Policies

Policy Document of Al-Āfāq Research journal:

The Policy [Document] of Al-Āfāq Research journal and guidelines are retrieved from Higher Education Commission (HEC), Pakistan manual for “Journals and Publications Policy – HEC” and “Ethical Guidelines for Journals”.

Policy Document

 Authorship Policy

  1. Authorship Credit

Authorship credits may only be given to those who have made a substantial contribution in constructing the article. The corresponding author of the article holds the responsibility to give credits to the co-authors that are significantly involved in the work. Also, the corresponding author should make sure that all the co-authors have approved the final submission and ready-to-publish version of the article. Others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research should be acknowledged for their contribution in an "Acknowledgement" section.

  1. Changes in Authorship

The authors are fully responsible to provide the names of the authors upon submitting the article to the journal. Once the article is accepted for publication, any addition, deletion, or rearrangement of the authors’ names will not be entertained unless approved by the journal’s editor. To request such a change, the corresponding author must provide the journal’s editor with: (a) the reason for the change in the author list and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement, along with the confirmation from the author being added or removed. Only in exceptional circumstances and with considerable reason/s will the editor may consider the addition, deletion, or rearrangement of authors after the manuscript has been accepted. While the editor considers the request, the processing of the manuscript for publication will be put on hold. If the manuscript has already been published in an online issue, any requests may not be entertained by the editor.

  1. Order of Authors

It the responsibility of the authors to have a mutual agreement on the order of the authors before submitting the article to the journal. Any such disagreements must be ruled out before the submission.

  1. Guest Authorship

The “guest” author makes no significant contributions to the study, hence, do not qualify for authorship. The journal does not allow the appearance of guest authorship on the articles.

  1. Anonymous Authorship

because authorship should be transparent and requires public accountability, it is not appropriate to use pseudonyms or to publish scientific reports anonymously. In extremely rare cases, when the author can make a credible claim that attaching his or her name to the document could cause serious hardship (e.g., a threat to personal safety or loss of employment), a journal editor may decide to publish anonymous content.

  1. Acknowledgment

In the Acknowledgments section, authors may wish to include the names and contributions of those whose involvement in a study did not qualify them for authorship (because of the journal policy) but have contributed to the article in some way.

  1. Contributors

"Ghost" and/or "Guest" author phenomenon has been common in the traditional listing of research papers. This has been raising inappropriate authorship practice in which some individuals did not have an actual input in the experiment. For this, the journal highly recommends that only authors who have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript shall be listed individually in the submitted manuscript (including students and lab technicians).

  1. Duplicate Submission

Articles that are found to have been published elsewhere, or are under consideration for publishing elsewhere, will be considered as "duplicated" material. In case the author(s) have used their own previously published work (or work that is currently under review), they are asked to cite the previous work and indicate how their submitted manuscript offers novel contributions and adds value differently (from the previous work).
i. Citation Manipulation

Submitted manuscripts that are found to include citations in order to increase the number of citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal, will be considered as a "citation manipulation"-containing material.

  1. Accessibility Policy

We are committed to continuously enhance the accessibility of our published database to maximize readability without any interruption. We process all our articles through the Open Journal System (OJS) that automatically generates the files in ‘HTML’ and converts those that are not in the desired format, making our files easily accessible on the web to all kinds of users.

Open Access Statement:

This is an open-access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author.

All articles are available on the internet to all users immediately upon publication. Non-commercial and commercial use and distribution in any medium are permitted, provided the author and the journal are properly credited.

  1. Corrections and Retraction Policy

Authors who discover errors in articles they have published should have the corresponding author contact the journal’s editorial office with a detailed description of the correction that is needed. Corrigenda (corrections of author’s errors) and errata (corrections of publisher’s errors) will be published at no charge to the authors. Requests for corrections that affect the interpretation or conclusions of a published article will be reviewed by the editors.

An article may be retracted when the integrity of the published work is substantially undermined owing to errors in the conduct, analysis, and/or reporting of the study. Violation of publication or research ethics may also result in a study’s retraction. The original article is marked as retracted but a PDF version remains available to readers, and the retraction statement is bi-directionally linked to the original published paper. Retraction statements will typically include a statement of assent or dissent from the authors.
In exceptional circumstances, the editorial office reserves the right to remove an article from the journal’s online platforms. Such action may be taken when (i) the editorial office has been advised that content is defamatory, infringes a third party’s intellectual property right, right to privacy, or other legal rights, or is otherwise unlawful; (ii) a court or government order has been issued, or is likely to be issued, requiring removal of such content; (iii) content, if acted upon, would pose an immediate and serious risk to health. Removal may be temporary or permanent. Bibliographic metadata (e.g. title and authors) will be retained and will be accompanied by a statement explaining why the content has been removed.

  1. Digital Archiving Policy

The journal is fully committed to storing the published material on digital archives to ensure that the articles will always be available to readers, even in the event of a publication being lost or discontinued. The best way to ensure that journal articles will always be accessible to readers, is to deposit all published articles into a long-term digital preservation service or archive.

The journal has further ensured that the metadata of all of its open access journals is compatible to all the well-known repository services and their digital crawlers may regularly collect it for record and preservation. Besides, the journal also assigns Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) to all its issues and the contents to facilitate reaching their permanent links on the internet.

  1. Confidentiality Policy

The editors and the publication handling/managing staff keep all information about a submitted manuscript confidential and share it only with those involved in the evaluation, review, and publication processes as per the journal’s publication policy. The journal is operating through an automated journal management system to ensure a transparent double-blind peer review process as well as the confidentiality of the information. The Editors should consider adding a confidentiality notice to all correspondence, including reviewer forms, to serve as a reminder to authors, editors, and reviewers.

  1. Conflict of Interests Policy

A Declaration of Conflicting Interests policy refers to a formal policy a journal may have to require a conflict of interest statement or conflict of interest disclosure from a submitting or publishing author.

The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) states in its Guidelines on Good Publication Practice (2003) that: “Conflicts of interest arise when authors, reviewers, or editors have interests that are not fully apparent and that may influence their judgments on what is published. They have been described as those which, when revealed later, would make a reasonable reader feel misled or deceived.” Many scholars, researchers, and professionals may have potential conflicts of interest that could affect their research. As a result, the journal requires a formal declaration of conflicting interests enabling a statement to be carried within the paginated published article.

A potential conflict of interest may arise from relationships, allegiances, or hostilities to particular groups, organizations or interests, which may influence one’s judgments or actions excessively. The issue is particularly sensitive when such interests are private and/or may result in personal gain. All manuscripts submitted to the journal are evaluated fairly and are not necessarily rejected when any competing interests are declared. Examples of conflicts of interest might include the following, although it is not an exhaustive list:

  • Having received fees for consulting.
  • Having received research funding.
  • Having been employed by a related company.
  • Holding stocks or shares in a company that might be affected by the publication of your paper.
  • Having received funds reimbursing you for attending related symposia, or talk.
    If there are other interests that the reasonable reader might feel has affected your research you may also wish to declare them. (Please note that it is not expected that details of financial arrangements be disclosed when a competing interest is declared.)
    Conflict of interests Upon identification of any conflict of interest, the editors may require more information from the author that may include the following:
  1. Acknowledgement of financial support/sponsorship in their contribution.
  2. Any commercial or financial involvements that might present an appearance of a conflict of interest related to the contribution are disclosed in a covering letter accompanying the contribution and all such potential conflicts of interest will be discussed with the editor as to whether disclosure of this information with the published contribution is to be made in the journal.
  3. If they have signed an agreement with any sponsor of the research reported in the contribution that prevents you from publishing both positive and negative results or that forbids you from publishing this research without prior approval of the sponsor.
  4. If they have checked the manuscript submission guidelines to ensure whether the journal requires a Declaration of Conflicting Interests and have complied with the requirements specified where such a policy exists.
    The Authors are required to fill and sign the Copyright and Author Consent Form upon submitting the manuscript.
  5. Publication Charge Policy

All articles published in our journals are open access and freely available online, immediately upon publication. The journal, right now, does not charge an article submission fee. Authors do not pay Article Processing Charge (APC) and Article Publication Fee (APF) to cover the costs of peer review administration and management, professional production of articles in PDF and other formats, and dissemination of published papers in various venues, in addition to other publishing functions.
All the expenses are born by its publisher, Department of Islamic Studies, Ghazi University, Dera Ghazi khan, Punjab, Pakistan. There are no charges for rejected articles, no submission charges, and no surcharges based on the length of an article, figures, or supplementary data. All the items (Manuscripts, Editorials, Teaching Modules, Corrections, Addendums, Retractions, Comments, etc.) are published free of charge.

  1. Editor obligations regarding conflicting interests:

The same obligations equally apply to the editors or guest editors writing an editorial for the journal. When you are submitting or publishing your article in a journal which requires you to make a Declaration of Conflicting Interests, please include such a declaration at the end of your manuscript after any Acknowledgements and prior to the Funding Acknowledgement, Notes (if relevant) and References, under the heading 'Declaration of Conflicting Interest'. If no conflict exists, please state that 'The Author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest'.


*Please note, a Conflict of Interest Statement will not appear in journals that do not require a declaration of conflicting interests. Where a declaration is required the disclosure information must be specific and include any financial relationship that all authors of the article have with any sponsoring organization and the for-profit interests the organization represents, and with any for-profit product discussed or implied in the text of the article.

 

Plagiarism Policy

Al-Āfāq Research journal strictly follows Plagiarism Policy as per the guidelines of HEC (Pakistan). The Similarity Report on Turnitin should be below 20 percent.

Copyrights/License Policy

The authors retain copyright under the CC-BY license. However, authors have to sign a form agreeing to the publication of their article under the CC-BY license.

Open Access System:

Al-Āfāq will be published through an open-access journal system that allows authors & readers to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of its articles and to use them for any other legal purpose. All current/previous issues and complete articles can be viewed or downloaded from Al-Āfāq’s Website.

APC & APF:

 Al-Āfāq Islamic Research Joiurnal currantly do not charge fee for publication or any other charges.