Publication Ethics
Sustainable Planet Sciences is committed to the highest standards of publication ethics. We adhere to the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and apply their guidelines to all editorial decisions and procedures.
Authorship & Contributorship
Authorship should be reserved for those who have made a substantial contribution to the work. We follow the ICMJE authorship criteria:
- Substantial contributions to conception or design of the work
- Drafting the work or revising it critically for intellectual content
- Final approval of the version to be published
- Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work
All authors must be listed at the time of submission. Changes to authorship after submission require a signed letter from all authors (including those being removed or added).
Originality & Plagiarism
All submissions must be original work. We use automated screening tools to detect plagiarism, and any manuscript found to contain plagiarised content will be rejected. Text re-use from the authors’ own prior work (self-plagiarism) should be minimised and appropriately cited where it occurs.
Conflicts of Interest
Authors, reviewers, and editors must declare all financial and non-financial conflicts of interest that could influence their work or judgment. Conflicts include:
- Financial relationships (employment, consultancies, stock ownership, patents, honoraria)
- Personal relationships that could bias the work
- Direct competition with the research subject
- Intellectual or ideological commitments
A conflict of interest does not preclude publication but must be disclosed transparently.
Research Involving Humans or Animals
Research involving human subjects must conform to the Declaration of Helsinki and have approval from an appropriate ethics committee. Informed consent must be obtained from participants.
Research involving animals must conform to the ARRIVE guidelines and have approval from an institutional animal care committee. The ethics approval number and institution must be stated in the manuscript.
Data Integrity & Research Misconduct
Fabrication, falsification, or selective reporting of data is research misconduct and will result in manuscript rejection and possible retraction of previously published work. We investigate all allegations of misconduct following COPE procedures.
Corrections & Retractions
Errors that substantially affect the interpretation of a published paper will be corrected through a signed and dated correction notice linked to the original article. Papers found to contain fabricated data, plagiarism, or serious errors will be retracted following COPE’s retraction guidelines.
Complaints & Appeals
Authors wishing to appeal an editorial decision should email the Editor-in-Chief within 14 days of the decision, providing a detailed justification. Appeals are considered seriously but are granted only in cases of procedural error or demonstrable misinterpretation of the manuscript.
Confidentiality
All manuscripts under review are confidential. Reviewers must not share, discuss, or use manuscript content without explicit permission. Editors and staff maintain strict confidentiality of submission details.
AI & Generative Tools
The use of large language models or other AI tools in manuscript preparation must be disclosed in the methods or acknowledgements section. AI tools cannot be listed as authors. Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy and integrity of their submissions.