Publication Ethics
These ethical guidelines establish the rules for the ethical behaviour of all participants in the publication process in Journal Papers of the Institute for Bulgarian Language Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin, previously also translated in English as Proceedings of the Institute for Bulgarian Language Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin, issued by the Institute for Bulgarian Language Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Adherence to the adopted international standards of publication ethics shall also play a crucial role in the policy of the editorial board, which shall aim to guarantee the exclusive publication of papers of the highest possible quality. Compliance with the standards of ethical conduct and performance of obligations in observance of professional ethics is therefore expected of all parties involved in the process of publication.
The principles of Publication ethics and publication malpractice statement in the journal Papers of the Institute for Bulgarian Language Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin are based on the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The journal respects these guidelines and adheres to them. They aim to ensure good ethical behaviour at all stages of the publishing process.
- Duties and responsibilities of the publisher (Institute for Bulgarian Language Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
The Institute for Bulgarian Language (IBL), as publisher of the journal Papers of the Institute for Bulgarian Language Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin takes its duties of guardianship over all stages of publishing extremely seriously, and we recognise our ethical and other responsibilities. We are committed to ensuring that advertising, reprints, or other commercial revenue has no impact or influence on editorial decisions. In addition, the Institute for Bulgarian Language and the editorial board will assist in communications with other journals and/or publishers where this is useful and necessary.
The publisher is responsible for the prepress processing of each issue of the journal, as well as for the final editing and proofreading of the manuscripts. It gives the authors the opportunity to acquaint themselves with the texts that have been prepared for publication and make the necessary corrections.
The journal is published both in print form and electronically. A paper copy is given to each author as well as to each member of the international editorial board.
The publisher assists the compilers of each issue by providing adequate answers to questions that have arisen in the work process. It also helps the editorial board in their work on projects aimed at the development of the journal. The publisher also participates in the process of indexing the journal in international databases.
- Ethical guidelines for the members of the editorial board
The editor in chief and members of the editorial board shall evaluate manuscripts exclusively on the basis of their scientific merit. The journal’s editor in chief shall present any available publication materials, while the editorial board shall approve or reject particular manuscripts or drafts based on double-blind peer review. The selection shall be made with a view to professional quality and academic contribution in the respective area of scientific interest. In controversial cases, the decision is taken by consensus.
Neither the editor in chief nor any member of the editorial board shall in any way consider manuscripts that present conflicts of interest arising from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the publication text. Upon the establishment of such conflicts, the editor or member of the editorial board concerned shall be excluded from the process of review and approval/rejection of the manuscript concerned. Whenever ethical complaints are filed concerning a submitted manuscript or published paper, the editor in chief and members of the Editorial board shall take reasonable action to ensure that proper compliance with the ethical standards is restored. The editor in chief and the members of the editorial board shall by all means respect the confidentiality of the reviewers and authors involved in the process of anonymous review. The editor in chief and the members of the editorial board shall be responsible for familiarising all parties in the publication process with the present ethical guidelines.
- Publication procedures and policies
The executive editor and the editorial board will take all reasonable steps to ensure a transparent publishing process and the reliability of the information they publish in the Papers of the Institute for Bulgarian Language Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin. Their decisions to accept or reject a paper should be based only on the paper’s quality, originality, and clarity on the basis of the results of the double-blind peer review procedure. The journal has a declared mechanism for authors to appeal against Editorial decisions. In such cases, a third anonymous reviewer is selected, and the resulting report is discussed at the meeting of the editorial board.
The executive editor and the editorial board publish and regularly update the guidance to authors on everything that is expected of them. This guidance is regularly updated on the website of the journal Papers of the Institute for Bulgarian Language Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin. The executive editor commits not to reverse decisions to accept submissions unless serious problems are identified with the submission. New editors should not overturn decisions to publish submissions made by the previous editor unless serious problems are identified.
- Ethical guidelines for authors
Authors shall justify the significance of their scientific research while at the same time providing comprehensive detail and citations or references to their sources so that any interested parties are able to reproduce the study analysis. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical conduct and shall therefore be deemed unacceptable.
Authors shall by all means strive to ensure that their work is entirely original, and therefore, wherever and whenever the work and/or words of others are used, all instances shall be appropriately acknowledged. Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical publishing conduct and shall therefore be deemed unacceptable.
Authors should not offer to publish in “Papers of the Institute for Bulgarian Language” a text that is published in another magazine. To republish text, the written consent of all authors and of the editors’ office is required. The republication is explicitly disclosed and refers to the original text. The corresponding author shall strive to ensure that there is a full consensus of all co-authors in approving the final version of the paper and its submission for publication. The publication of any part of a collective research work without the prior consent of all contributing authors is inadmissible. Another important condition with regard to collective research work is that all co-authors shall be able to demonstrate their significant involvement in and contribution to the research under consideration.
The authors shall state that, to the best of their knowledge, all data utilised for the purposes of their research is genuine and authentic. In case significant errors are discovered, authors shall duly notify the editorial board so that publication could be withdrawn and revised accordingly in due time. Authors are obliged to identify the sources of their funding, e.g., internal funding by a university, institute, etc., or any form of external funding, if required by contract.
• Authorship and contributorship
Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria follows the criteria for authorship and contributorship set up by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines for authorship and contributorship.
The contribution of each author, as reflected in the order of the authors’ names, should be determined by the authors themselves. The corresponding author is responsible for the adequacy and completeness of the author list, appropriate credit attribution and the agreement of all authors to the journal’s open access, ethics and, if applicable, data release policies. The corresponding author should also ensure that all appropriate co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the manuscript and agree to its publication.
Acknowledgements can be used to identify contributions that do not fulfil the criteria for authorship.
• Use of AI tools
The journal does not allow artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT or large language models (LLMs) to be listed as authors of publications. The journal agrees with the position of the Committee on Publication Ethics that AI tools do not meet the requirements for authorship since they cannot assume ethical and legal responsibility for their work.
Authors who use AI tools to generate content (text, images/graphics, etc.) or to collect data must indicate this in their manuscripts so that readers can understand the contribution of these tools to the development of the work.
- Ethical guidelines for reviewers
The articles in Papers of the Institute for Bulgarian Language Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin are published after double-blind peer review. The job of reviewers is crucial for the attestation and improvement of the quality of any and all materials submitted for publication and shall be of conclusive importance in the decision-making process on behalf of the editorial board as regards the publication of materials.
The ethical principle of confidentiality lies at the core of any reviewer’s job. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review shall be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage. Violation of the principle of confidentiality is unethical behaviour.
Reviews shall be conducted in an objective, comprehensive, and accurate manner, while any observations shall be formulated clearly and supported by arguments.
Any appointed reviewer who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or is otherwise aware that a prompt or accurate review will be impossible shall notify the editor and step down from the review process.
- Protecting individual data
The editor in charge will protect the confidentiality of individual information. It is therefore almost always necessary to obtain written informed consent from patients, experimental subjects, and interviewees described in case reports and for photographs of informants and participants. It may be possible to publish without explicit consent if the report is important to a general public concern, if such consent is unusually burdensome to obtain, and if a reasonable individual would be unlikely to object to publication (all three conditions must be met).
- Ensuring the integrity of the academic effort and pursuing misconduct
Whenever it is found that a significant inaccuracy, misleading statement, or distorted report has been published, it will be corrected promptly and with due prominence. If, after an appropriate investigation, an item proves to be fraudulent, it will be retracted. The retraction should be clearly identifiable to readers and indexing systems. Editors accept the duty to act if they suspect misconduct. This duty extends to both published and unpublished papers. The editor should not simply reject papers that raise concerns about possible misconduct. S/he accepts the ethical obligation to pursue alleged cases. He or she should first seek a response from those accused. If they are not satisfied with the response, they should ask the appropriate body (regulatory or legal) to investigate.
• Handling of complaints and appeals
Any complaints or appeals should be submitted in writing to the editorial email address no later than the deadline for submission of the final version of the accepted paper.
Complaints and appeals received will be investigated in accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines and related documents on handling complaints and appeals.
• Handling allegations of research misconduct
Misconduct in research may include falsification of data, fabrication, plagiarism, or unethical treatment of research participants or subjects, or any behaviour that violates established ethical standards and/or compromises the integrity of the research.
All authors are obliged to refrain from such practices in their work. Suspected research misconduct identified in a paper under review must be clearly described and emphasised by the reviewers as part of the written review.
Appropriate action will be taken in accordance with the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) guidelines on plagiarism (in a submitted / published
Anyone who believes that research published in the journal involves scientific misconduct should report their concerns to the Editorial Board by email to the editorial address.
• Conflicts of interest
A conflict of interest may exist if an author or the author’s institution has financial or other relationships with persons or organisations that could inappropriately influence the author’s work. Conflicts of interest include financial relationships (e.g., employment, consulting work, stock ownership, or other forms of compensation) as well as personal relationships and academic competition or rivalries. In general, authors should avoid entering into agreements with study sponsors that could influence or compromise the authors’ access to all study data or their ability to analyse and interpret the data and to write and publish manuscripts independently.
Conflicts of interest may also occur between an author and a reviewer. Such conflicts are avoided by ensuring the mutual anonymity of authors and reviewers during the review process.
In addition, the review process allows reviewers to decline to review a paper if they recognise a potential conflict of interest.
Reviewers must not be involved in any way with a submitted paper if they have recently collaborated with the author(s) on the same project, if they have received or may receive financial compensation for the work described in the paper, if they are or have been in any way personally or familially related to the author(s), or if they are close/direct competitors of the author(s). In any of the above cases, the reviewer must decline to review the paper.
To avoid potential conflicts of interest, the submission management system automatically distributes the papers to the reviewers, ensuring a broad match between the keywords provided by the authors and the topics reflecting the reviewers’ research interests and capacities that they themselves have indicated prior to the review. A further restriction is that the author(s) of a paper and the reviewers to whom it is assigned must not belong to the same institution.
• Data sharing and reproducibility
Authors who submit papers to the journal are free:
- to share their research data, code, or other relevant materials in appropriate repositories or archives to ensure the accessibility, transparency and credibility of their research;
- to provide detailed documentation of shared data to facilitate the understanding and replication of the study;
- to supplement the shared data and documentation with more detailed information on the methods and procedures used in the analyses so as to enable the reproducibility of the results;
- to follow best practices for data management and documentation, such as the use of standardised formats and metadata.
• Policy on ethical oversight
In all matters requiring ethical oversight, such as falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, duplicate publication, the journal will be guided by the COPE Guidelines on Ethics as described in the Ethics toolkit section and in the detailed Ethics Toolkit Guide.
• Policy on intellectual property
The authors are responsible for the content of the submitted manuscript and all supporting items, data, materials, codes, etc. All responsibility regarding the intellectual property of the work lies with the authors.
In order to meet the conditions of open access publication and to promote the widest possible distribution, the works included in the journal are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. International Licence (CC BY 4.0).
By submitting a paper to the journal, authors confirm that they accept the terms and conditions of the Licence.
No author or reader fees are charged for access to the journal.
• Post-publication corrections
In cases where post-publication corrections may be required, the journal will refer to the Post-publication discussions and corrections section of the COPE website.
• Policy on retractions and corrections
During the review process, reviewers exercise ethical oversight with respect to possible reasons that could lead to the retraction of an accepted paper (e.g. discovery of plagiarism, lack of proper attribution, unreliable findings, fabrication or falsification, copyright infringement, etc.). The reviewers are instructed to report all such cases that they discover during the review.
In addition, the reviewers are instructed to look for errors in the submitted papers and to point them out to the authors in the review so that they can correct them.
• Policies for ensuring the integrity of the scholarly literature
The guidelines for ensuring the integrity of the scientific literature adopted by the journal are based on the COPE Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.
The strategies and procedures for dealing with plagiarism, the manipulation of citations and the falsification of data are based, among other things, on the COPE Core Practices Guide and the relevant publications made available in this section of the COPE website.
The executive editor should make all reasonable efforts to ensure that a proper investigation is conducted. If this does not happen, the editors will make all reasonable attempts to persist in obtaining a resolution to the problem.
- Relations with journal owners and publishers
The journal Papers of the Institute for Bulgarian Language Prof. Lyubomir Andreychin is published by an academic institution that is funded by the state and by other publicly available resources of funding in Bulgaria. The editorial independence is strictly maintained, and the publication strategy and practices are the sole responsibility of the executive editor and the editorial board. No commercial considerations are taken into account in this or any other respect. The Executive Editor is willing to publish criticisms according to the same criteria used for material in the rest of the journal.