Ethical standards

Compliance with standards provided by international organizations on publishing ethics and recommendations.

Acta Acustica fully supports the latest version of the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing released by the organizations involved in establishing and monitoring publication standards for Open Access journals and assessing the journal’s compliance with these guidelines.

Acta Acustica follows the standards and guidelines provided by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics), especially regarding misconduct and fraud, and how to act in front of such a case. COPE provides a code of conduct with best practices in publishing and flow charts that describe the publisher's and editor's actions, if such a case has to be resolved: http://publicationethics.org/. To authors with proven misconduct or fraud the actions available in the flowcharts will be applied.

Acta Acustica’s ethical practice and policy is closely related to those published on the pages of EDP Sciences.

1. Publication criteria

Acta Acustica submitted work implies that it has not been published and / or is not submitted for publication anywhere else. Publication must be approved by all authors. Authors should accept Article Processing Charges (only applied to accepted articles). No fee is applied for the submission of an article. For ethics in publishing consult COPE.

Acta Acustica has adopted a rigorous examination of every submitted manuscript towards plagiarism or text recycling using SimilarityCheck. This tool allows the Editors-in-Chief to quickly identify even partial use of already published content, which cannot be re-published in this journal for various reasons, such as copyright issues, autoplagiarism, plagiarism, etc. In case of doubt, and in order to avoid any forms of plagiarism or text recycling, authors are invited to visit relevant webpages of universities across the world dealing with this topic, or probably the websites of their own institutions. Please visit these few examples:

• MIT
• Plagiarism.org
• Standford University
• University of Toronto
• Université du Québec
• Universität Bamberg
• Univesität Heidelberg
• Université de Paris Descartes

If an article is submitted containing any forms of previously published content without citing the appropriate sources, the authors will be informed by the Editors-in-Chief. For an unpublished manuscript, in case of conflicts, the relevant COPE guidelines will apply. The details and updated version of the action of the Editors-in-Chief is available on the website of COPE.

2. Authorship

Acta Acustica follows recommendations by COPE on what constitutes authorship in each discipline (see https://publicationethics.org/files/Authorship_DiscussionDocument.pdf). Those contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship shall be acknowledged.

3. Preprint servers

4. Stringent Peer-Review-Process

Acta Acustica operates a blind peer review process.

All articles submitted to Acta Acustica are scanned for plagiarism using Crossref Similarity Check Powered by iThenticate.

Acta Acustica performs a stringent quality control process. Submissions need to pass an in-house quality check contains competing interest, ethical requirements, financial disclosures, compliance with Acta Acustica’s data availability policy, etc.. In case a submission does not pass our rigorous in-house quality check and / or the submission fails compliance with the journal’s instructions for authors, or if the Editors-in-Chief observe a significant lack of scientific and/or language quality, submissions may be returned for queries or directly rejected.

Acta Acustica’s submissions which passed this check are forwarded for assignment to the Editor-in-Chief of one of our four domains. Together with Deputy Editors, Senior Editors and members of the Editorial Board and the Reviewer Board - containing experts in the field of submission - an initial decision will be provided. Editors, reviewers and authors are all invited to fairness, objectivity, timely involvement and confidentiality during this whole process.

Acta Acustica’s judgement initiating the Review Process: an expert in the area of the submitted work is appointed as Reviewer Editor selecting referees. Reviewers are expected to inform the Editor-in-Chief about any suspicion of misconduct.

After reviews have been received, the Associate Editor recommends a decision. All decisions are reviewed by the Editor-in-Chief for final decision which will be forwarded to the authors.

Acta Acustica’s Editor-in-Chief has full authority for acceptance/rejection of the submitted manuscripts. Persons with a conflict of interest towards a submitted manuscript shall declare it and be withdrawn from the peer reviewing of the respective article.

5. Statements

Statement of Informed Consent

Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information, including patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that a patient who is identifiable be shown the manuscript to be published.

Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve, however, and informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt. For example, masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate protection of anonymity. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, such as in genetic pedigrees, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning and editors should so note, authors should identify Individuals who provide writing assistance and disclose the funding source for this assistance.

Statement of Human and Animal Rights

When reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national). If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the ethical standards, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach, and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should be asked to indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.

6. Policies for publication of errata and for article retraction

Despite careful peer reviewing and article production, situations might occur where errata should be published or articles retracted. Acta Acustica’s Editors-in-Chief, together with the publisher, therefore follow the flowcharts established by COPE. Due to changing guidelines or policies, these are not explained here but are accessible on COPE’s website here. Acta Acustica then applies at any time the most recent policies.

8. Archiving

As soon as the journal has obtained indexation, in order to facilitate self-archiving, Acta Acustica deposits open access articles in repositories in the relevant disciplines. Authors are also permitted to post the final, published PDF and / or press release of their accepted submission on a website, institutional repository or other free public server, immediately upon publication.

9. Special Issues

For the publication of Special Issues curated by Guest Editors, Acta Acustica adheres to the DOAJ criteria for Special Issues.