Appeal and Retraction Procedures
Handling of Complaints and Appeals
The editorial board of the collection recognises the importance of upholding high standards of academic integrity and considers all complaints and reports of possible breaches of publication ethics in accordance with the principles of transparency, objectivity, and confidentiality, while being guided by the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
The subject matter of a complaint may include plagiarism, falsification or fabrication of data, duplicate or multiple publication, incorrect attribution of authorship (the exclusion or addition of authors without their consent), breach of the peer review procedure, the existence of an undeclared conflict of interest, as well as other manifestations of unethical conduct on the part of authors, reviewers, or editors.
A complaint shall be submitted in writing to the official email address of the editorial board at apiclu@cnu.edu.ua. The complaint must clearly set out its substance, indicate the names or details of the persons concerned, provide specific evidence or references to the relevant sources, and include the contact details of the complainant. Anonymous communications may be considered, provided that they are accompanied by a sufficient evidentiary basis.
Upon receipt of a complaint, the Editor-in-Chief or an authorised member of the editorial board conducts a preliminary review within ten working days. Where necessary, the complainant may be sent requests for additional information. If, following the preliminary review, the complaint is recognised as well-founded, the editorial board initiates an internal examination of the information set out in the complaint, engaging independent experts where required. The persons concerned by the complaint have the right to submit a written explanation, and all parties enjoy equal rights to be heard. Depending on the outcome, the editorial board may take the following measures: introduce corrections to the article, publish a statement of misconduct or retract the article, notify the institution with which the author is affiliated, prohibit the submission of articles to the collection for a specified period, and apply other actions in accordance with COPE standards.
The persons concerned by a decision taken have the right to lodge a reasoned objection or appeal. Reconsideration is carried out with the involvement of external experts not connected with the initial process, which ensures the impartiality of the assessment. All complaints, investigation materials, and decisions taken thereon are duly documented and retained in the archives of the editorial board; these records may be used to refine editorial policy and to prevent similar situations in the future.
Retraction Policy
Retraction (the withdrawal of a published article) is a mechanism for correcting scholarly information that the editorial board applies in order to alert readers to publications containing serious flaws or unreliable data. Grounds for resorting to this mechanism may involve various forms of misconduct - ranging from cases of self-plagiarism, where authors submit the same data in several publications, to academic plagiarism, fabrication and falsification of results, as well as the concealment of conflicts of interest that could have affected the interpretation of data or recommendations as to their use. The appearance of such materials in the collection may be either the result of an error or the consequence of deliberate misconduct.
The purpose of retraction is to inform the scholarly community of a publication containing unreliable data, in order to prevent the further use of such data in other research. In its work, the editorial board is guided by the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) regarding the procedure for the retraction of articles already published.
The grounds for retracting an article are: the presence of improper borrowings; duplication of the article across several publications; identification of fabrication or falsification; the discovery of serious errors, in particular the incorrect interpretation of results, which calls into question the scholarly value of the material; an incorrect composition of the authorship - the inclusion of persons who do not meet the criteria for authorship or, conversely, the omission of a person who ought to have been listed as an author; an undisclosed conflict of interest and other breaches of publication ethics; republication of the article without the author's consent; and other breaches of the publication's ethical principles.
The retraction procedure may be initiated upon the request of the author themselves, who asks for the article to be withdrawn; upon the request of third parties who provide evidence of a breach of research ethics by the author of an article published in the collection (including participants in the relevant conflict of interest); as well as upon the editorial board's own identification of such facts.
The decision to retract an article is taken by the editorial board. Information about the retraction of an article is posted on the publication's website in open access. Following retraction, the article is preserved in the archive of the scientific publication with a clear indication of the fact of its withdrawal - the text is not deleted but is marked as retracted ("Retracted") with a corresponding explanation of the reasons, which ensures transparency and allows readers to obtain full information about the fate of the publication. The author, or in the case of co-authorship all authors, are sent the decision setting out the reasons for the retraction of the article.
