Policy against “ghostwriting” and “guest authorship”

To ensure professional integrity, the editorial staff has introduced the following procedures to avoid the unethical activities when publishing research results. Adopting the procedures by the authors is the prerequisite to publishing their texts. All instances of unethical activities will be documented by the editorial staff.

Submitting a text and asking for it to be qualified for publishing in ATHSS will be understood as a declaration that all the authors took part in the activities that resulted in creating of a given text and that they all are holders of copyrights. Each of them should take part in a study to the extent that the author was responsible for the content. It is also a declaration that all authors who have contributed to the text are mentioned. For the authorship to be justified it has to be based on the substantial input into:

• the concept and planning or analysing and interpreting the data,
• the elaboration of the text and its critical analysis in relation to the relevant intellectual content,
• the final approval of the version of the text to be printed.

Contribution which means only fund raising or collecting data (not applicable for texts based only on a survey) does not justify the authorship as well as supervising the research group is not enough to clam authorship.

The editorial staff may ask the first author to name the author who has the most substantial contribution to the text (so called ‘responsible author’) and to indicate the percentage contribution of other authors as well as to indicate the author of the research concept, methodology of research, analysis of results, etc.

If there are other team members who do not fulfill the conditions to be the copyrights holders, they should be enumerated with their consent in the part called Credits and Acknowledgements in the form of statement which should include:

• contribution to the text which is important but does not justifies authorship
• acknowledgements for technical assistance,
• acknowledgements for financial help,
• if the research was commissioned, the ordering party should be mentioned.

To ensure transparency in financing, in the event when the publication is not financed by a state University or Institute where the authors are affiliated, the editorial staff asks the first author to send a statement which describes the details of financing.