Publication Ethics

Standards we follow

Green and Sustainable Membranes, published by the Green and Sustainable Materials Society, follows the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Core Practices and uses COPE flowcharts when handling suspected misconduct. Authorship follows the ICMJE recommendations, contributions are recorded with the CRediT taxonomy, and the journal is operated according to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing issued jointly by COPE, DOAJ, OASPA and WAME.

Editors, reviewers and authors are expected to act in line with these standards. Where a situation is not covered by the policies on this page, the editors follow COPE guidance and consult the publisher's ethics committee.

Editorial independence

Acceptance and rejection are decided by the editors solely on the scientific merit, originality, clarity and relevance of the work to the journal's scope. Decisions are never influenced by the authors' nationality, institution, gender, ethnicity, religion or political views, nor by any commercial consideration, including whether the article processing charge is waived. The publisher has no role in individual editorial decisions and does not overrule them. An editor who has a competing interest in a manuscript, including a recent collaboration or the same institution as an author, hands it to another editor.

Peer review policy

Editorial staff and board members may submit to the journal. Their manuscripts are handled by an editor with no connection to them, and they have no access to the review process for their own work. The steps from submission to decision are described in the Author Guidelines.

Roles & responsibilities

Authorship & contributorship

Every listed author must meet all four ICMJE criteria: substantial contribution to the conception or design of the work, or to the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data; drafting the manuscript or revising it critically; approval of the version to be published; and agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work. Contributors who do not meet all four, such as those who provided funding, materials, general supervision or language editing, are named in the Acknowledgments instead. Each author's role is recorded using the CRediT taxonomy and published with the article.

Originality & plagiarism

Every submission is screened with similarity-detection software before editorial assessment. Presenting someone else's ideas, text, data or figures as one's own, with or without their consent, is plagiarism and leads to rejection; if discovered after publication it leads to a correction or retraction and the authors' institutions may be informed. Verbatim text must be in quotation marks with a citation, and paraphrased material must be cited. Reuse of the authors' own previously published text (text recycling) is acceptable only for brief methodological passages, with the source cited. Translations of published work are considered duplicate publication unless clearly labelled and approved by the copyright holder and both editors.

Prior publication & preprints

A manuscript must not have been published elsewhere, in any language, and must not be under consideration by another journal while it is being reviewed. Simultaneous submission to more than one journal is grounds for rejection. Conference abstracts, theses and posters do not count as prior publication, but must be disclosed in the cover letter. Posting a preprint on a recognised server such as arXiv, ChemRxiv or SSRN before or during submission is welcome: cite the preprint DOI in the cover letter and, after publication, update the preprint record to link to the published article.

Data, reproducibility & image integrity

Human, animal & safety ethics

Research involving human participants, human material or personal data must have been approved by an institutional review board or ethics committee; name the committee and give the approval number in the Methods, and confirm that informed consent was obtained. Research involving animals must comply with national and institutional regulations and is reported following the ARRIVE guidelines. Work with a significant hazard, for example an explosive, highly toxic or pyrophoric material, must include a safety statement so the procedure can be repeated safely. Authors should draw the editor's attention to any dual-use concern, where results could be misused to threaten public health, safety or security.

Conflicts of interest & funding

A conflict of interest exists when a financial, professional or personal relationship could reasonably be seen to influence the work or its assessment. Authors declare all such relationships from the past three years, including employment, consultancies, honoraria, grants, patents, stock ownership and advisory roles, or state that none exist. All funding sources are listed with grant numbers, together with any role of the funder in the study design, data collection, analysis, writing or the decision to publish. Reviewers and editors are held to the same standard and withdraw from manuscripts where a conflict exists. Declarations are published with the article.

Use of artificial intelligence

Citation integrity

Cite the work that actually informed the research, including work that reports competing or negative results, and cite the original source rather than a review where possible. Citations added only to inflate the citation count of any author, reviewer, editor or journal are citation manipulation and are treated as misconduct. Reviewers and editors must not request citations to their own work unless the citation is scientifically necessary, and authors are free to decline such requests without consequence.

Allegations of misconduct

Anyone may raise a concern about a submitted or published article by emailing the Editor-in-Chief at gsmb@greensus.org. Anonymous reports are considered when they contain enough detail to be examined. Reporters who act in good faith are protected from retaliation, and the identity of the reporter is not disclosed to the authors without consent.

Possible outcomes

Outcomes are proportionate to the seriousness of the breach and to whether it was deliberate. One or more of the following may apply:

Appeals

Authors who believe an editorial decision was based on a misunderstanding of the science or a procedural error may appeal once, in writing, within 30 days of the decision letter. The appeal must respond point by point to the reviewers' comments and explain why the decision should be reconsidered; new data may be included. Appeals are considered by an editor not involved in the original decision, who may consult a new reviewer. The outcome of an appeal is final. Disagreement with the editors' judgement of priority or interest is not by itself grounds for appeal.

Complaints

Complaints about the conduct of the editorial process, the behaviour of an editor or reviewer, or the handling of a submission should be sent to the Editor-in-Chief. A complaint about the Editor-in-Chief, or one not resolved by the journal, may be escalated to the publisher, the Green and Sustainable Materials Society. Complaints are acknowledged promptly, investigated in confidence, and answered in writing with the reasons for the outcome.

Corrections, expressions of concern & retractions

Published articles are part of the permanent scholarly record and are not silently edited or removed. Errors of consequence are addressed with one of the notices below, each published with its own DOI, linked to the article through Crossmark, and freely accessible. Authors are expected to report errors they discover; readers may report them to the editorial office.

Retractions follow the COPE retraction guidelines. In rare cases, for example where an article is defamatory or infringes legal rights, the text may be removed and replaced by a notice explaining the removal; the bibliographic record and DOI remain.

Post-publication discussion

Substantive scientific questions about a published article may be submitted as a Letter to the Editor within twelve months of publication; the original authors are invited to reply and both are published together. Readers who spot a possible error are encouraged to contact the editorial office first. The journal does not host reader comments on article pages.

Copyright, licence & permissions

Archiving & preservation

Every article is assigned a Crossref DOI (prefix 10.62755), and its metadata is deposited with Crossref and exposed through an OAI-PMH endpoint for harvesting by indexing services and aggregators, so that the article remains discoverable and citable independently of this website. Published files are held on redundant, backed-up storage by the publisher.