The document below presents the perspective of IFAC on ethical guidelines for editors, reviewers, and authors. The purpose of these guidelines is to define generally agreed upon rules and minimal standards for the proper scientific conduct with respect to scholarly publications represented by IFAC.
Ethical Obligations and Guidelines for Authors
An excerpt from the document specifically for authors is as follows:
“The nature and complexity of ethical issues depends strongly on the scientific field. It is the goal of IFAC to provide scientific guidelines that are geared towards the special situation in the field of automatic control. This list is based on experience in other scientific fields [1,2]. Authors of scholarly publications in automatic control should adhere to the following ethical guidelines.
- An author’s central obligation is to present an accurate and complete account of the research performed, absolutely avoiding deception, including the data collected or used, as well as an objective discussion of the significance of the research [2].
- The corresponding author must have the approval of all authors for each submission and the publication of the manuscript.
- Ghost authorships and gift authorships are not permitted, i.e., the authors’ list contains all people, and only those people, who have made a noteworthy contribution to the research behind the manuscript and to the manuscript itself. Other contributions should be indicated in a footnote or an “Acknowledgments” section.
- The material in any newly submitted paper should be original. If the paper is based on a prior publication, its contents must be substantially different from the previous version. The authors need to indicate how the new paper differs from relevant previous publications. In particular, the additional original contribution in the new paper has to be pointed out explicitly. The previous paper has to be cited and discussed like any other paper in the list of references [3]. This also holds if the previous publication has been published in connection with a conference (conference proceedings, edited book volumes for conferences, etc.).
- All material which is based on prior work, including from the same authors, must be properly attributed to the prior publication by proper citation.
- The manuscript should not contain any figures or other material copied from anyone else without their written permission and proper citation in the manuscript.
- It is the authors’ duty to find and cite the original publications that present closely related work. Furthermore, the authors need to identify the source of all information quoted or offered, except that which is common knowledge.
- While criticism regarding the scientific work of others may be appropriate, personal criticism is never acceptable.
- Potential conflicts of interest, financial or otherwise, must be disclosed to the editor with the submission.
- The research itself, as reported in the manuscript, should have been conducted in accordance with commonly accepted ethical standards.
- The authors have the obligation to notify the editor immediately should any of the statements in this list cease to be true.
It is the goal of IFAC to regularly monitor whether these criteria are still valid and whether they needed to be adapted changed, or added to.”
[1] Shewan, L. & Coats, A., Ethics in the authorship and publishing of scientific articles, International Journal of Cardiology, Vol. 144, 2010, pp 1-2.
[2] Ethical Guidelines to Publication of Chemical Research, American Chemical Society (ACS), 2012.
[3] Adapted from Automatica “Information for Authors”
http://www.autsubmit.com/authorinfo.html
