Journal Policies

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Ethics and responsibility

 

Research Focus adopts the ethical standard and guidelines of COPE – Committee on Publication Ethics. As such, the journal complies with the COPE Peer Review process, Authorship, and Intellectual Property.

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Peer Review

 

All submitted research articles will be refereed in an open peer review process by two reviewers (referees) with expertise in the relevant subject area.

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Manuscripts that are literature review are verified by the Editorial team, and do not undergo a peer review. Research articles and Features are submitted to peer review. After the referees receive the Research paper or Feature from the editor, they read it closely and provide individual comments, usually within two to four weeks. In their critiques, the reviewers comment on the validity of the science, identifying scientific errors and evaluating the design and methodology used; judge the significance by evaluating the importance of the findings; determine the originality of the work based on how much it advances the field. Reviewers also identify missing or inaccurate references.

 

The reviewers recommend that the paper be published without changes; be modified by the authors in view of its future publishing, or rejected.

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Open Access

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Open Access represents the way research results are distributed online, free of cost (or with a minimal cost). In this way, the researchers can publish their papers free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.

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​The main advantage of open access journals is the free access to scientific papers regardless of affiliation with a subscribing library and improved access for the general public. For researchers, publishing their articles openly accessible brings the benefit of maximizing their research impact.

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​Research Focus makes all articles and related content available for free on the journal's website ('gold' open access). There are no costs associated to reading or publishing.

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Intellectual Property

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​Copyright. Research Focus applies the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to all articles published. This license enables open access – specifically, free immediate access to original works of all types. Under this license, authors agree to make articles legally available for reuse, without permission or fees, for virtually any purpose. Anyone may copy, distribute or reuse these articles, as long as the author and original source are properly cited.

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Plagiarism. All submitted papers, regardless of the type of article, will be checked for plagiarism using the PlagiarismDetector software. Authors must cite properly (APA style) all bibliographic sources for all ideas, quotes, figures and numbers, statistics, graphs, tables and charts that are not their own. In cases of detected plagiarism, the paper will be sent back to author(s) to be corrected. Research Focus does not publish any manuscript suspected on plagiarism.

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