The Editors of the scientific quarterly Journal of Elementology undertake all efforts to maintain the highest ethical standards concerning the publishing practice. We presume that the reliability of original and review papers lies at the foundation of their quality. The Editors apply all measures available to prevent author unreliability. The principles followed by all parties involved in the publication process (editors, authors, reviewers and publisher) have been written in compliance with the guidelines proposed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

The obligations of authors

• Authors should present results of their research in a manner that is reliable, honest and trustworthy, not giving rise to any doubt. Falsification of research results or modification of data are considered to be unethical and unacceptable.
• Authors should submit only research results which have not been submitted for publication or published in another journal. Articles must be original and should not use data without providing reference to their source. In the case of biological studies, experiments should have been conducted according to the approved ethical standards.
• Authors of investigations presented during conferences or scientific symposia should inform the Editors about this fact upon submission of their paper for publication in the journal.
• Authors are requested to prepare their articles on the basis of the most up-to-date references connected with the research subject they investigate.
• Authors are obliged to provide a description of the research methods, research instruments, software and reagents they used with the details which will enable the replication of the course of their experiments.
• It is considered unethical to submit the same article to more than one journal simultaneously.
• The authorship/co-authorship of an article should be limited only and exclusively to persons who have made a considerable and significant contribution to the writing of a given article. The author is obliged to include acknowledgements of the persons or institutions which have participated in the performance of the experiments or in the writing of the article.
• Authors are requested to provide clearly all sources of funding of the research connected with a given research paper and to include the information about the absence of any conflict of interest between the co-authors (concerning the subject matter or sources of funding) which might be taken advantage in questioning the reliability of the results obtained.
• Authors have a right to use freely the articles published in the Journal of Elementology. The use is free of charge. Access to the articles is available in accordance with the Open Access Gold, which is compatible with the Creative Commons licence template Recognition of authorship – on the same conditions 4.0 (known also as CC-BY-NC-SA), available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, or any other linguistic version of this licence or any subsequent version of this licence, made public by the Creative Commons organisation.

The obligations of Reviewers

    Articles preliminarily accepted for publication are submitted for review to at least two independent reviewers, outside the locality given in the affiliation(s) of the authors (Editorial Peer Review – Reviewers know the identity of the Authors).
    A Reviewer assesses the article in terms of its subject content, without taking into the consideration such characteristics of the Author(s) as their race, nationality, sex, religious belief or political views. A Reviewer is requested to provide an objective assessment of the text: originality, scientific merit, quality, compliance with the journal’s mission, scientific discussion and conclusions drawn from the research. Any opinion or criticism based on personal issues is inappropriate. A detailed procedure for paper review and guidelines for Reviewers are available on the journal’s website at https://jsite.uwm.edu.pl//procedura-recenzji/
    Should Reviewers gain knolwedge about the scientific unreliability or cheating, plagiarism or any other unethical behaviour connected with the manuscript they are reviewing, they should immediately share their doubts with the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Elementology.


The obligations of the Editors

    In order to ensure the highest standards in science, the Editors of the Journal of Elementology implement a procedure to eliminate ghost writing and guest writing, thus complying with the guidelines of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education.  
    Any case of plagiarism (in all its forms) is considered to be unethical and cannot be accepted by the Editors of the Journal of Elementology; an article detected to present so-called self-plagiarism is deemed unoriginal. Should such cases be detected, the article is returned to the Authors by electronic mail, providing the justification of this step, and the article is not longer processed for publication.

         
„ghost writing” – occurs when a person who has had a significant contribution in producing an article is not mentioned as a co-author or is not included in the acknowledgments given in the article.
„guest autorship” – occurs when a person whose name is provided as a co-author of an article has not made any contribution in producing the article or his or her contribution was negligible.