• Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

• No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Research Data

Authors are encouraged to make all data, necessary to replicate their findings, publically available at the time of publication. Authors should include a data access statement in their submission and indicate how others may obtain access to their data. Data availability statements will be published as part of the article.

Where ethical, legal or other reasons prevent the sharing of the dataset the authors must detail this and indicate how others may access the data.

Preprints

GJSSCMR encourages preprinting and will accept articles previously available as preprints. Authors should declare on submission that their manuscript is available as a preprint and provide a link from their preprinted work to the published article.

Copyright

Third-party materials

Authors are expected to ensure any third-party material used in their submission can be shared under a CC BY license. You should provide proof that the material is in the public domain or available under another compatible open license. If this is not the case you will need to provide written permission from the copyright holder allowing you to use and publish the work.

Author rights retention

Authors retain their copyright in any work submitted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Users are allowed to copy, distribute, and transmit the work in any medium or format provided that the original authors and source are credited. To view a copy of this license, visit creativecommons.org.

AI Authoring Tools & Authorship Policy

The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) authoring tools (e.g., ChatGPT, GPT-3) presents academic scholarship with unique challenges. Recently, several stories concerning the attribution of authorship to AI authoring tools have circulated (1). In concordance with the recommendations of other publishers, it is our position that an AI authoring tool does not meet the standards required for authorship as defined elsewhere (2). Specifically, it is recommended that every author be “…accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.” (2). We do not believe that AI Authoring tools meet this standard.

In agreement with the position of the Committee on Publication Ethics (3), we endorse the following recommendation, and suggest that Instructions for Authors be updated accordingly:

Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in disclosing in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics.

References

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00107-z
2. https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html
3. https://publicationethics.org/cope-position-statements/ai-author

Ethics and misconduct

Northumbria Journals is committed to ensuring high ethical standards across all publications, author lists should reflect the roles and responsibilities set out in our submission guidance.

All authors, peer reviewers and editors are expected to declare any conflict of interest relating to any submitted work. This may include financial interests, including employment, funding or personal financial interest. Authors should disclose any membership of relevant organisations.

The publication takes seriously any allegation of misconduct. Cases should be brought to the attention of the editor-in-chief for investigation.

By law, any experimental participant or patient who is exposed to possible physical, psychological, or social injury must give informed consent prior to participating in a proposed project. Informed consent can be defined as the knowing consent of an individual or their legally authorized representative so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice without undue inducement or any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, or other forms of constraint or coercion. GJSSCMR requires that all appropriate steps be taken in obtaining the informed consent of any, and all, human participants employed by investigators submitting manuscripts for review and possible publication. In most cases, written informed consent should be obtained by having the participant read a document (an Informed Consent Form) presenting all information pertinent to the investigation or project and affixing a signature indicating that the document has been read and consent given to participation under the conditions described therein. In some cases, usually when risks to participants are very low (e.g., survey research), the Institutional Review Board of Record may approve the conduct of the investigation and declare the study to be exempt from the usual requirement of obtaining written informed consent, in lieu of obtaining the participants’ verbal consent to participate. Information presented at the time of consent should be provided in a way that it is easily understood by the participants and provided in a language in which the participants are fluent. The use of participants should be approved by an ethics committee prior to the investigation and shall be stated in the Methods section of the submitted manuscript.

Fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or any other practice by an author that seriously deviates from practices commonly accepted in the discipline or in the academic and research communities generally for proposing, conducting, or reporting research and creative activities will be considered actionable misconduct. The act of serious deviation includes duplicate publication or unethical use of research participants. Misconduct does not include honest error or honest differences in the interpretation or judgment of data.

Archiving

The Northumbria Journals collection archives content for long-term preservation using LOCKSS.