COPE

Committee on Publication Ethics — Core Practices for all aspects of editorial and publication integrity.

ICMJE

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors — Authorship criteria and research reporting for health sciences.

Declaration of Helsinki

WMA Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects (2024 revision).

WAME

World Association of Medical Editors — Policies on peer review, editorial independence, and conflict of interest.

Fair & Impartial Evaluation

Editors must evaluate all submissions on their intellectual merit and compliance with submission standards, without regard to the author's nationality, institutional affiliation, gender, race, religion, or political views. Every eligible submission is entitled to a fair review.

Confidentiality

Editors must treat submitted manuscripts as confidential documents. Information about a submission — including its existence, content, and status — must not be disclosed to third parties without the explicit consent of the corresponding author.

Editor Conflict of Interest

Editors must recuse themselves from handling submissions in which they have a conflict of interest — including works authored by close colleagues, competitors, collaborators, students, or family members. Such submissions are assigned to an alternative editor.

Editorial Independence

Editorial decisions are made solely on the basis of scholarly quality, accuracy, and compliance with our standards. Editors' decisions are independent of commercial, political, or institutional pressure from the publisher, sponsors, or any external party.

Timely Communication

Editors are responsible for communicating editorial decisions to authors promptly, providing clear and constructive feedback, and ensuring that the review timeline does not unnecessarily disadvantage authors.

Misconduct Investigation

Editors are obligated to take action when publication misconduct is suspected or reported, following COPE flowcharts and guidance. This includes investigating allegations even for already-published records, issuing corrections, or initiating retractions where warranted.

Confidentiality

Reviewers must keep all information about submitted works strictly confidential. Manuscripts must not be shared, cited, or discussed outside the review process.

Objectivity

Reviews must be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of authors is not appropriate. Evaluations must be supported by reasoning and referenced to verifiable standards.

Promptness

Reviewers must complete their assessment within the agreed timeframe. If unable to do so, they must notify the editorial team immediately so the work can be reassigned.

Conflict of Interest

Reviewers must declare any potential conflicts of interest before accepting a review assignment and must decline to review any work in which a conflict exists.

Misconduct Reporting

Reviewers who identify or suspect research misconduct — plagiarism, data fabrication, undisclosed AI authorship — during the review process are expected to report this to the editor immediately.

Non-Exploitation

Reviewers must not use knowledge gained from reviewing unpublished work to further their own research, claim priority, or benefit competitively before the work is published.

???? AI Cannot Be an Author

Large language models, generative AI systems, and any AI tool cannot be listed as an author or co-author of any registered work. Authorship entails legal accountability, the ability to consent, and responsibility for research integrity — none of which AI systems possess. This position is consistent with COPE (2023), ICMJE, Nature Portfolio, Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Wiley AI policies.

???? Mandatory Transparency

Any use of generative AI tools in drafting, editing, translating, analyzing, or creating visual content for a submitted work must be disclosed in the submission form and, where appropriate, in the published record's acknowledgements section. Concealment of AI use is treated as a form of misrepresentation.

⚙️ Human Oversight Required

Authors who use AI tools remain fully responsible for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of the submitted content. AI-generated text must be reviewed, verified, and edited by the human author prior to submission. Authors cannot delegate scientific responsibility to an AI tool.

???? Prohibited AI Practices

The following are strictly prohibited: using AI to fabricate citations or references; submitting AI-generated content as entirely original human scholarship without disclosure; using AI tools to circumvent originality screening; using AI to impersonate peer reviewers or generate fabricated review reports.

???? AI in the Editorial Process

Asia Book Registry uses AI-assisted tools (Grammarly, Turnitin AI detection) as advisory inputs to the editorial process. No submission is accepted or rejected solely on the basis of automated AI assessment. All final editorial decisions are made by human editors.

???? Data & AI Training

Asia Book Registry does not use submitted manuscripts, author data, or bibliographic metadata to train or fine-tune AI models. We require our AI tool vendors to implement equivalent protections under contractual data processing agreements.

Fabrication

Inventing or making up data, results, findings, or conclusions that were not actually observed or generated during the research process.

Falsification

Manipulating, altering, omitting, or selectively reporting research data, images, or outcomes to misrepresent the actual findings of the research.

Plagiarism

Presenting another person's work, ideas, text, data, or images as one's own without proper attribution, including self-plagiarism and undisclosed reuse of previously published material.

Ghost & Guest Authorship

Ghost authorship (omitting a genuine contributor) and guest authorship (including a person who did not meaningfully contribute) are both violations of authorship integrity standards.

Undisclosed Conflicts of Interest

Failure to declare financial, commercial, or personal relationships that could influence the content, conclusions, or framing of the submitted work.

Undisclosed AI Authorship

Submitting AI-generated content as entirely original human scholarship without disclosure, or attempting to use AI tools to deceive originality screening systems.

✏️ Correction

Issued when a published record contains a minor, non-intentional error — such as a typographical error in the title or an incorrect affiliation — that does not affect the integrity of the work. The original record is updated with a dated correction notice appended.

⚠️ Expression of Concern

Issued when the editorial team has reasonable cause for concern about the integrity of a registered work but has not yet concluded an investigation. The registry record is flagged pending outcome. Not a final judgment.

???? Retraction

Issued when a registered work is found to contain serious errors, plagiarism, fabricated data, fraudulent authorship, or other misconduct that compromises the integrity of the record. The bibliographic entry is retained but permanently marked as retracted, with a public retraction notice.