Publication Ethics

 As a leading journal in the release of the latest scientific achievements in the field of civil and projects in Iran, the Civil and Project (̒Umrān va pruzhah) Journal is committed to meeting high standards of ethical behaviors at all stages of the publication. In our ethical standards and procedures, we set out specific expectations for authors, editors, reviewers, publishers and society partners.

The journal is under the license of Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).

Copyright and Access

Authors can retain the copyright. They can distribute the published articles to other sources such as Academia and Research gate. All societies and universities are allowed to use the published content in courses providing they mention the source of publication. The journal gives free access to readers to use and distribute content under the license of CC BY 4.0

This journal also follows the standards and guidelines provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (https://publicationethics.org/), especially regarding misconduct, fraud, plagiarism, and how to act if such a breach occurs.. In the future, we decide to become a member of COPE

 This journal publishes unpublished work. The content which is submitted to this journal must not be under consideration by other sources

Legal actions will be taken against any unethical issues, plagiarism and misconduct including

• Fabrication: Fabrication is the practice of inventing data or results and reporting them in the research. Both of these misconducts are fraudulent and seriously alter the integrity of research. Therefore, articles must be written based on original data and the use of falsified or fabricated data is strongly prohibited.
• Falsification: Falsification is the practice of omitting or altering research materials, equipment, data, or processes in such a way that the results of the research are no longer accurately reflected in the research record.
• Plagiarism: Plagiarism is the act of taking someone else's writing, conversation, idea, claims or even citations without any acknowledgment or explanation from the work producer or speaker.
• Wrongful Appropriation: Wrongful appropriation occurs when author(s) benefit(s) from another person's efforts and after a little change and manipulations in the research work, publish(s) it on his/her own definitions
• False Attribution:It represents that a person is the author of a work but she/ he was not involved in the research.
• Double Submission: Submitting one paper in two or several journals or academic sources at the same time

Authors, Reviewers, editorial boards and editor-in-chief ought to adhere to all principles of research ethics and related responsibilities.

      Authors’ Criteria

• Authors are responsible for the originality of manuscripts submitted to the Civil & Project Journal and the original raw data based on which the manuscript is provided must be available upon editors’ request.
• Authors are responsible for the contents of their manuscript, including claims, conclusions, and appropriate citations, acknowledgments, and authors’ contributions.
• Any conflict of interest (Financial or non Financial) must be clearly stated.

• Authors must adhere to instructions provided for the author; otherwise, the manuscript will not be sent to reviewing process
• All authors of every manuscript must contribute to composing the manuscript and/or research.
• Authors are responsible for the accuracy of their work.
• Authors submitting to Civil & Project Journal are required to declare any conflicts of interest. Conflicts of interest are those that could be considered or viewed as exerting an undue influence on the presentation, reviewing, and publication of their work. These may be financial, non-financial, professional, or personal.
• Authors areobliged to show necessary feedback to reviewers and editors’ comments and proofreading.
• Submitting the manuscript to CPJ means that authors have not published or submitted their work in other sources simultaneously.
• Authors are asked to have authors' permission for an accurate citation. When using direct speech, a quotation mark (“   ”) is necessary.
• The Corresponding author should ensure that the complete information of all involved authors in the article is mentioned.

• The corresponding author is responsible for the order of co-authors after their approval.
• Author(s) is/are responsible for any fault or inaccuracy of the article and in this case, the  journal's authorities should be informed immediately.
• Author(s) is/are asked to provide and preserve raw data one year after publication, in order to be able to respond to journal audiences' questions
• Author(s) should avoid research and publication misconduct. If some cases of research and publication misconduct occur within each step of submission, review, edition or publication, journals have the right to act based on COPE regulations.

Note 1: Submitting an article does not guarantee acceptance by the journal.

Note 2: Do not write the statement of “Gift Authorship” and do not omit the statement of “Ghost Authorship”.

Reviewers’ Criteria

• The reviewers should review the qualitative, contextual and scientific quality and content of the articles.
• Reviewers can introduce or suggest an alternative reviewer and the editor-in-chief has complete authority to accept or decline the reviewer’s offer.
• Reviewers should inform the editor in chief of any conflict of interest in which the reviewer might be involved or decline the reviewing invitation
• The reviewer shall review unbiasedly and any self, professional, religious or racial opinion is prohibited.
• Reviewers are responsible to be punctual in completing the review and must keep the confidentiality of papers' content.
• Reviewers should not edit or rewrite the article according to his/her personal interest.
• Reviewers can suggest up to date references to authors to improve the quality of paper.
• If reviewers recognize the author’s identity or information, they should inform the editor in chief and should not continue the reviewing process.
• Reviewers are not allowed to use the authors’ paper content before publishing.
• The reviewer is prohibited from delivering an article to anyone else for reviewing except with theeditor-in-chief’s permission. The reviewer and co- reviewer's identification should be recorded in each article's documents.
• Reviewers should not contact the author(s) directly. Any contact with the authors should be made through the editorial office.
• Reviewers must report any misconduct observed in the paper.

5. Editorial Board Responsibilities

• Journal maintenance and quality improvement are the main aims of the editorial board.
• Editorial board should introduce the journal to universities and international communities and publish the articles of other universities and international societies as their priority.
• Editorial board must not have quota and excess of their personal article publishing in this journal.
• Editorial board is responsible for selecting the reviewers as well as accepting or rejecting an article after reviewers' comments.
• Editorial board should be well-known experts with several publications. They ought to be responsible, accountable, truthful, adhering to professional ethics and contributing to improving journal aims.
• Editorial board is expected to have a database of suitable reviewers for the journal and to update the information regularly.
• Editorial board should try to select qualified, experienced and well-known reviewers.
• Editorial board will not consider superficial and poor, one-sided and contemptuous reviews.
• Editorial board should record and archive the whole review's documents as scientific documents and to keep the confidentially the reviewers' names.
• Editorial board must inform the final result of the review to the corresponding author immediately.
• Editorial board should keep the article's contents confidential and not to disclose its information to others.
• Editorial board ought to prevent any conflict of interests due to any personal, commercial, academic and financial relations which may impact on accepting and publishing the articles.
• Editor-in-chief should check each type of research and publication misconduct which reviewers report seriously.
• If research misconduct occurs in an article, the editor-in-chief should omit it immediately and inform indexing databases or audiences even after publishing.
• If misconduct is observed after publication, the editorial board is responsible to represent an erratum to audiences rapidly or omit the published article.
• Editorial board must benefit from audiences' new ideas to improve publication policies, structure and content quality of articles.

Publisher’s criteria

• The publisher is committed to preserving the history of peer review, publication and journal information.
• The publisher must store and back up the manuscript and authors' data.
• The publisher must solve technical and non-technical problems of the managing system.
• The publisher observes the journal activities which must comply with the journal ‘s ethical rules.
• If the editors or one of the journal employees decides to submit an article, the publisher must conduct the reviewing process as a third party.
• The publisher must provide the articles with appropriate proofreading and layout in a short time period.

 Archiving

• Content of website, manuscript, author information and published articles are preserved and stored by daily backup.
• Part of articles content will be saved in Internet Archive to follow archiving policies.
• The journal follows Sherpa/Romeo's green archiving policy