Duties of the Publisher [4], [5]

The Publisher of a journal is finally responsible for the ethical conduct of the editorial team as he has the ability to take action whenever it is required in order to maintain the standards of best practice.
The Publisher should ensure to the scientific community that its financial activities like advertising, reprint or other commercial revenue have no impact or influence on editorial decisions.
For these reasons, some of the most important publisher’s duties may include:



As universally known, the success of scientific publishing is mainly due to the peer review process.
As main commitment towards the scientific community, the Publisher has an obligation to assist it in the publishing process and in the ethical aspects, too, related to suspected duplicate submission or plagiarism. As Publisher, Praise Worthy Prize is engaged in efforts to prevent scholarly and professional plagiarism.
Plagiarism detection software exist and are adopted by important institutions in order to disclose potential plagiarism and to deter authors by this fraud.
No competing interests should exist among the Publisher and members of the editorial staff.
There should be no conflicts of interest between authors and the individuals or the organisation they write about.
Editorial independence should be respected.
Journal owners (both learned societies and publishers) must not interfere nowise with editorial decisions.
The relationship between the editor and the journal owner and publisher should be set out in a formal contract and an appeal mechanism for disputes should be established.
Decisions by editors about whether to publish individual items submitted to a journal should not be influenced by pressure from the editor's employer, the journal owner or the publisher.
Ideally, the principles of editorial independence should be set out in the editor's contract.
Editors’ contracts should describe the principles of editorial independence. It is appropriate for journal owners/publishers to discuss general editorial processes and policies with journal editors (for example, whether or not a journal should publish a particular type of article), but they should not get involved in decisions made by the editor about individual articles [4].
Publisher should:
- encourage the editors they work with to follow an ethical accepted behavior;
- assure the observance of research ethics, confidentiality, consent, authorship, transparency, integrity and peer review;
- define the relationship among all the other parties involved in the publication;
- determine journal policies, communicate them and update them periodically meeting the parties;
- set journals policies with respect to appeals and complaints, communicating journals policies and reviewing these policies periodically;
- assist the parties (institutions, grant funders, governing bodies) responsible for the investigation of suspected research and publication misconduct and, where possible, facilitate in the resolution of these cases.