Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement

1. Responsibilities of Academic Partners (Editorial Board, Reviewers, and Authors)

• Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board: The Editor-in-Chief and board members bear independent and ultimate responsibility for making final acceptance or rejection decisions based solely on originality, scientific validity, and scholarly merit, without regard to the authors' race, gender, institutional affiliation, or geographical origin. They commit to maintaining the absolute confidentiality of all submitted manuscripts and initiating immediate investigations into any behavioral or ethical complaints in strict accordance with COPE flowcharts. Furthermore, they must recuse themselves from managing any manuscript that involves a conflict of interest.
• Peer Reviewers: Peer review is recognized as a strictly confidential and ethical obligation. Reviewers are strictly prohibited from sharing any manuscript content, metadata, or utilizing unpublished ideas to advance their personal research agendas. Reviewers commit to delivering objective, constructive evaluation reports backed by technical and scientific evidence within a mandatory timeframe of 3 weeks. They are obligated to recuse themselves immediately if a conflict of interest is identified (including direct professional collegiality, familial kinship, or active research collaboration within the past 3 years).
• Authors and Researchers: Authors pledge that their submitted work is entirely original and built upon authentic, verified empirical data. Simultaneous submission of the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently is a severe breach of publishing ethics and is strictly prohibited. Authors are required to provide valid ORCID iDs for all participants and document specific contributions via the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) framework to completely eliminate "gift", "courtesy", or "honorary" authorship (the inclusion of individuals who did not make a substantial scientific contribution).

2. Plagiarism Detection, Conflict of Interest, and Open Data Policies

• Plagiarism Screening and Originality: All submitted manuscripts undergo mandatory automated similarity screening using iThenticate 2.0 software prior to peer review. The maximum permissible overall similarity index is set at 20%, provided that the text overlap from any single individual source does not exceed 5%.
• Data Sharing and Open Science: The journal fully adopts the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (2021). Authors are required to manage their research data in accordance with the FAIR Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). Raw datasets, media text corpora, or statistical analysis records must be deposited in a trusted, public repository that assigns a unique DOI. Consequently, a mandatory Data Availability Statement (DAS) must be included as an independent section immediately preceding the references.
• Financial Transparency: Operating under a Diamond Open Access model, the journal offers immediate, barrier-free access and downloading for all published research. It does not levy any financial fees, submission costs, administrative charges, or publication fees on authors throughout any stage of the editorial or peer-review process (No APCs).

3. Governance of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)

• Prohibition of AI Authorship: It is strictly forbidden to list generative artificial intelligence tools (such as ChatGPT or other LLMs) as an author or co-author. AI tools lack the legal personhood, moral agency, and capacity to assume accountability for the integrity, validity, and authenticity of scholarly work.
• Disclosure and Human Accountability: The utilization of GenAI tools must be restricted strictly to basic linguistic refinement, structural proofreading, and copyediting. The human author retains exclusive and ultimate accountability for the accuracy of all information, references, and interpretations. Authors must provide a detailed, transparent disclosure within the Methodology section detailing the tool's name, version, date of use, and precise operational purpose.
• Prohibition of AI Tools in Peer Review: Reviewers and editors are completely prohibited from uploading submitted manuscripts, drafts, or any portion thereof into external large language models or AI assistants for summarization, translation, or evaluation. This mandate protects author data privacy and safeguards intellectual property rights prior to official publication.

4. Media Research Ethics and Digital Data Harvesting (IMR)

• Respect for Private and Semi-Closed Virtual Environments: Harvesting or scraping data from closed or semi-closed digital spaces (such as private Facebook groups, restricted digital support communities, or password-protected forums) strictly requires prior, explicit informed consent from both platform administrators and participants before any posts or user interactions are extracted.
• Prevention of Reverse Identification: Direct verbatim quotation of digital text, user posts, or comments from public social media platforms is strictly prohibited if a reverse online search could allow third parties to trace the text back to the user's authentic real-world identity. In such instances, researchers must employ interpretive paraphrasing to mask identifying markers and ensure the absolute safety of digital human subjects.

5. Enforcement Measures Against Scientific Malpractice

• Sanctions for Intentional Plagiarism and Data Falsification: Upon verification of intentional plagiarism, severe text recycling, or data fabrication/falsification in any manuscript (whether under evaluation or already published), the journal will immediately terminate all editorial procedures or fully retract the article. The authors' names will be placed on the journal's permanent blacklist, their home institutions will be formally notified, and a comprehensive report will be submitted to the Scientific Journals Oversight Committee at the University of Benghazi to enforce applicable statutory regulations.
• Sanctions for Simultaneous Submission and Redundant Publication: If a manuscript is proven to have been submitted concurrently to multiple publishers, the editorial assignment will be revoked immediately. A formal report will be dispatched to the authors' university presidents, accompanied by a publication ban within the journal for a specified duration.
• Sanctions for Reviewer and Citation Manipulation: If an author is found to have provided fraudulent email addresses for suggested reviewers, or if a reviewer is found to have coercively enforced citations from their own published works for self-promotion, the compromised accounts will be frozen within the journal’s Open Journal Systems (OJS) environment, and all professional collaboration with the reviewer will be permanently terminated.

6. Enforcement Measures Against Professional Malpractice

• Combating Discrimination and Academic Bias: The journal is firmly committed to providing fair and equitable treatment to all stakeholders, regardless of gender, race, religion, or geographical origin. The rejection or obstruction of manuscripts by an editor based on personal or institutional biases constitutes a grave violation, triggering immediate dismissal and the permanent revocation of their editorial privileges within the system.
• Countering Breaches of Confidentiality and Vindictive Reviewing: Reviewers are strictly forbidden from utilizing peer-review workflows for retaliatory purposes or intentionally delaying the publication of competing research to secure personal intellectual advantages. Upon verification of such an infraction, the reviewer will be permanently removed from the system, and their home institution will be notified to protect intellectual property rights.
• Prohibition of Unprofessional Conduct and Personal Attacks: All reviewer correspondence, assessments, and critiques must be articulated in a dignified, scholarly, and professional manner, entirely devoid of sarcasm, derogatory remarks, or unsubstantiated ethical accusations. The editorial board commits to auditing and sanitizing peer-review reports to remove unprofessional language before transmitting them to authors, thereby preserving academic dignity. A strict warning will be issued to offending reviewers, and subsequent violations will result in the permanent termination of collaboration.

7. Post-Publication Amendments and Preserving the Academic Record

The journal actively participates in the Crossmark initiative by Crossref to maintain an accurate, reliable, and trustworthy scholarly record:

• Scientific Corrections (Corrigendum / Erratum): Issued to rectify inadvertent clerical, mathematical, or linguistic errors (introduced by either the author or the publisher) that do not undermine the overall validity of the scholarly conclusions. These are published as a standalone notice bi-directionally linked to the original article via a unique DOI.
• Editorial Expression of Concern: A temporary cautionary notice issued directly by the Editor-in-Chief when serious, well-founded concerns arise regarding the integrity of a study, but definitive evidence cannot yet be secured (due to uncooperative authors or protracted institutional investigations). This serves to alert the scientific community while investigations proceed.
• Manuscript Retraction: The ultimate measure implemented to correct the scholarly record when severe ethical breaches or catastrophic errors completely invalidate the research findings (such as verified fabrication or flagrant plagiarism). In compliance with archiving standards, the article is not physically deleted from the digital archive; instead, it remains accessible with a prominent, unmistakable red "RETRACTED" watermark applied to all pages, accompanied by a freely accessible, detailed retraction statement explaining the grounds for the action.