Duties and responsibilities

Authors

Authorship

The International Journal of Special Education has introduced ghost-writing and guest authorship barriers. Authors are obliged to submit their statements concerning the accuracy of submitted papers, and in the case of papers prepared by several authors, they are obliged to reveal the contribution of individual authors to their papers.

Authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works and that where other materials (including data) are used the sources are appropriately cited. Papers submitted for peer review should not have been published in their current or a very similar form before, other than as a pre-print in a repository or as a conference paper with limited circulation beyond the conference attendees. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable.

The authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights without any restrictions.

Research Ethics

Research Involving Human Subjects

Institutional Review Board Statement

When reporting on research that involves human subjects, human material, human tissues, or human data, authors must declare that the investigations were carried out following the rules of the Declaration of Helsinki of 1975, which was revised in 2013. According to point 23 of this declaration, approval from the local Institutional Review Board (IRB) or another appropriate ethics committee must be obtained before undertaking the research to confirm that the study meets national and international guidelines. As a minimum, a statement including the project identification code, date of approval, and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board must be stated in the ‘Institutional Review Board Statement’ Section of the article.

Example of an Institutional review board statement:
ETHICS DECLARATION: “The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of XXX (Project identification code) on [date of approval].”

For non-interventional studies (e.g. surveys, questionnaires, social media research), all participants must be fully informed whether their anonymity is assured, why the research is being conducted, how their data will be used, and if there are any risks involved in participating. As with all research involving humans, ethical approval from an appropriate ethics committee must be obtained prior to conducting the study. If ethical approval is not required, authors must either provide an exemption from the ethics committee or cite the local or national legislation that indicates ethics approval is not required for this type of study. When a study has been granted exemption, the name of the ethics committee that provided this should be stated in the ‘Institutional Review Board Statement’ Section with a full explanation for the rejection of ethical approval.

Informed Consent Statement

Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data, or human tissue must include a statement of informed consent for participation in research. Verbal informed consent to participate in a study can be acceptable under some circumstances (such as in ethnographic studies). The authors must explain the rationale for using this kind of consent in the “Informed Consent Statement” Section. For verbal informed consent, a copy of the script used must be provided during the submission stage.

For all manuscripts that include identifying patient/participant information (personal details, images, or videos relating to an individual person), written informed consent for the publication of these details must be obtained from patients/participants (or their relatives/guardians) before submitting to an IJSE journal. A blank version of the form used to obtain permission (without the patient/participant names or signature) should be provided upon submission. You may refer to our template permission form and provide an appropriate form after consulting with your affiliated institution.

For the purposes of publishing in IJSE journals, a consent, permission, or release form should include unlimited permission for publication in all formats (including print, electronic, and online), in sublicensed and reprinted versions (including translations and derived works), and in other works and products under open access license. To respect patients’/participants’ and any other individuals’ privacy, please do not send signed forms.

Private information identifying participants need not be included unless the identifiable materials are of relevance to the research (e.g., photographs of participants’ faces that show a particular symptom). Patients’/participants’ initials or other personal identifiers must not appear in any images. Patient/participant details must be anonymized as much as possible, e.g., do not mention specific age, ethnicity, or occupation where they are not relevant to the conclusions. Steps necessary to protect privacy may include de-identifying data, adding noise, or blocking portions of the database. Editors reserve the right to reject any submission that does not meet these requirements.

The Editorial Office reserves the right to request further documentation when necessary. The submitted manuscript will be scrutinized by the Editorial Office, and upon request, documentary evidence (signed consent forms and any related discussion documents from the ethics board) must be provided.

Example of an Informed Consent Statement:
“Informed consent for participation was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.”
OR “Informed consent for participation is not required as per local legislation [provide local legislation].”
 “Verbal informed consent was obtained from the participants. Verbal consent was obtained rather than written because [state the reason]”,
OR “Informed consent for publication was obtained from all identifiable human participants.”

Requirements for Studies on Vulnerable Groups and Organ Transplants

If a study involves vulnerable groups, the manuscript will undergo an additional review by the editorial office. If requested, the author must provide documentary evidence, including blank consent forms and any related discussion documents from the ethics board or other relevant bodies. Additionally, when studies describe groups by race, ethnicity, gender, disability, disease, etc., an explanation regarding why such categorization was needed must be clearly stated in the article.

Articles describing human organ transplantation studies are subject to all policies for research involving human subjects. Additionally, the authors must specify the institution(s), clinic(s), or department(s) from which the organs or tissues were sourced. IJSE does not accept manuscripts that report data on organs and/or other materials obtained from illegal commercial activity, executed prisoners, or other unethical practices relating to organ donations. Manuscripts addressing this practice, such as editorials or reports on its secondary consequences, may be considered at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief but require a written appeal to the editorial office before submission. For further resources on organ transplantation, IJSE follows the glossary maintained by the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (https://optn.transplant.hrsa.gov/patients/glossary/).

Clinical Trials Registration

Registration

Clinical trials are subject to all policies regarding Research Involving Human Subjects. In addition, IJSE follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines which require registration of clinical trials in a public trials registry at or before the time of first patient enrollment as a condition of consideration for publication. The ICMJE defines a clinical trial as any research project that prospectively assigns people or a group of people to an intervention, with or without concurrent comparison or control groups, to study the relationship between a health-related intervention and a health outcome. Therefore, ‘clinical trial’ not only refers to studies that take place in a hospital or involve pharmaceuticals, but also refers to all studies which involve participant randomization and group classification in the context of the intervention under assessment.

Authors must pre-register clinical trials with an international clinical trials register. Suitable databases include clinicaltrials.gov, the EU Clinical Trials Register and those listed by the World Health Organisation’s International Clinical Trials Registry Platform. The name of the registry, trial registration number and date of registration should be included in the Institutional Reviewer Board statement or in the methods section. 

Purely observational studies (e.g., cohort studies, cross-sectional studies, and case–control studies) do not require registration. Editors may consider exceptions to pre-trial registration requirements in some cases. If an exception is granted, authors must retroactively register the trial and clearly indicate the date and reasons for the retroactive registration in the methods section of the publication.

Approval to conduct a study from an independent local, regional, or national review body is not equivalent to prospective clinical trial registration. IJSE reserves the right to decline any paper without trial registration for further peer-review.

Randomized Clinical Trial Reporting Guidelines

In addition to clinical trial registration, IJSE requires a completed CONSORT 2010 checklist and flow diagram uploaded as a condition of submission when reporting the results of a randomized clinical trial. Checklist templates can be found on the CONSORT website which also describes several CONSORT checklist extensions for different designs and types of data beyond two-group parallel trials. At a minimum, clinical trial articles should report the content addressed by each item of the checklist.

If Authors do not provide the details on ethical issues of their research, the paper will not meet the eligibility criteria for the IJSE and will be declided by the journal Editors.

When submiting the paper, the ethical aspects of the research must be included. The details must be provided at the end of the manuscript in the statements and in n "Methods" or "Procedure" section in the paper and the Bioethics Commission certificate  included as the separate file in the paper metadata (as Research Materials).
If Authors do not provide the details on ethical issues of their research, the paper will not meet the eligibility criteria for the IJSE and will be declided by the journal Editors.

Acknowledgment

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an acknowledgments section.

Financial Disclosure

The journal requires all authors to disclose their funding consistently under a separate funding heading.

Conflict of interests

The journal requires all authors to disclose any possible conflicts of interest. If the conflict occurs, the statement should be placed before the references list in a declaration.

Payment

The publication fee is 250 USD net after the final paper acceptance.
The invoice for publication will be issued after the article is finally approved for publication.

Reviewers

1. Peer review

The first stage of reviewing the submitted papers is preliminary reviewing done by the editorial staff of the journal. At this stage, a paper is subjected to assessment in terms of its conformity with the profile of the journal, maintaining the editorial requirements of the publisher, and general criteria of grammatical correctness.

2. Double-blind review

A text complying with the requirements of the introductory review is assigned an identification code and is referred to a minimum of two reviewers, specialists in the field of special education. In accordance with the principle of the double-blind review process, reviewers and authors remain anonymous towards one another. Reviewers submit their opinions about a paper by filling in a review form.

Principles for the Review Appropriation

The reviewer should have no prior knowledge of your submission. The reviewer should not have recently collaborated with any of the authors. Reviewer nominees from the same institution as any of the authors are not permitted. The reviewer shall make the paper evaluation in the IJSE online submission system electronic system.
It is also possible for a reviewer to send individual comments to be published in the article content. All judgments and findings in the peer-review process should be objective.

Reviewers should not use GenAI tools and other large language models (LLMs) to prepare review reports. Reviewers are solely responsible for the content of their reports, and utilizing these tools may violate confidentiality, proprietary, and data privacy rights.

Some limited use to improve the written quality of the peer-review report (e.g., checking grammar, structure, spelling, punctuation, and formatting) may be acceptable but should be disclosed upon submission of the peer-review report. Under no circumstances should reviewers upload manuscripts, either in whole or in part, images, figures, tables, or any communication related to manuscripts under review to any GenAI tools, as to do so violates IJSE's confidentiality policy relating to peer review. If it is determined that AI tools have been inappropriately used in review report preparation, the report will be discarded.

Editor

Any discovered cases of scientific unreliability shall be exposed, including notification of respective employers of the authors, their learned societies, associations of science editors, etc.). On misconduct issues, the journal follows the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) flowcharts, available at https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts

Plagiarism

The journal has a policy of screening for plagiarism. The authors must only present for publication their original papers, which have not been published previously as a whole or insignificant part of any other copyrighted content. Submitted articles are checked with duplication-checking software. Up to 20% palagirism is allowed in submited manuscripts.

Open Access Policy

The IJSE  is a fully open-access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the reader or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the DOAI definition of open access.

Copyright Statement

Copyright: © 2022 Authors.Open access publication under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).