Ethics & Integrity

PUBLICATION ETHICS & ACADEMIC INTEGRITY

1. Authorship and Co-authorship

Crises on Languages and Literature expects all published articles to contain clear and accurate attribution of authorship. It is the responsibility of the author to ensure that all authors that contributed to the work receive fair acknowledgment and that the order of authors reflects the individual contributions. Gift, ghost, and honorary authorship are prohibited and may result in corrective action in accordance with COPE guidelines. The authorship must be based on the following 4 criteria:

1. Giving substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, interpretation of data for the work.
2. Drafting the work or revisiting it critically for important intellectual content.
3. Giving final approval of the version to be published.
4. Being accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors.

The corresponding author is the one individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the article submission, peer review, and typically ensures that all the journal's administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration, documentation, and gathering. The corresponding author should be available after publication to respond to the critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information should questions about the paper arise after publication.

When a large multi-author group has conducted the work, the group ideally should decide who will be an author before the work is started and confirm who is an author before submitting the article for publication. Some large multi-author groups designate authorship by a group name, with or without the names of the individuals. When submitting an article authored by a group, the corresponding author should specify the group name if one exists, and identify the group members who can take the credit and responsibility for the work as authors.

Contributors who meet fewer than all 4 of the above criteria for authorship should not be listed as authors, but they should be acknowledged. Examples of the activities that alone (without other contributions) do not qualify a contributor for authorship are the acquisition of funding, general supervision of a research group or general administrative support and writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading. Those whose contributions do not justify authorship may be acknowledged individually or together as a group under a single heading (e.g. “clinical investigator”) or specified (e.g. “critically reviewed the study proposal,” “collected data”).

2. Post-publication Discussion

Readers, researchers, and other stakeholders are encouraged to communicate any comments, concerns, or observations regarding published content to the editorial office. Constructive post-publication discussions may be submitted as letters to the editor or formal responses and may be considered for publication following editorial review.

When errors, omissions, or inaccuracies are identified in published work, the editorial team will assess the matter and, where appropriate, publish a correction, erratum, or corrigendum linked to the original article to maintain the accuracy and integrity of the scholarly record.

In cases involving suspected research misconduct, data falsification, plagiarism, or other ethical breaches, an investigation will be conducted in accordance with COPE guidelines and may involve consultation with authors, reviewers, and relevant institutions. Depending on the findings, appropriate actions may include the publication of a correction, an Expression of Concern, or a retraction.

All post-publication notices will be made openly accessible to ensure transparency and to maintain the integrity, reliability, and credibility of the scholarly record. The editorial team is committed to addressing post-publication issues promptly, fairly, and transparently.

3. Conflict of Interest

All parties in the publication process, including authors, reviewers, and editors, must disclose any actual or potential conflicts of interest that could affect the review, interpretation, or publication of a manuscript. Conflicts may be financial, personal, professional, institutional, or otherwise capable of influencing objectivity.

Authors must disclose relevant conflicts of interest and funding sources at the time of submission. Reviewers should declare any competing interests and decline review assignments when impartiality cannot be maintained. Editors and editorial board members must recuse themselves from handling manuscripts where a conflict of interest exists.

Failure to disclose relevant conflicts of interest may result in corrective actions, including the publication of an Expression of Concern, article retraction, or other measures consistent with COPE guidelines. Transparency in the disclosure of competing interests is essential to maintaining the integrity and credibility of the scholarly record.

4. Defamation

Whilst striving to promote freedom of expression wherever possible, CILL aims to avoid publishing anything that harms the reputation of an individual, business, group, or organization unless it can be proven to be true. We take all possible measures to ensure that published work is free of any text that is, or may be considered to be libelous, slanderous, or defamatory.

5. Screening for Plagiarism

Authors must ensure that all submitted work is original, properly attributed, and compliant with applicable copyright and licensing requirements. Any use of published text, data, figures, tables, or other materials must be appropriately cited and, where necessary, accompanied by permission from the copyright holder.

Plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and any unauthorized use of intellectual property constitute serious breaches of publication ethics. All submissions may be screened using plagiarism-detection software. A similarity index of up to 20% may be acceptable; however, the intentional use of uncited material, including AI-generated content presented without proper disclosure or attribution, is not permitted regardless of the overall similarity score.

5. The Responsible Use of AI-Tool Policy

• For Author 

Authors must disclose any substantive use of AI tools in manuscript preparation through an AI Declaration Statement submitted with the manuscript. The disclosure should identify the AI tool used, its purpose, and the extent of human oversight. Such statements may be published to promote transparency and accountability. Routine grammar, spelling, and punctuation checks do not require disclosure unless the AI tool significantly alters the content, structure, or organization of the text, indicated by the high percentage of AI index.

The use of AI-based accessibility tools does not require disclosure when used solely for accessibility purposes. Where AI is used as part of the research process, its application must be described appropriately in the Methods section. Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of their work regardless of any AI assistance used.

• For Editor

Editors are responsible for ensuring the integrity, fairness, and quality of the editorial process and must treat all submitted manuscripts as confidential documents. Manuscripts and their contents must not be uploaded to AI tools or external platforms where confidentiality, intellectual property rights, or data privacy may be compromised.

Editorial decisions require independent human judgment and cannot be delegated to AI tools. While AI may be used in a limited, supportive capacity, such as improving the language of editorial correspondence or assisting with literature searches, editors remain fully responsible and accountable for all editorial assessments, decisions, and communications.

Editors may therefore only use AI tools in a supportive capacity, for example to improve the language or structure of their decision letters, or to assist with a background literature search, provided that confidentiality is maintained and human control and oversight are exercised.

• For Reviewer

Peer review is conducted under strict standards of confidentiality. Reviewers must treat all manuscripts and related materials as confidential documents and must not disclose, share, or use unpublished content for personal or professional advantage.

To protect authors' confidentiality, intellectual property, and privacy rights, reviewers must not upload submitted manuscripts or any portion of their contents to AI tools or external platforms.

Reviewers are expected to provide independent, objective, and critical evaluations of the scholarly work. AI tools cannot replace professional judgment in the peer-review process, and reviewers remain fully responsible and accountable for the content, accuracy, and integrity of their review reports.

6. Fair Editorial and Review Processes

All participants in the publishing process are encouraged to adhere to established principles of ethical publishing. This extends from authors to journal editors, reviewers, journal administrators, and publishing staff.

• Editorial independence

Editors have full editorial independence. They need to have clearly defined processes and policies for the handling of contributions by the editor or members of the editorial board to ensure that, where appropriate, these submissions receive an equivalent level of peer review to any other submission.

• Peer-reviewers conduct

Articles are reviewed by two independent experts in the relevant area. The reviewers make a scientific assessment and a recommendation to the editors. Reviewers remain unknown to authors. The Handling editor considers the manuscript and the reviewers’ comments before making a final decision either to accept, accept with revision or to reject a manuscript.

• Peer-review fraud

It is the responsibility of the lead author to ensure that only genuine reviewers and reviewer contact details are put forward. Any suspected or alleged instances of authors submitting fabricated reviewer details will be thoroughly investigated. If such allegations are proven, the article in question will be immediately rejected or, if already published, retracted. The journal would typically notify the authors’ institutional or local ethics council and may also impose a ban on further submissions from the author group.

• Confidentiality

Unless otherwise specified, CILL expects editors and reviewers to handle all submissions as confidential. If a reviewer wishes to delegate the review or seek the opinion of a colleague on a specific aspect of the paper, they are expected to clear this with the editor in the first instance.

7. Data Availability

Authors must report research methods and findings accurately, transparently, and in sufficient detail to support verification and, where appropriate, reproducibility. The use of AI in the research or manuscript preparation process must be disclosed.

Data fabrication, falsification, or inappropriate manipulation are prohibited and may result in rejection, retraction, or other corrective actions. Authors are encouraged to make research data available through appropriate repositories or, where this is not possible, to clearly explain any restrictions on data access.

The editorial team may request access to underlying data to verify reported findings. Transparency, data integrity, and reproducibility are essential principles of responsible scholarly publishing.

8. Ethical Approval and Informed Consent

The data, results, or analyses presented in the submitted article do not violate the protection of human subjects or other valid privacy or security concerns. Please include this information after the conclusion of the article.

• If the research did not involve human subjects, animal subjects, or other valid privacy or security concerns, please note that it uses publicly accessible data and discloses the sources (URLs, websites, books, etc.).
• If the research involved human subjects, animal subjects, or other valid privacy or security concerns, please note that the author(s) had obtained the interviewees’, participants’, or other related parties’ consent to publish the work.

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