Purpose and Scope
This policy establishes the publisher-wide foundation for ethical scholarly publishing at Treata Scholars. It applies across journals, editorial teams, authors, reviewers, contributors, and relevant publishing activities, and should be read together with the more specific policies that govern authorship, competing interests, peer review, research ethics, data, images, artificial intelligence, misconduct, and post-publication action.
The governing principle is that the integrity of the scholarly record takes precedence over individual, institutional, commercial, reputational, or editorial convenience. Ethical publishing therefore requires both responsible conduct before publication and a willingness to investigate and correct the record when credible concerns arise.
Responsibilities Across the Publication Process
Authors are responsible for the integrity and accuracy of the work they submit, appropriate attribution of contributions, required ethical approvals and consent, transparent disclosure of relevant interests and funding, and the reliability of the data and materials on which their conclusions depend. Reviewers are responsible for independent, confidential, timely, and constructive assessment within their expertise and for declaring conflicts that could affect their judgment.
Editors are responsible for fair and evidence-based editorial decisions, appropriate management of conflicts, protection of peer-review confidentiality, proportionate handling of integrity concerns, and decisions about the scholarly record. Publisher and journal-management functions must support editorial independence and must not allow commercial or reputational interests to improperly determine scientific decisions.
Originality, Attribution and Responsible Reporting
Submitted work must represent the authors’ work accurately and must distinguish original material from ideas, words, data, images, or other content derived from previous sources. Sources should be acknowledged appropriately, and prior dissemination or overlapping publication should be disclosed where relevant.
Similarity, overlap, or automated screening results are indicators for assessment rather than automatic findings of plagiarism or misconduct. Editorial evaluation should consider the nature, extent, location, attribution, context, and potential effect of the overlap.
Authorship, Contributorship and Accountability
Authorship should reflect substantial intellectual contribution and accountability rather than status, seniority, funding, supervision alone, or administrative position. Individuals who qualify as authors should be identified as authors; contributors who do not qualify for authorship should be acknowledged appropriately and with any required permission.
Artificial-intelligence systems and other non-human tools cannot assume authorship or accountability. Human authors remain responsible for submitted content, including material produced or modified with technological assistance.
Research Ethics, Consent and Participant Protection
Research involving human participants, identifiable personal information, animals, clinical interventions, or other ethically sensitive activities must comply with applicable ethical, legal, institutional, and journal requirements. Authors must provide relevant approvals, registrations, consent information, or justified explanations when requested.
Publication does not eliminate obligations to protect privacy, dignity, confidentiality, and participant welfare. Editors may request supporting documentation where necessary to evaluate compliance or respond to credible concerns.
Data, Images and the Evidentiary Record
Data, images, code, and other research objects should be presented accurately and should not be fabricated, falsified, selectively altered, or manipulated in a way that misrepresents the underlying evidence. Legitimate processing must preserve the scientific meaning of the material and should be documented where relevant.
Authors should retain appropriate underlying records and be prepared to provide information necessary for editorial assessment, subject to legitimate restrictions such as privacy, consent, law, security, or contractual obligations.
Peer Review and Editorial Integrity
Peer review is an advisory process that supports editorial judgment; it does not transfer decision responsibility from editors to reviewers. Reviewers and editors must protect confidential material, manage conflicts appropriately, and avoid misuse of privileged information.
Attempts to manipulate reviewer identities, recommendations, citations, editorial assignments, or other parts of the publication process are inconsistent with responsible publishing and may require investigation under the relevant Treata policies.
Competing Interests and Transparency
Financial, professional, academic, personal, institutional, or other interests can affect—or reasonably appear to affect—judgment. Relevant interests should therefore be disclosed and managed rather than assumed to be absent. Disclosure does not by itself establish bias or wrongdoing.
Editors may require clarification, additional disclosure, recusal, independent assessment, or publication of relevant statements where this is necessary to protect confidence in the editorial process.
Artificial Intelligence and Human Responsibility
AI-assisted tools may support research, writing, screening, editing, or publishing workflows when their use is compatible with confidentiality, accuracy, intellectual-property, and journal requirements. Use that materially affects the submitted work should be disclosed where required.
No automated system may replace human accountability for authorship, peer review, editorial decisions, or integrity findings. Automated outputs should be treated as evidence or signals requiring appropriate human interpretation.
Concerns, Allegations and Fair Assessment
Treata journals should take credible concerns seriously whether raised before or after publication. Initial assessment should determine the nature of the concern, the evidence available, any immediate risk to participants or the scholarly record, and the policies or external bodies that may be relevant.
Allegations should not be treated as established findings. Investigations should be proportionate, appropriately confidential, documented, and fair to the parties involved. Where institutions or other competent bodies have a distinct responsibility to investigate research conduct, the publisher may communicate with them while retaining responsibility for editorial action on the manuscript or published record.
Post-Publication Action
When published content requires amendment, Treata journals should use an appropriate and visible mechanism such as a correction, expression of concern, or retraction. The purpose is to maintain the reliability and transparency of the record, not to use editorial notices as punishment.
Substantive changes should not be made silently. Notices should be linked appropriately to the affected article and should explain the reason for the action to the extent that evidence, fairness, confidentiality, and legal considerations permit.
Journal Implementation
This is a publisher-mandatory policy. Treata journals inherit its core requirements and may add discipline-specific procedures or stronger requirements where appropriate, but journal-level settings must not weaken the publisher’s fundamental integrity protections.
Journal pages should identify relevant local requirements—such as peer-review model, ethics documentation, data expectations, article-type requirements, or reporting standards—without duplicating or silently modifying the canonical publisher policy.
Policy Governance
Treata Scholars maintains this policy as part of a connected publishing-governance framework. Material changes should be versioned, dated, and preserved so that previous requirements remain historically identifiable.
Specific concerns should be assessed under the most relevant detailed policy as well as this overarching standard. Where policies interact, the interpretation that best protects the reliability, fairness, and transparency of the scholarly record should guide editorial action.
Version Control
Version 1.0. This page is the canonical publisher-level policy text for the current version. Material revisions should receive a new version or effective date, and superseded versions should remain identifiable so that the policy applicable at an earlier point in the publication lifecycle can be determined.