Ethical Principles and Publication Policy
Current Research in Plant Science is committed to maintaining high standards of research integrity, publication ethics, transparency, reproducibility, and responsible scholarly publishing.
Authors, reviewers, editors, editorial board members, and the publisher are expected to comply with applicable ethical, scientific, regulatory, and publication standards throughout the research, submission, peer-review, editorial, production, and post-publication processes.
Publication Ethics Standards
The journal supports internationally recognized principles and guidance relevant to scholarly publishing, including:
- Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
- Council of Science Editors (CSE)
- European Association of Science Editors (EASE)
- National Library of Medicine (NLM)
- Relevant research-integrity and reporting standards
Requirements are applied according to the nature of the research, article type, study design, applicable laws, institutional requirements, and relevant professional standards.
Research Integrity
Research must be conducted and reported honestly, accurately, transparently, and responsibly.
Fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, inappropriate manipulation of data or images, selective misrepresentation, and other practices that compromise research integrity are not permitted.
Research Involving Human Participants
Research involving human participants must comply with applicable ethical and regulatory requirements.
Where required, approval must be obtained from an appropriate ethics committee, institutional review board, or equivalent authority.
Where applicable, manuscripts should identify the approving body, approval/reference number, and ethical approval or exemption status.
Informed Consent and Privacy
Where human participants are involved, appropriate informed consent must be obtained where required.
Authors must protect personal information, privacy, and confidentiality and must not disclose unnecessary identifying information.
Animal Research
Research involving animals must comply with applicable institutional, national, and international animal-welfare requirements.
Where required, ethical approval must be obtained before the research is conducted. Authors should provide relevant approval and animal-welfare information in the manuscript.
Field Research and Biodiversity
Field research involving plants, animals, genetic resources, protected species, or environmentally sensitive locations must comply with applicable permits, institutional requirements, biodiversity regulations, conservation requirements, and access and benefit-sharing obligations.
Authors should provide relevant permissions or ethical information where applicable.
Authorship
Authorship must reflect meaningful contributions to the research and manuscript. All authors must approve the final version and accept responsibility for their contributions.
Guest, gift, and ghost authorship are not permitted.
Changes in Authorship
Requests to add, remove, or rearrange authors should normally be made before acceptance and must include a clear explanation and appropriate confirmation from the affected authors.
Conflict of Interest
Authors, reviewers, editors, and editorial board members must disclose actual, potential, or perceived conflicts of interest.
Conflicts may include financial interests, employment, institutional relationships, personal relationships, professional collaborations, academic relationships, competitive relationships, or other circumstances that may affect impartiality.
Funding
All sources of financial support must be disclosed. Where applicable, authors should state the role of the funding organization in the research and publication process.
Data Availability
Authors should provide a Data Availability Statement where applicable.
Data may be publicly available, deposited in a recognized repository, available upon reasonable request, or restricted because of legitimate ethical, legal, confidentiality, commercial, or other limitations.
Plagiarism and Text Reuse
The journal does not tolerate plagiarism, inappropriate text reuse, fabrication, falsification, duplicate publication, or other research misconduct.
Manuscripts may be screened using similarity-detection or other appropriate tools.
The journal does not use an automatic fixed similarity-percentage threshold for determining plagiarism. Editorial assessment considers the nature, extent, location, and context of identified similarities.
Duplicate and Redundant Publication
Manuscripts must not be submitted simultaneously to more than one journal.
Authors must disclose relevant previous dissemination, including preprints, conference proceedings, theses, datasets, and related publications where applicable.
Data and Image Integrity
Data, figures, photographs, microscopy images, charts, tables, and other research materials must accurately represent the underlying work.
Manipulation that misrepresents research findings is not permitted. Any legitimate image processing should not alter or obscure the scientific interpretation of the results.
Peer-Review Ethics
The journal follows a single-anonymous peer-review process. Manuscripts selected for external review are normally evaluated by at least two independent reviewers.
Reviewers must maintain confidentiality, declare conflicts of interest, provide objective and constructive assessments, and report suspected ethical or research-integrity concerns to the Editor.
Editorial Independence
The Editor-in-Chief has overall responsibility for editorial and publication-ethics standards.
Editorial decisions must be based on scientific, ethical, and editorial considerations and must not be improperly influenced by commercial interests, sponsors, advertisers, authors, reviewers, or other external parties.
Publication fees must not influence editorial decisions.
Artificial Intelligence
Authors remain responsible for the accuracy, originality, integrity, references, interpretation, and ethical compliance of their manuscripts.
AI tools must not be listed as authors and must not be used to fabricate or falsify data, results, references, citations, images, or other scholarly content.
Where substantial AI assistance has been used in manuscript preparation, authors should disclose the tool and its general purpose.
Editors and reviewers must not upload confidential manuscripts, unpublished data, proprietary information, or reviewer reports to external AI systems where confidentiality or intellectual property could be compromised.
Research and Publication Misconduct
Potential misconduct includes fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, duplicate publication, inappropriate image manipulation, unethical research practices, improper authorship, undisclosed conflicts of interest, manipulation of peer review, and other forms of research or publication misconduct.
Where concerns arise, the journal may request clarification or supporting documentation and may contact relevant institutions or authorities where appropriate.
Corrections
A correction may be published when a published article contains an error that affects accuracy or clarity but does not invalidate the overall scholarly record.
Expressions of Concern
An Expression of Concern may be published when substantial concerns exist about a published article but the available information is insufficient to make an immediate final determination.
Retractions
An article may be retracted when reliable evidence indicates that the published work is substantially unreliable or involves serious research or publication misconduct.
Appeals and Complaints
Authors may submit substantive appeals or complaints concerning editorial decisions or publication processes. Appeals should provide clear reasons and relevant evidence. The journal will consider appeals fairly and independently.
Post-Publication Integrity
The journal has a continuing responsibility to protect the integrity of the published scholarly record and may issue corrections, expressions of concern, retractions, or other appropriate notices when necessary.
Accountability
Authors, reviewers, editors, editorial board members, and the publisher share responsibility for maintaining the integrity, transparency, and ethical standards of the journal.