Policies

Please read these policies in full before submitting your article, to ensure you’ve correctly followed all the requirements.

1- Publication Ethics
The journal strives to uphold the highest standards of publication ethics and takes all possible measures against any publication malpractices. It also believes that ethical publishing requires the active participation of all parties (authors, reviewers, editors, and publisher) involved in the act of publishing to agree upon standards of expected ethical behaviour. Based on the guidelines recommended by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the journal has developed international standards for publication ethics for all these parties. The journal expects all the parties to commit to these standards.

International Standards for Authors
All authors who submit their papers to the journal are expected to observe the following international standards:

1- All authors must certify that the submitted manuscript is their original research. Plagiarism, falsity, fabrication, duplicate, redundant publications or other inappropriate manipulation are strictly forbidden.
2- Authors must certify that the manuscript has not previously been published and is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere. 
3- All authors must notify Democratic Arab Center for Strategic, Political and Economic Studies of all actual or perceived conflicts of interest that might be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript.
4- All authors must conduct the research in a responsible and ethical manner that complies with relevant legislation and applicable industry rules and guidelines.
5- Upon discovery or notification of inaccuracies or significant errors in the submitted manuscript, all authors must notify the Journal editor-in-chief or publisher to retract or correct the paper. 
6- All authors must identify all sources used in the creation of the submitted manuscript, including proper acknowledgement of the work and/or words of others and citation of relevant publications. 
7- Authors must notify the journal of any conflicts of interest.

International Standards for Reviewers
All the journal's reviewers are also expected to meet the following international standards when they accept review invitations:

1- All reviewers must review and evaluate the submitted manuscripts in fairness based upon their originality, significance and relevance without any favoritism or bias based on the origin of the manuscript, the author’s race, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, origin, sexual orientation, religious beliefs.
2- All reviewers must provide the Editor-in-Chief with their professional credentials, education and experience that represent their expertise truthfully and accurately.
3- All reviewers must ensure sufficient time to complete a comprehensive evaluation of the submitted manuscript in a timely manner prior to consenting to the review assignment.
4- All reviewers must refuse to review the submitted manuscript that creates any potential conflict of interest to the publisher and seek advice before they proceed further with the manuscript review.
5- All reviewers must offer reviews which are impartial and constructive, devoid of any inflammatory, libelous, hostile, unfair, or derogatory comments.
6- All reviewers must preserve the confidentiality of unpublished manuscripts and refrain from discussing any details of the manuscript with anyone (including the authors) during and after the peer-review process.

International Standards for Editors
All editors of the journal are expected to observe the following international standards:

1- All editors must accept or reject the submitted manuscript on the basis of its journalistic or scholarly merit, which includes its originality, clarity, importance and relevance to the journal’s mission.
2- All editors must maintain objectivity when reviewing the manuscript and act without favoritism or bias based on the origin of the manuscript, the gender, national origin, race, ethnicity, political or religious beliefs, sexual orientation, or the age of the author, or on the grounds of any commercial considerations.
3- All editors must adhere to the regulations which govern any conflict of interest and improper use of unpublished manuscripts as peer reviewers.
4- All editors must oversee the performance of both authors and peer reviewers, and ensure that authors and peer reviewers understand their roles in the process of reviewing manuscripts.
5- All editors must follow editorial policies which promote honest, comprehensive, and ethical reporting.
6- All editors must guarantee the confidentiality of unpublished articles and the anonymity of peer reviewers.
7- All editors must pursue serious and alleged misconduct in the process of writing, submitting, accepting and/or rejecting, reviewing the submitted manuscript, for the purpose of protecting the integrity of the journal. Editors must also reject any manuscripts that raise any concerns about potential misconduct, making considerable efforts to ensure a full investigation is carried out and the issue resolved.
8- All editors must communicate corrections, retractions and/or revisions, if any, to the publisher, and in the case of an unpublished article also to the author upon identifying major errors or material omissions in the submitted manuscript.

International Standards for Publisher
The publisher is expected to observe all international standards.

1- The publisher must uphold strict standards of publication ethics to preserve the integrity of the journal.
2- The publisher must offer the institutional support and provide useful resources needed to publish original and accurate manuscripts, including, as necessary, specialized legal counsel and review for issues of libel, infringement and copyright. 
3- The publisher must ensure clear policies are in place to give guidance, address and resolve editorial conflicts of interest.
4- The publisher must stop publishing any content that is not in accordance with these Standards for Publication Ethics.
5- If and when the need arises, the publisher must publish corrections, revisions, clarifications, retractions, and apologies promptly, and with due prominence.

PRIVACY
Upon submission of articles, the author’s name and email address will be used exclusively for the purpose of review, and will not be made available to other parties.

2- Peer Review Process
The journal employs a double-blind peer review to all submitted manuscripts, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process. A more in-depth description of our peer review process is below. 

Initial In-house Assessment Stage
When the manuscript arrives at the editorial office of the journal, the editor-in-chief carries out an initial in-house assessment of the received manuscript based on the suitability of the topic according to the journal’s aims & scope, the author’s adherence to the journal’s guidelines (word count, language clarity, and format), research quality, the importance of the topic and relevance to the journal’s readership. If the manuscript does not pass these initial checks, the author will be contacted to revise their manuscript according to the journal criteria; however, the editor-in-chief might reject the manuscript immediately. Rejected manuscripts at this stage have serious flaws, are insufficiently original, have poor language, or do not fall within the aims and scope of the journal. Authors whose manuscripts are rejected at this stage will be informed directly. This rejection can enable a fast decision if the manuscript is not suitable for the journal, enabling the author(s) to submit the paper to another journal quickly.

Peer Review Stage
When the manuscript has passed the desk review stage, it will then be delivered to two reviewers who are experts in the field of the submitted manuscript. The reviewers are initially invited to review the manuscript by sending them the abstract of the manuscript. Upon acceptance to review the manuscript, the reviewers are sent the full text of the manuscript and requested to do the review within 2 to 3 weeks as a maximum to submit their reports to the editor-in-chief. The reviewers are also required to disclose potential conflicts of interest if any, that may affect the outcome of the double-blind reviewing process.

The reviewers are provided with an evaluation form requesting them to judge the manuscript in terms of the paper novelty, originality, valuable contribution to the existed field of study, ethical aspects, scientific misconduct, the structure of the article submitted and its relevance to authors’ guidelines, references provided to substantiate the content, literature review, design and methodology, clarity of findings and discussion, documentation and references. The reviewers are also required to include general and specific anonymous comments to the author(s). If the two reviewers are in disagreement in their judgment on the suitability of the paper for publication, the second round of peer review may be initiated. Each online review report should conclude with a final recommendation for the submitted paper, which can be one of the following:

(a) accepted without any changes; means that the manuscript is acceptable for publication
(b) accepted with minor revisions; means that the manuscript is acceptable for publication once it is revised in response to the reviewers’ concerns.
(c) accepted with major revisions; means that substantive inadequacies in the manuscript, such as data analysis, the main theory used, and rewriting of paragraphs, need to be revised.
(d) rejected, means that the manuscript is not acceptable for publication or the given reviews relate to fundamental issues.

Revision Stage
Once the manuscript is received with notations of minor or major revisions, it will be sent to the author with a manuscript evaluation form. If the manuscript is accepted with minor revisions, author(s) will be given one week to make the corrections. For manuscripts accepted with major revisions, two weeks will be allotted for revision.

Final Decision Stage
At this stage, the editor will look through the resubmitted manuscript to make sure that the author(s) has revised the manuscript in response to the reviewers’ comments. At this stage of the final decision, the author(s) may be required to make further revisions, or the manuscript might be rejected if the author(s) did not adequately carry out the revisions suggested by the reviewers.

Copyediting, Layout Editing and Proofreading Stage
Once the manuscript is accepted by the editorial team, it will undergo a copyediting, layout editing and proofreading process to ensure the linguistic quality of the manuscript. After the editing stage is finished, authors are requested to double-check the PDF file of the final version before online publication.

Complaints Policy
The journal strives to deal with to and resolve all complaints as soon as possible. The procedures followed by the journal to handle and resolve complaints aim to be fair for authors filing complaints and for those being complained about.

Appeals against editorial decisions
In case an author would like to challenge an editorial decision, he or she should contact the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. After the appeal is made by the author, the Editor-in-Chief will review the manuscript, peer reviewers' comments and reach a decision for accepting or rejecting the manuscript. If required, the Editor-in-Chief may send the manuscript to new referees for peer review. The Editor-in-Chief's decision is final in such cases. All submitted complaints will be acknowledged within two working days.

3- Plagiarism Policy
The journal regards plagiarism as a very serious offence. It is an illegal form of copying. Plagiarism is defined as the unacknowledged use of the work of others as if this were your own original work. Please be aware that we check all submitted manuscripts for plagiarism. We use Turnitin, the leading plagiarism-detection system, to check for similarity to previously published documents. All manuscripts containing plagiarism, including self-plagiarism, and dishonesty are rejected.

Examples of plagiarism: 
1- Copying and pasting from the Internet and posting somewhere else without proper citation
2- Putting your name on another person’s essay or project
3- Copying exact wording from another person’s text
4- Using another person’s photo, diagram, tables, sounds, or ideas without proper citation
5- Presenting research in your own words without providing references
6- Purchasing another person’s text and using it as your own
7- Presenting ideas in the same format and order as your research source

By submitting a paper for publication to the journal, Author(s) certify that: 
1- I/We are fully aware that plagiarism is wrong
2- I/We know that plagiarism is the use of another person’s idea or published work and to pretend that it is one’s own.
3- I/ We declare that each contribution to your project from the work(s) of other peoples published works or unpublished sources have been acknowledged and source of information have been referenced.
4- I/We certify that you are solely responsible for any incomplete reference that may remain in my/our work.

Anti-plagiarism declaration:
I have read and understood the journal's rules on plagiarism. I hereby declare that this piece of written work is the result of my own independent scholarly work and that in all cases material from the work of others (in books, articles, essays, dissertations, and on the internet) is acknowledged, and quotations and paraphrases are clearly indicated. No material other than that listed has been used. This written work has previously not yet been published.

4- Retraction Policy
The journal strongly believes in maintaining and protecting the integrity of the academic record. Manuscripts formally published in the journal are considered as the “Version of Record”. Very rarely, when the scientific information in a manuscript is significantly undermined, it becomes obligatory for the journal to publish corrections to, or retractions of manuscripts published on the journal website, at the discretion of the editor-in-chief.

Article Corrections
Contributors are encouraged to report errors related to the accuracy of published information in their manuscripts. Errors that impact the manuscript considerably will be considered only. Corrections are made at the editor-in-chief’s discretion. The correction procedure is based on the publication stage of the manuscript. Corrections will be published under corrections and addendum in an upcoming issue of the journal.

Article Retractions
The manuscript published in the journal may be retracted due to scientific misconduct in some circumstances such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, fraudulent use of data or plagiarism. Concerned authors are required to submit a signed statement form to the editorial office before a manuscript can be retracted. The retractions are decided on a case by case basis by the editor in consultation with the authors and the reviewers of the manuscript. A retraction notice will be published and linked to the original manuscript being corrected and a link to the retraction page will be placed on the article published earlier.

Article Removal
In extremely exceptional circumstances, it may be mandatory to remove the published manuscript from the journal website. This may happen if the manuscript is found to be defamatory or infringing on other’s legal rights leading to a court order. Under such circumstances, the whole manuscript will be removed and replaced with a screen stating that the manuscript has been removed due to legal reasons.

Article Replacement
If the manuscript is found to include inaccurate data which may pose a serious health risk if acted upon by others, the authors of the original manuscript may wish to retract the manuscript and replace it with a corrected version. In this case, the above procedures for retraction will be followed with the difference that the manuscript retraction notice will contain a link to the corrected manuscript together with a history of the document.

Article Withdrawal
The manuscript can be withdrawn by the author(s) or the publisher. The manuscript can be withdrawn at any time before it is officially published online. If the authors request withdrawal of their manuscript, a signed withdrawal request letter will be required to reach to the editorial office prior to the withdrawal of the manuscript. The publisher can withdraw the manuscript if it is found to violate the ethical publishing guidelines of the journal such as plagiarism, duplicate publication, multiple submission, fraudulent use of data or bogus claims of authorship.  In such a case, the PDF version of the manuscript will be removed and replaced by a note that the manuscript has been withdrawn formally.

5- Informed Consent Policy
Author(s) should comply with the following conditions in order to meet ethical and legal standards for work with human subjects:

Participants in your research should be informed that
1- you will be conducting research in which they will be the participants or that you would like to write about them for publication.
2- until preliminarily review participation is voluntary so that there is no penalty for refusing to participate, and the participants may withdraw at this time without penalty.  After preliminarily review, the author is not allowed to withdraw submitted manuscripts because the withdrawal is a waste of valuable resources that editors and referees spent a great deal of time processing submitted manuscripts, money, and works invested by the publisher. If the author still requests withdrawal of his/her manuscript when the manuscript is still in the peer-reviewing process, the author will be punished with paying APC per manuscript, as a withdrawal penalty to the publisher.

Participants in your research should be informed about
1- the purpose of your research and the procedure you will follow in the research.
2 - contact information that they can reach you for answers to questions regarding the research.
3- any foreseeable risks and discomforts involved in agreeing to cooperate.
4- any possible direct benefits of participating (e.g., receiving a copy of the article or chapter).

Participants in your research should be informed if and how their confidentiality will be protected.

6- Criterion for Authorship
Anyone listed as an author on the Journal manuscript submission must meet the following criteria:

1. They have made substantial intellectual contributions to some components of the original work described in the manuscript
2. They have participated in drafting and/or revision of the manuscript
3. They are aware the manuscript has been submitted for publication
4. They agree to be held accountable for any issues relating to the correctness or integrity of the work

The journal requires that all published papers include the names, affiliations where the research took place, and email addresses of all authors listed on the paper, as well as provide accurate contact information to the journal as required in the journal rights contract. The journal does not allow anonymous authors, and any papers published in the journal Digital Library without author names, affiliations, and email addresses may be retracted by the journal. The journal authors have published under actual pen names using “independent consultant” as the author's listed affiliation, but even under such circumstances, the journal must be provided with accurate contact information for such authors using a pen name, so that the journal will be able to reach all authors of published papers.

Other contributors may be acknowledged at the end of the paper, before the bibliography, with explicitly described roles, preferably using the roles found in the CASRAI Contributor Roles Taxonomy at https://casrai.org/CRediT.

7- Conflict of Interest and Competing Interests
Conflict of interest is a situation in which financial or other personal interests are likely to make professional judgment and objectivity bias and untrustworthy.

- Editors and editorial board members will not use unpublished information disclosed in a submitted manuscript for their own research purposes without the authors’ explicit written consent. Privileged information or ideas obtained by editors as a result of handling the manuscript will be kept confidential and not used for their personal advantage. Editors will recuse themselves from considering manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships/connections with any of the authors, companies or institutions connected to the papers; instead, they will ask another member of the editorial board to handle the manuscript.

- Editors and editorial board members will not use unpublished information disclosed in a submitted manuscript for their own research purposes without the authors’ explicit written consent. Privileged information or ideas obtained by editors as a result of handling the manuscript will be kept confidential and not used for their personal advantage. Editors will recuse themselves from considering manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships/connections with any of the authors, companies or institutions connected to the papers; instead, they will ask another member of the editorial board to handle the manuscript.

- Authors should -at the earliest stage possible (generally by submitting a disclosure form at the time of submission and including a statement in the manuscript)- disclose any conflicts of interest that might be construed to influence the results or their interpretation in the manuscript. Examples of potential conflicts of interest that should be disclosed include financial ones such as honoraria, educational grants or other funding, participation in speakers’ bureaus, membership, employment, consultancies, stock ownership, or other equity interest, and paid expert testimony or patent-licensing arrangements, as well as non-financial ones such as personal or professional relationships, affiliations, knowledge or beliefs in the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. All sources of financial support for the work should be disclosed (including the grant number or other reference number if any).

8- Confidentiality
- Editors and editorial staff will not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.
- Any manuscripts received for review are confidential documents and must be treated as such; they must not be shown to or discussed with others except if authorized by the Editor-in-Chief (who would only do so under exceptional and specific circumstances). This applies also to invited reviewers who decline the review invitation.

9- Appeals and Complaints and Misconduct
Democratic Arab Center for Strategic, Political and Economic Studies journals follow Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines on appeals to journal editor decisions and complaints about a journal’s editorial management of the peer-review process.
Appeals, complaints, or allegations of misconduct will be taken with utmost seriousness, regardless of whether those involved are internal or external to the journal, or whether the submission in question is pre-or post-publication. If an allegation is made to the journal, it must also be passed on to the publisher, who will follow guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) on how to address the nature of the problem.
Should an individual wish to submit an appeal, complaint or raise an issue of potential misconduct regarding the journal or its content, they should contact that editor in chief and/or the publisher to explain their concerns.
The journal does not tolerate abusive behaviour or correspondence towards its staff, academic editors, authors, or reviewers. Any person engaged with the journal who resorts to abusive behaviour or correspondence will have their contribution immediately withdrawn and future engagement with the journal will be at the discretion of the editor and/or publisher.

10- Open Access Policy
Democratic Arab Center for Strategic, Political and Economic Studies (DAC) firmly believes in research publications that can be immediately accessed by scholars, policymakers, students, and the general public, in a matter of seconds. All journals under the DAC are Open Access and free to be downloaded.
The journal is an open-access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.
This journal provides immediate open access to its content under a CC BY-NC licence (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence).

11- Waiver Policy
The journal is a voluntary organization that sustains itself without receiving funding from any public or private institution. It also does not receive any financial or moral support from any government or political entity. In this regard, the administrative activities such as editing, reviewing, and publishing are managed on a voluntary basis by the team overseeing the journal, while the financial aspects of the website, such as web hosting, are taken care of by the publisher.
As mentioned earlier, the journal is a free and open-access scientific periodical. Therefore, readers are not required to pay any financial subscriptions to access its content. The scientific materials of the journal are available on the internet for free and easy access. Researchers can readily find, read, download, print, and redistribute the scientific articles without any financial barriers. This flexible option provided to readers and researchers is seen as positive, ensuring widespread accessibility to the articles online.
Given the aforementioned, authors are not required to pay any financial fees for submitting their articles or for the processing and peer review of these articles.
In this regard, we confirm that we do not wish for fees to be a barrier to the dissemination of rigorous and serious scientific work.
The Democratic Arab Center for Strategic, Political, and Economic Studies recognizes that some authors and university students may have limited funding for their research activities. Therefore, the general principle of the center is to exempt researchers from paying the financial fees for publishing their works. Our journal adheres to this free and incentivizing principle. The goal of the journal, as mentioned earlier, is to accelerate the dissemination of high-quality scientific knowledge. We consistently strive to facilitate and streamline the publication processes and interactions with researchers without imposing a financial burden on them.

12- Copyright Policy
The following copyright agreement is read and approved by authors before they publish their work to our journal's online system. The copyright notice text is regarded to have been approved by them after they give their approval.

Copyright Notice Text

Author(s);

a) The submitted article is the original work of the author(s), and they do not plagiarize,
b)All authors have participated in this study individually, and they take all responsibility for the study.
c)All authors have seen and approved the final version of the submitted article,
d) The article has not been published elsewhere or submitted for publication,
e) They accept and undertake that the text, figures, and documents in the article do not violate the copyrights of other parties.

The authors are deemed to have accepted the following terms by submitting their work to the journal under the CC BY-NC

• The copyright of the published article belongs to its author under CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
• The authors authorize the journal to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher.
• The authors grant the right to freely use the article to any third party as long as the original authors and citation details are identified.
• Nothing in this license impairs or restricts an author's right to preserve the integrity and ownership of their work.
• All commercial rights related to the article belong to the publisher.

The authors own the copyright of their work published in AJTS, and their work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). The Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license allows the work to be shared, copied, and reproduced in any size and format except for commercial use. It also allows it to be rearranged, transformed, and adapted, including building upon the original work, with proper reference to it.

CC BY-NC 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

The license owner cannot cancel these rights so long as you adhere to the terms of the license.

These are open to you:

• Share: You can share and redistribute the work in any environment or format.
• Adapt: Mix, cite, and build on the existing work.

With the conditions below:

• Attribution: You must cite properly, put a link to the license, and if a modification is made, you must inform. Still, you can do fulfill these conditions, but this does not mean the license owner approves you and your way of use.
• Non-Commercial: You cannot use this material for commercial purposes.

There is no additional restriction. The usage of the license's permissions is not subject to any statutory requirements or technological limitations.

13- ORCID
The journal strongly recommends that all authors submitting a paper register an account with Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID). Registration provides a unique and persistent digital identifier for the account that enables accurate attribution and improves the discoverability of published papers, ensuring that the correct author receives the correct credit for their work. As the ORCID remains the same throughout the lifetime of the account, changes of name, affiliation, or research area do not effect the discoverability of an author's past work and aid correspondence with colleagues.
The journal encourages all corresponding authors to include an ORCID within their submitting author data whilst co-authors are recommended to include one. ORCID numbers should be added to the author data upon submission and will be published alongside the submitted paper, should it be accepted.

14- Digital Archiving Policy
The journal aims to preserve all the published content on digital repositories. In order to follow that, the journal commits to submit the metadata of all its manuscripts to LOCKSS as we have recently implemented the use of the OJS (Open Journal System). In a connected context, we continuously work on storing the journal's numbers and articles within the most prominent academic digital repositories such as Internet Archive, Zenodo, ResearchGate, and Academia. This diverse and extensive archiving effort for the journal's content on the internet is aimed at achieving the goal of providing its scientific content widely, freely, and easily accessible to the global research community. This is done while preserving and safeguarding this content from deletion and disappearance.
Besides, the journal also assigns Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) to all its issues and the contents to facilitate reaching their permanent links on the internet.

15- Disclaimer
The views or opinions expressed in this Journal are those of the authors and contributors and do not necessarily reflect those of this Journal, the editors, the editorial board, the publisher of this Journal Democratic Arab Center for Strategic, Political and Economic Studies.