The SigmAgri Journal follows the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) for its statements of ethics. 

Allegations of Misconduct

The SigmAgri Journal takes seriously allegations of misconduct pre-publication and post-publication. We will assess any information to identify any type of misconduct. If the allegation is true, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to publishing corrections; retracting the article; resolving this issue with the head of the department or dean of the relevant author institution and/or academic body or community, or take appropriate legal action.

Authorship and Contributorship

The SigmAgri Journal obligates the authors to explain the originality of their works, avoidance of duplicate and/or salami publications, and the contribution of each author listed in the manuscript through a Cover Letter. The template of the Cover Letter can be downloaded here. 

It should be noted thatThe SigmAgri Journal does not accept any articles that have been submitted to other types of publication (journals, proceedings, book chapters, etc.)

The authors must properly cite all works mentioned in the articles (articles or data set), both in the body text and in the reference list. Self-citation is allowed as long as it is relevant to the topic discussed. 

Conflict of interest/competing interests

Since conflicts of interest may influence the judgment of authors, reviewers, and editors, authors should avoid conflicts of interest or the appearance of conflicts of interest throughout the research process. All such interests (or their absence), such as roles in a project or funding source, should be stated explicitly by authors upon submission of the manuscript. If the manuscript is published, such a statement will be published within the article. If there is doubt about whether a circumstance represents a conflict, it should be disclosed, so that Editors may assess its significance. Any queries about possible conflicts of interest should be addressed to the SigmAgri Journal

Data and reproducibility

Editorial Board or Peer-Reviewers have the responsibility to identify the use of fabricated data. If suspicion arose, the Editorial Board will ask opinions from more than one additional peer-reviewers and have a dialogue with authors. The SigmAgri Journal also has the right to check data sets from the Author, if there is concern about data fabrication.

Ethical oversight

The SigmAgri Journal also has concerns about ethical problems such as consent from respondents/informants, handling confidential data, and ethical business/marketing practices.

Intellectual property

As mentioned in the ‘Copyright Notice’, by publishing in The SigmAgri Journal, authors grant any third party the right to use their article to the extent provided by a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 

Copyright on articles is retained by the respective author(s), without restrictions. A non-exclusive license is granted to The SigmAgri Journal to publish the article and identify itself as its original publisher, along with the commercial right to include the article in a hardcopy issue for sale to libraries and individuals.

Every article submitted in the SigmAgri Journal will be checked with plagiarism-checking software. Article with a similarity index of more than 25% will be rejected upon submission. For duplicate publications and salami publications, we encourage the readers and peer-reviewers to inform us of these types of misconduct. Duplicate publication (sometimes referred to as redundant or dual publication) implies reporting identical or very similar data in multiple papers. Salami publication (also known as salami slicing and salami publishing) refers to the inappropriate fragmentation of data into the smallest publishable units.

Post-publication discussions and corrections

The SigmAgri Journal allow changes in article post-publication. Correction, revision, or retracting articles post-publication can be done through discussion between the authors and the Editorial Board.

In the copy-editing and proofreading process, the editor will make changes to the text without changing the meaning if there is a grammatical error, spelling, or ineffectiveness of the sentence. Prior to the publication of the article, the results of the copy-editing and proofreading will be provided to the author for approval