Statement on ethics and malpractice in the publication of scientific work by the “Italian Journal of Computational Linguistics” (Rivista Italiana di Linguistica Computazionale), IJCoL. The statement is based on COPE’s Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors.

Duties of the Scientific Direction

• The Editors in Chief and the members of both the Advisory and the Editorial Boards of IJCoL are solely responsible for the decision to publish articles submitted to the journal. In their decisions, they are bound to respect the Journal’s editorial policies and the legal provisions in force concerning defamation, copyright infringement and plagiarism.
• Articles are submitted to the evaluation of two or more reviewers and their acceptance is subject to the implementation of any requested change and the final opinion of the Editors in Chief.
• The Scientific Direction of the Journal is required to evaluate manuscripts for their scientific content without distinction of race, sex, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, as well as scientific, academic or political orientation of the authors.
• The Scientific Direction also guarantees the correctness of the systems used to evaluate, accept or reject the articles submitted by the authors and, in particular, supervises the peer review process and the anonymity of the reviewers with respect to the specific article under review; it also avoids any conflict of interest, discrimination due to gender, sexual or religious orientation, political beliefs, or geographical origin.
• The Scientific Direction is required not to disclose any information about the submitted manuscripts except to the authors themselves or to those who have been previously authorised.
• Unpublished material contained in manuscripts submitted to the Journal may not be used by members of the various editorial bodies for their own research without the written consent of the author.

Duties of the Reviewers

• Reviewers assist the various committees of IJCoL in making decisions and, through the communications they convey, can help the author improve the manuscript.
• If the reviewers do not feel adequate to the proposed task or know that they cannot read the work in the required timeframe, they must communicate this promptly.
• Any paper assigned for reading must be considered strictly confidential; therefore these articles must not be discussed in any way with other people without the explicit permission of the Scientific Direction.
• The review must be carried out objectively and according to a rigorous system of scientific principles, clearly and uncontroversially linked to the intellectual and methodological traditions established by international research in the various domains covered by the journal. The reviewers are required to give adequate reasons for the judgments made precisely in accordance with the above-mentioned traditions.
• The reviewers undertake to point out to the various committees of IJCoL any similarities or overlapping of the text received with other works known to them.
• All confidential information or indications obtained during the peer-review process must be considered confidential and may not be used for any other purpose. Reviewers are required not to accept for reading articles for which there is a conflict of interest due to previous collaborative or competitive relationships with the author and/or his/her institution.

Duties of Authors

• Authors are required to declare that they have written an original work in all its parts and to have duly cited all the texts used, avoiding any form of plagiarism. If the work and/or words of other authors are used, they must be appropriately paraphrased or literally quoted.
• Authors must accept the article selection process and in particular the peer-review process.
• If the article is accepted, the author grants the journal the right to publish it by releasing it under the terms of the Creative Commons 4.0 International “Attribution – Noncommercial – No Derivative Works” (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence.
• The authorship of the work must be correctly attributed and all those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, organisation, realisation and re-elaboration of the research on which the article is based must be indicated as co-authors.
• The authors guarantee the truthfulness of the data presented in the paper and the objectivity of their interpretations. The relevant data must be reported accurately and in detail to enable others to replicate the investigation.
• The authors guarantee the veracity of the data presented in the paper and the objectivity of their interpretations. Relevant data must be reported accurately and in detail to allow others to replicate the investigation.
• All authors must explicitly declare that there are no conflicts of interest that could have influenced the results obtained or the interpretations proposed. Authors should also indicate the funding bodies, if any, of the research and/or project from which the article originates.
• Manuscripts under evaluation should not be submitted in any form, identical or significantly overlapping with those submitted to IJCol, to other journals for publication.
• When an author identifies a major error or misstatement in one of his/her articles, he/she must promptly inform the Journal’s Editorial Board and provide appropriate corrections.