Publication Malpractice Statement
INDUSTRICS
Publication Malpractice Statement
This statement defines publication malpractice at INDUSTRICS, assigns the duties whose breach constitutes it, and states the consequences. It binds every participant in publication — authors, reviewers, editors and the publisher — and is applied under COPE guidance. Detailed procedures live in the journal's peer review, ethics and governance policies; this statement is the accountability framework that connects them. Malpractice is any deliberate act, by any party, that deceives the journal, its readers, or the scholarly record — and in an applied journal, the readers who are deceived are often the people who then specify, install or operate the technology.
Duties of editors
- Judge manuscripts solely on scholarly merit and fit to scope, without regard to the authors' origin, gender, seniority, employer or institution, and without influence from the publisher or from payment.
- Keep submissions confidential, sharing them only with those involved in their assessment, and never use unpublished material — a method, a dataset, a commercial insight — for their own research, their employer's advantage or anyone else's.
- Stand aside from any manuscript in which they have a competing interest, including one arising from their employer's products, processes or commercial position, and disclose the conflict.
- Never require or suggest citation of their own work, the journal, or any source for other than scholarly reasons.
- Resist pressure from any quarter — a sponsor, a manufacturer, an employer, the publisher — to publish, suppress, delay or alter a finding, and record any attempt to apply it.
- Act on credible concerns about any article, however old, and correct or retract as the evidence requires.
Duties of reviewers
- Review only within their competence, decline when conflicted, and deliver on time or withdraw promptly.
- Treat the manuscript as confidential and commercially sensitive: no sharing, no use of its content, no disclosure to or processing by third parties or external AI services. A manuscript describing a competitor's process is not market intelligence, and treating it as such is theft as well as a breach of confidence.
- Assess the work objectively and support every criticism with evidence; hostility toward authors, their employers or their products has no place in a report.
- Never use the review to delay or damage a competing technology, and never use it to advance one they are connected to.
- Recommend citation of their own work only where genuinely required by the argument, and flag any substantial similarity with published work they know of.
Duties of authors
- Report honestly work they actually performed, on data that exist as described, under test conditions stated fully enough for the result to be judged and repeated.
- Compare against current practice as a competent engineer would configure it, and report the configuration.
- Claim no further than the evidence reaches: state whether the work is simulation, laboratory, pilot or in service, and do not let the abstract promise what the method section cannot support.
- Submit original work, to one journal at a time, disclosing any prior technical report, white paper or conference version, and crediting the words, ideas and prior findings of others — and of themselves — accurately.
- List as authors all who qualify and only those who qualify; declare funding, sponsorship and competing interests; confirm that no agreement permitted a sponsor to suppress or alter the findings; disclose any use of AI tools.
- Hold every permission the manuscript depends on before submitting, and suggest only real, correctly identified potential reviewers — supplying fabricated or misattributed reviewer contact details is fraud against the review process.
- Notify the journal promptly of any significant error discovered after publication, and cooperate with correction, retraction and any investigation.
Duties of the publisher
- Guarantee editorial independence and never intervene in decisions on content.
- Provide the resources for integrity screening, investigation of allegations, and permanent preservation of the record.
- Support editors in issuing corrections, expressions of concern and retractions, however uncomfortable and whoever is displeased, and publish them without delay.
- Decline any commercial arrangement that would give a sponsor, advertiser or partner influence over editorial content, and disclose any new revenue source before it takes effect.
Forms of malpractice
| Party | Examples |
|---|---|
| Authors | Fabrication or falsification of data or images; selective reporting of favourable test conditions; comparison against a deliberately weakened baseline; undeclared post-processing of measurements; describing laboratory work in the language of deployment; plagiarism and redundant publication, including republishing a study under a different product designation; gift, guest or ghost authorship; undeclared sponsorship or competing interests; fake reviewer suggestions; undisclosed AI-generated content |
| Reviewers | Breach of confidentiality; misappropriation of methods, data or commercial information from a manuscript; reviewing under an undeclared conflict; delaying or disparaging a competing technology; coercive self-citation; delegating review without consent |
| Editors | Deciding under a conflict of interest; using submissions for personal or employer advantage; citation coercion; suppressing or fabricating reviews; yielding to commercial pressure; obstructing correction of the record |
| Sponsors and third parties | Conditioning funding on a favourable outcome; asserting a contractual right to suppress or alter findings; pressing the journal to withdraw an unfavourable article absent demonstrated error; misrepresenting publication as endorsement of a product |
| Any party | Peer review manipulation; interference with an investigation; retaliation against a good-faith whistleblower, including against an employee who reported a concern about their own organisation's work |
Enforcement
- Anyone may report suspected malpractice to the editorial office; good-faith reports are handled confidentially and bring no reprisal, and the accused are always heard before conclusions are reached.
- Cases proceed under the applicable COPE flowchart. Outcomes are proportionate to the finding: correction, expression of concern, retraction, rejection, notification of institutions, employers and funders, and — for documented abuse of the process — refusal of future service as reviewer or editor.
- A demand from a company, a sponsor or a law firm is treated as evidence to be assessed, never as an instruction. An article is corrected or retracted when the evidence requires it and not because someone with an interest in the outcome would prefer it.
- Where a finding concerns work done under an employment relationship, the journal refers the matter to the employer as it would to a university, and reaches its own editorial conclusion regardless of what the employer decides.
- Findings against editors are handled by editors with no involvement in the conduct at issue, up to and including the governance procedures for removal from office. No role in the journal confers immunity from this statement.