Sustainability Policy and Human Geography, called SPHG, is committed to upholding the highest standards of publication ethics and takes all possible measures against any publication malpractices. The Editorial Board is responsible for, among others, preventing publication malpractice. Unethical behavior is unacceptable, and the SPHG does not tolerate plagiarism in any form. Authors who submitted articles: affirm that manuscript contents are original. Furthermore, the authors’ submission also implies that the manuscript has not been published previously in any language, either wholly or partly, and is not currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Editors, authors, and reviewers, within the Sustainability Policy and Human Geography, are to be fully committed to good publication practice and accept the responsibility for fulfilling the following duties and responsibilities, as set by the COPE Code of Conduct for Journal Editors. As part of the Core Practices, COPE has written guidelines on the http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines.

Section A: Publication and authorship

1. All submitted papers are subject to strict peer-review process by at least two international reviewers that are experts in the area of the particular paper.
2. Review process are blind peer review.
3. The factors that are taken into account in review are relevance, soundness, significance, originality, readability and language.
4. The possible decisions include acceptance, acceptance with revisions, or rejection.
5. If authors are encouraged to revise and resubmit a submission, there is no guarantee that the revised submission will be accepted.
6. Rejected articles will not be re-reviewed.
7. The paper acceptance is constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism.
8. No research can be included in more than one publication.

Section B: Authors’ responsibilities

1. Authors must certify that their manuscripts are their original work.
2. Authors must certify that the manuscript has not previously been published elsewhere.
3. Authors must certify that the manuscript is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere.
4. Authors must participate in the peer review process.
5. Authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes.
6. All Authors mentioned in the paper must have significantly contributed to the research.
7. Authors must state that all data in the paper are real and authentic.
8. Authors must notify the Editors of any conflicts of interest.
9. Authors must identify all sources used in the creation of their manuscript.
10. Authors must report any errors they discover in their published paper to the Editors.

Section C: Reviewers’ responsibilities

1. Reviewers should keep all information regarding papers confidential and treat them as privileged information.
2. Reviews should be conducted objectively, with no personal criticism of the author
3. Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments
4. Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors.
5. Reviewers should also call to the Editor in Chief’s attention any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which they have personal knowledge.
6. Reviewers should not review manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.

Section D: Editors’ responsibilities

1. Editors have complete responsibility and authority to reject/accept an article.
2. Editors are responsible for the contents and overall quality of the publication.
3. Editors should always consider the needs of the authors and the readers when attempting to improve the publication.
4. Editors should guarantee the quality of the papers and the integrity of the academic record.
5. Editors should publish errata pages or make corrections when needed.
6. Editors should have a clear picture of a research’s funding sources.
7. Editors should base their decisions solely one the papers’ importance, originality, clarity and relevance to publication’s scope.
8. Editors should not reverse their decisions nor overturn the ones of previous editors without serious reason.
9. Editors should preserve the anonymity of reviewers.
10. Editors should ensure that all research material they publish conforms to internationally accepted ethical guidelines.
11. Editors should only accept a paper when reasonably certain.
12. Editors should act if they suspect misconduct, whether a paper is published or unpublished, and make all reasonable attempts to persist in obtaining a resolution to the problem.
13. Editors should not reject papers based on suspicions, they should have proof of misconduct.
14. Editors should not allow any conflicts of interest between staff, authors, reviewers and board members.

The papers published in the Sustainability Policy and Human Geography will be considered to retract in the publication if :

1. They have clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error)
2. the findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper crossreferencing, permission or justification (i.e. cases of redundant publication)
3. it constitutes plagiarism
4. it reports unethical research

The mechanism of retraction follows the Retraction Guidelines of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) which can be accessed at https://publicationethics.org/files/retraction%20guidelines.pdf.

Papers submitted to the Sustainability Policy and Human Geography will be screened for plagiarism using CrossCheck/iThenticate plagiarism detection tools. International Journal of Education and Learning will immediately reject papers leading to plagiarism or self-plagiarism.

Before submitting articles to reviewers, those are first checked for similarity/plagiarism tool, by a member of the editorial team. The papers submitted to the International Journal of Education and Learning must have a similarity level of less than 15%.

Plagiarism is the exposing of another person’s thoughts or words as though they were your own, without permission, credit, or acknowledgment, or because of failing to cite the sources properly. Plagiarism can take diverse forms, from literal copying to paraphrasing the work of another. In order to properly judge whether an author has plagiarized, we emphasize the following possible situations:

• An author can literally copy another author’s work- by copying word by word, in whole or in part, without permission, acknowledge or citing the original source. This practice can be identified by comparing the original source and the manuscript/work who is suspected of plagiarism.
• Substantial copying implies for an author to reproduce a substantial part of another author, without permission, acknowledge or citation. The substantial term can be understood both in terms of quality as quantity, being often used in the context of Intellectual property. Quality refers to the relative value of the copied text in proportion to the work as a whole.
• Paraphrasing involves taking ideas, words or phrases from a source and crafting them into new sentences within the writing. This practice becomes unethical when the author does not properly cite or does not acknowledge the original work/author. This form of plagiarism is the more difficult form to be identified.

Understand the Sustainability Policy and Human Geography (SPHG)'s article sharing and posting policies for each stage of the article life cycle.

Prior to submission to SPHG
Authors may post their article anywhere at any time, including on preprint servers such as arXiv.org. This does not count as a prior publication.

Upon submission to SPHG
Authors may share or post their submitted version of the article (also known as the preprint) in the following ways:

1. On the author’s personal website or their employer’s website
2. On institutional or funder websites if required
3. In the author’s own classroom use
4. On Scholarly Collaboration Networks (SCNs) that are signatories to the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers’ Sharing Principles (https://www.stm-assoc.org/stm-consultations/scn-consultation-2015/)

1. Author’s personal website
2. Author’s employer’s website
3. arXiv.org
4. Funder’s repository*

1. When the article is published, the posted version should be updated with a full citation to the original of Sustainability Policy and Human Geography, including DOI. He or she will need to replace the accepted version with the published article version of IJELE.
2. The article will be followed statements on the SPHG's copyright notice at http://pubs2.ascee.org/index.php/SPHG/abou/submissions#copyrightNotice.