International Journal of Crowd Science (IJCS), sponsored by Tsinghua University and published by Tsinghua University Press, has the responsibility to maintain the rigour of scientific research and protect the researchers’ intellectual property rights. In order to comply with the Publishing Ethics Committee of journal publishing ethics rules, IJCS Publication Ethics have been formulated as the guideline for the editing and publication of IJCS.

Ethical guidelines for journal publication

IJCS adheres to a strict practice of double-blind peer review. Every submitted manuscript within the scope of the journal is reviewed by two or more specialists in the area of the submission. Each peer-reviewed article published in IJCS is an approval of the progress of scientific research in the field of crowd science. It directly reflects the quality of the authors’ work and the institutions that support them. Peer-review is designed to support and embody scientific methods.

Therefore, it is very important that all parties involved in the act of the publication, including the author, journal editors, peer reviewers, publishers, and social organization, should common to perform the Publication Ethics as the moral behavior standards.

IJCS recognizes the Publication Ethics as our moral behavior, and takes our duties of guardianship over all stages of publishing extremely seriously.

1. Guideline of the paper

1.1 The paper published in IJCS should be the original scientific paper and the content should be relevant with the scope.

1.2 A paper should contain sufficient detail, such as the research work and the experimental method, data must be guaranteed to be true. If any reference and open literature resources are quoted in the paper, they should be listed in detail for peer evaluation.

1.3 It should be avoided to split one research result into fragmented papers to submit.

1.4 Contention issue and the words in the paper should be clear and concise. Photographs and graphs in the paper should be of high quality. If the authors have used the work and/or words of others, that has to be appropriately cited or quoted.

1.5 Please give clear indication of research funding sources in the paper, if the research work is supported by the funds.

1.6 All papers submitted to IJCS will be screened for plagiarism by Crosscheck software.

1.7 After the publication of the paper, the copyright belongs to the authors.

2. Duties of Authors

2.1 Authors should cherish the opportunity of publication on IJCS and maintain the reputation of IJCS.

2.2 Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behavior and it is unacceptable. When submitting the manuscript, all authors should certify the manuscript is the original one and hasn’t published on or submitted to other journals.

2.3 Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant intellectual contribution to the theoretical development, system or experimental design, prototype development, execution, and/or the analysis and interpretation of data associated with the work contained in the article, and contributed to drafting the article or reviewing and/or revising it for intellectual content. The others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research project, should be acknowledged or listed as contributors. The corresponding author should ensure that all authors have seen and approved the final version of the manuscript and have agreed to its submission for publication.

2.4 Please indicate one author as the corresponding author in the case of articles with multiple authors. The corresponding author has responsibility for communication with the editorial office, overseeing the publication process and ensuring the integrity of the final document.

2.5 Once the list and order of authors has been established, it should not be altered without permission of all living authors of that article. Due to a result of special circumstances, if it is necessary to change, the corresponding author should put forward a written application including the consent of all authors before the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) makes final decision for the paper. It can be modified after EIC approval.

2.6 It is the author's obligation to correct the errors in the article no matter the error is found by author or reviewers.

2.7 All authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial or other substantive conflict of interest that might be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed. Examples of potential conflicts of interest which should be disclosed include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. Potential conflicts of interest should be disclosed at the earliest stage possible.

3. Duties of editors

3.1 For IJCS, the EIC is ultimately accountable for acceptance or rejection of an article.

3.2 Articles submitted by the EIC or an AE shall be handled and reviewed by another EIC or AE of IJCS.

3.3 Editors should treat all manuscripts fairly. An editor should evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content without regarding to Ethnic, religion, nationality, gender, age, or affiliation of the authors. However, the editor may consider the relevance of the manuscript by the authors in its early or to other manuscripts contemporaneous period. The editor can directly reject the manuscript if it is not accord with the requirement of IJCS in the theme, breadth, depth, and English expression.

3.4 Editors should respect the independence of the author's ideas. For unpublished manuscripts, editors may not use their content without the consent of the author. The editor and any editorial staff must not disclose any information about the submitted manuscript to anyone other than the reviewers, potential reviewers, EIC, and the publisher, as appropriate.

3.5 Editors should exercise their responsibilities based on the EIC or AE's suggestion that whether the paper needs to be modified or it can be published. No matter what the outcome of the review is, reviewers’ comments and marked articles are normally returned to the author in any case.

3.6 It is essential that the editor assure that the anonymity of the reviewers is protected during the review process. Editors shall not disclose the contents of manuscripts under review. Everything within this review process must be done openly, but the reviewer anonymity policy can protect the review results from the interference of authors.

3.7 Editors should respect the opinions of EIC and AE. The editor must not arbitrarily refuse the reviewers’ comments, unless the editor deems them clearly to be irrelevant, incorrect, or otherwise inappropriate. In particular, editors should not arbitrarily ignore reviewers’ suggestions for modifications of the article without sufficient technical cause to do so.

3.8 If an article is returned for revision, it is important to make clear to the corresponding author whether on the one hand the article will be accepted if the indicated changes are made or, on the other hand, the article will be resubmitted to the reviewers for further review.

3.9 Once the EIC confirms that the manuscript can be published, the editor should prepare for publication as soon as possible.

3.10 The submitted manuscript written by editor him/herself should be handled by other editors or AE who has no conflict of interest.

3.11 If there is sufficient evidence to show that the published paper has mistake(s), Editors should take corrective action whenever possible and the corrected text can be provided by the mistake finder or the author of the manuscript.

4. Duties of Reviewers

4.1 Manuscript review is an essential step in the process of publishing and peer review is an essential component of formal scholarly communication. So, IJCS shares the view of many people that all scholars who wish to contribute to publications have an obligation to do a fair share of reviewing.

4.2 Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify and return the manuscript to the editor immediately. Or they should remind the editor of the possibility of delaying the review and give a possible return time.

4.3 Based on the standards of maintaining a high level of scientific and textual expression, referees should be objectively evaluated the quality of the manuscript, the level of the experiments and the theory, the rationality of the interpretation and inference. Referees should respect the independence of the author's thought.

4.4 Selected referee shall not have a personal or business relationship with the authors or partner of the paper affecting the evaluation impartial.

4.5 Information contained in an article under review is confidential and shall not be shared with others, nor shall reviewers use non-public information contained in an article to advance their own research or financial interests.

4.6 Referee comments should be explained sufficiently with the basis of his (her) judgment in order to be understood by the editor and the author. The facts or opinions in the evaluation comments shall be attached to related literature to avoid lacking basis assertions.

4.7 Referees should identify whether the important relevant published work has been cited or not by the authors. It is absolutely forbidden guiding the author to cite the reviewer's own paper. The authors should be reminded of the substantive similarities between the author's manuscript content and published papers or manuscripts submitted to other journals.

4.8 Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate.

5. Punitive measure

5.1 Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable. And that is highly likely to have serious moral and legal consequences.

5.2 After screened, if the paper is found there are more than 30% similar to the previous published journal article or more than 50% similar to the authors’ own paper published in conference proceedings, the paper will be regarded as plagiarism and will be rejected.

5.3 In case an author has submitted the paper under consideration to another journal, the paper will be rejected. IJCS will inform the institute of the author and other journals within the field of computer and electronic engineering, and will reject to publish all the papers submitted by this author forever.

6. Archive

The publisher is committed to the permanent availability and preservation of the published content in IJCS.

7. Open access, article licensing, and copyright

7.1 All articles in IJCS shall be published on an open access basis.

7.2 The Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) shall apply to all articles published in IJCS.

7.3 Copyright in articles published in IJCS shall remain vested in the authors or original copyright holders.

7.4 The articles published in this journal are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.