Journal Policies

VUJS advises scientists to read the journal's policies carefully before submitting articles as authors or referees

• Submission policy
• Author policy
• Referees policy
• Conflict of interest
• Plagiarism & Ethics
• Peer-review process & Editorial Judgment
• Open access policy
• Matters arising

Submission Policy

Manuscripts submitted to VUJS need to be appropriate with the aims and scope of the journal and must comply with the journal's regulations on submission. Besides, VUJS's contributors are responsible for the reliability of the research results of their work and complying with all regulations related to the publication under the Law on Science and Technology, the Law on Intellectual Property, and the Press Law.

Authors are not permitted to submit manuscripts to other journals without the Editorial Board's final approval decision, and they must be responsible for the publication of duplicate articles in other journals; not provide information about themselves in the article; and not be exposed to referees during the review process.

Authors must disclose conflicts of interest, which may include all factors that interfere with or interfere with the full and objective presentation of research results or may affect their reliability research in the article. Authors may refer to the Editorial Board in case needed.

VUJS does not require all authors of an article to sign the submission upon submission, nor does it impose an order on the list of authors. Submission to VUJS means that all authors listed on the author list have agreed to all aspects of the article's structure, form, and content. Authors contacting should ensure that they have reached this agreement between the authors and are responsible for communicating the manuscript with all co-authors before and after publication.

Each author's primary authority should be the one where the author completes the majority of his or her contributions to the article. If an author has subsequently moved, their current address must also be stated. VUJS is not responsible for disputes about author agencies and affiliated organizations during the author's research.

If the manuscript contains personal communications, the author must provide the subject's written permission to use any information cited in the communication. VUJS accepts this permission through the acceptance email of the individual concerned.

VUJS reserves the right to refuse to publish an article even after it has been accepted for publication or withdraw an article after publication if we determine that the article has a serious problem with scientific content or has violated the journal's policies.

Publishing language

The journal is committed to publishing works in both Vietnamese and English, either within the same issue or across separate issues. Authors are encouraged to review the current issues requirements for specific language guidelines and publication term before initiating their submissions.

Fees and refund policy

Authors or their affiliated organizations are required to settle the Article Processing Charge (APC) upon acceptance of their manuscript after the initial screening process (Pre-review). Vinh University Journal of Science curently applies an APC rate of 40$ per submission (or equivalent to 1,000,000 VND).

In the event that an author wishes to withdraw their manuscript after the APC has been paid, VUJS will only entertain refunds if their manuscript has not been sent for peer review round. This policy dictates that once the manuscript has entered the peer review stage, the APC payment becomes non-refundable, regardless of circumstances.

Author policy

Authorships

Authorship provides a commitment to a researcher's contributions to a article. VUJS grants authorship to a researcher when they fully meet the criteria below:

Each author is expected to have contributed significantly to the formulation or design of the article's research; or collected, analyzed, or interpreted data; or created new software used in the article; or have drafted the article or substantially modified it;

AND approved the manuscript of the article prior to submission (and any revisions related to the author's contribution to the article);

AND has agreed to be personally responsible for its contributions and to ensure that questions concerning the accuracy or integrity of any part of the article (even those unrelated to his or her contribution) have been appropriately reviewed, studied, and resolved. The answers to these questions should be documented in the document, and VUJS is allowed to ask the author for such documentation when necessary.

The Corresponding Author is the author primarily responsible for contacting the VUJS editorial staff and has the following responsibilities: ensure that all authors listed have approved the manuscript prior to submission; all authors have received dispatch and all correspondence with the editors; and verify that all data, documents (including chemicals, biological samples, products, etc.), and computer program code (self-built or provided by other authors) comply with standards of transparency and reproducibility in future research. This responsibility should include at least: (i) ensuring that the data/documentation/computer program code underlying the scientific content of the article is maintained in the most optimal manner so that it is retrievable for reanalysis; (ii) ensuring that the presentation of data/material/computer program code accurately reflects the original; and (iii) anticipating and minimizing obstacles to data/documentation/program code sharing described in the work. The author concerned is responsible for managing these requirements for co-authors and for ensuring that the entire author team is fully aware of and adheres to regulatory publishing best practices.

A co-author is a person who contributes to the research work of the article, satisfying the authorship criteria as described above and ensuring the consistency and transparency of information with the corresponding author and other co-authors listed on the article's author list.

VUJS encourages collaboration with colleagues at research sites and expects them to become co-authors when they meet all of the authorship criteria described above. Contributors who do not meet all the criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgments section. VUJS urges researchers to carefully consider researcher contributions and authorship criteria when engaging in cross-regional collaborative activities involving local researchers to promote greater equity in research collaboration.

Originality and data use right

• VUJS does not accept any articles that contain part or all of the content that has been published in other journals.
• The author is responsible for not submitting articles to other journals without a final decision of the Editorial Board.
• The author is responsible for the scientific content of the article, the accuracy of the citations in the article, the legality of the copyright. The author is responsible for obtaining permission to use the data from individuals and organizations that manage / own the data.
• For unpublished research works that are used in the article, the author must attach a document confirming the consent of the individual or organization that authored the research.
• The data presented in the article must be cited source.

Referees policy

The peer-review is responsible for critically reading and evaluating a manuscript in their specialty field, and then providing respectful, constructive, and honest feedback to authors about their submission. It is appropriate for the referees to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the article, ways to improve the strength and quality of the work, and evaluate the relevance and originality of the manuscript.

Selecting referees

Referee selection is critical to the review process, and we base our choice on many factors, including expertise, reputation, specific recommendations and our own previous experience of a referee’s characteristics. For instance, we avoid using referees who are chronically slow, careless, too harsh or too lenient.

We normally contact potential referees before sending them manuscripts to review. Referees should bear in mind that these messages contain confidential information, which should be treated as such.

Confidentiality

We ask referees to treat the review process as strictly confidential, and not to discuss the manuscript with anyone not directly involved in the review. It is acceptable to consult with laboratory colleagues, but please identify them to the editors. Consulting with experts from outside the referee’s own laboratory may be acceptable, but please check with the editors before doing so, to avoid involving anyone who may have been excluded by the authors.

Conflict of interest

VUJS is responsible for managing potential conflicts of interest of Editorial Board members, authors, referees and related individuals. The Journal requires those to declare an apparent and potential conflict of interest and to be held accountable for their statement. Particularly for the author, the statement about potential conflicts of interest must be made by the author in contact with the representative of the author group before the article is edited and published. VUJS considers potential conflicts of interest to be all factors that may interfere with or interfere with the full and objective presentation of research findings or may affect their reliability. research in the article after publication. VUJS considers the following types of potential conflicts of interest involving Editorial Board members, authors, and referees:

For members of the Editorial Board: The financial and non-financial benefits that the member enjoys, including expertise, working position, position, organizations with which the individual is affiliated, and paid. This information is collected and managed by the journal on a regular basis, annually or upon appointment, re-appointment, or assignment.

For authors: The author is obligated to disclose any personal or relationship interests that may be affected once the manuscript is published. Sources of funding must be noted in the manuscript. All authors must report any financial interest in corporate or commercial entities related to them. On behalf of all authors, it is the responsibility of the contacting author to notify the journal of a potential conflict of interest at the time of manuscript submission. Such conflicts will be stated in the article upon publication. Authors must also submit corrections if a potential conflict of interest becomes an apparent conflict of interest after the article has been published. Then, depending on the level of conflict of interest, the journal will make a decision to withdraw or not withdraw the article, and publish the conflicting interest of that article on the journal's website.

For referees: In addition to the duties set forth in the Referees Policy, referees are also responsible for assessing any conflicts of interest disclosed by the author as well as for reporting any situations involving members of the Editorial Board, relationships with authors, and other relevant individuals that could lead to bias or perceived bias in their assessment of submitted manuscripts, including include: personal relationships with authors, concurrent competitive research on the same topic in the article, or professional or financial relationships with an organization with interests after the article is published. publish. In cases of potential or apparent conflicts of interest, the use of evaluation results is at the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief.

VUJS strictly adheres to the policy of independence in the review process, editing and publishing; is not governed by any agreements with third parties or sponsors.

VUJS considers the following types of conflicts of interest in research:

Financial benefits: When an individual has the opportunity to take advantage of his or her expertise for personal financial gain or for the benefit of a company or entity in which the individual has a financial interest such as patents, trademarks, copyrights, license agreements, ownership, etc. Or, a research team member is likely to be affected by upcoming large sums of money - for example, a grant for another study that is similar to or competitive with ongoing research.

Non-financial benefits:

• Individual: When an individual's other interests may influence the results, staff or study participants
• Career: When an individual has the opportunity to advance professionally by participating in research
• Establishment: When an institution's interests and/or financial interests can affect or appear to influence research or other establishment activities.
• Perception: When others become aware of the existence of conflict and lead to questions about the individual's eligibility to participate in researchIn case of necessity.

 

In all cases, the author and reviewer can discuss with the Editorial Board to clarify the point.

Plagiarism and Ethics

Plagiarism

The manuscript of the article is checked for plagiarism by a manual method or by the duplicate detection software of Vinh University. In the case of detecting plagiarism, the journal has the right to ask the author to explain, correct, or immediately refuse to publish the article. VUJS considers any of the following behaviors to be forms of plagiarism:

• Use paragraphs, figures, images, or other information from other people's published work or articles without citing the source.
• Provide ambiguous, unclear, or inaccurate information about the source of the cited information or inaccurate information about the source's author.
• Citing the correct source of information but failing to follow the journal's citation guidelines. 
• Translating part or a whole work from Vietnamese into English or from another language into Vietnamese to make up more than 20% of the author's article content without quoting the original work. 
• Correctly cite another author's paragraph to form the author's article, but the citation content makes up 30% or more of the article's content. This situation may be admissible if the quotes still reliably preserve the integrity of the original work and the quotations only serve to clarify the point that the author is trying to persuade to draw his own conclusion. 
• Use more than 30% of the content of the author's own previously published work and present it as a new one. 
• Copies other people's entire works to create the author's own. 
• Other acts that are in violation of current intellectual property and copyright laws.

Research misconduct

VUJS defines misconduct as “fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism in proposing, performing, or reviewing research, or in reporting research results.” Anyone who engages in these behaviors is putting his manuscript immediately rejected. According to the statement, the three elements of misconduct are defined as follows:

• Fabrication is “making up data or results and recording or reporting them”
• Falsification is “manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record.”
• Plagiarism is “the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit.”

 

VUJS invites all contributors to check Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) for more information about misconduct and misconduct avoidance.

Review process and Editorial Judgement

This journal uses double-blind review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the referees, and vice versa, throughout the review process. To facilitate this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give away their identity.

All submitted manuscripts are read by the editorial staff. To save authors and referees time, only those articles that seem most likely to meet our editorial criteria are sent for formal review. Those articles judged by the editors to be of insufficient general interest or otherwise inappropriate are rejected promptly without external review.

The peer-review process normally starts once our topical editor or Editor-in-Chief sends the manuscript to for formal review, typically to two referees. The Editor-in-Chief will ask those to present the results within 20 working days, if they were unable to complete the review within the agreed period then the editor have the right to resend the manuscript for new referees. Two referees can proceed their review’s work in parallel or in tandem fashion, but our journal try to keep the review process not exceed 34 working days. Depending upon the review results, our Editor-in-Chief will make his decision based on the referees’ advices, from among several possibilities:

• Accepted: the manuscript is accepted for publication, no revision is required.
• Minor revision: invite the authors to revise their manuscript to address specific concerns before a final decision is reached
• Major revision:  the manuscript need a crucially revision/correction. Once the manuscript has been revised, it may be sent out for peer review again to the same or different referees (proceed a second round of review process). To be noted that there should no guarantee of acceptance.
• Rejected: typically the manuscript is rejected outright, which might due to lack of novelty, insufficient conceptual advance or major technical and/or interpretational problems.

The article is immediately accepted for publication if both referees give favorable results. If the results were negative by one referees and positive by the other, then the Editor-in-Chief may consult with the other referees or he may reach the final decision by discussing with the Topical editor.

Open access policy

VUJS is committed to the Vinh Universitys mission to promote the research, innovation, and contributing to the improvement of the university's education and training quality in the wide range of fields and to disseminate the knowledge worldwide. Our journals publish original, quality, trusted scientific content, and we support sustainable models of access that enable the long-term provision of and access to that content for the widest audience possible. Our open access statement below is stated in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access:

Open access statement: All content published in VUJS is freely and widely available to all readers via VUJS's online platform. VUJS permits everyone to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the published articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without registration, price barriers, or asking for permission from the VUJS or the author.

Licensing and Copyright

All articles published in VUJS are licensed under the Creative Common Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License which permits non-commercially to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium) or adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material). When utilizing a VUJS's published article, it is essential to provide appropriate credit by including accurate citation details, such as authors' names and attribution parties, alongside a copyright notice, license notice, disclaimer notice, and a direct link to the original material (DOI or URL that points to the original article in the VUJS's website). Additionally, any modifications made to the original content should be clearly indicated.

The corresponding author is responsible for completing and returning the signed Open Access Agreement to the editorial office upon his/her article has been accepted for publication. This agreement enables VUJS to be the first publisher of the article under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. However, authors retain significant rights related to attribution, non-commercial use, permissions for further use, modification, distribution, and enforcement of the license terms. The following rights ensure that authors maintain control over their intellectual property and how it is utilized by others:

1. The right to be properly credited for their work: The author maintains the right to receive appropriate acknowledgment for their article, including citation of their name and attribution, in accordance with the requirements of the CC BY-NC license.
2. The right to control the non-commercial use of their work: The author retains the right to control how their article is used for non-commercial purposes, ensuring that it is not utilized for commercial gain without their consent.
3. The right to grant permissions for further use: While the CC BY-NC license allows others to reuse and adapt the author's work for non-commercial purposes, the author retains the right to grant additional permissions or licenses for specific uses beyond the scope of the CC BY-NC license.
4. The right to modify and distribute their work: The author retains the right to modify and distribute their article, including making revisions, updates, or corrections, and distributing it through various channels, such as personal websites or academic repositories.
5. The right to enforce compliance with the CC BY-NC license: The author has the right to ensure that their article is used in accordance with the terms of the CC BY-NC license, including proper attribution, non-commercial use, and compliance with any additional conditions specified by the author.

 

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Repository Policy

VUJS permits authors to deposit all versions of their article in any institution or other repository of their choice.

Preservation and archiving

VUJS articles and contents are archived at and through the following units:

Print materials

• Department of Science and International Affairs, Vinh University - No.182 Le Duan street, Vinh City, Nghe An, Vietnam
• Nguyen Thuc Hao Library and Digital Information Center, Vinh University - 182 Le Duan street, Vinh City, Nghe An, Vietnam
• Authority of Press - Ministry of Information and Communication -No. 50, Thi Sach street, Hai Ba Trung District, Hanoi, Vietnam
• Nghe An Department of Information and Communications - No. 6, Le Hoan street, Vinh City, Nghe An
• National Library of Vietnam - No. 31 Trang Thi street, Hoan Kiem District, Hanoi, Vietnam

Electronic materials

• Vinh University Data Center located at the A0 Building, no.182 Le Duan street, Vinh City, Nghe An, Vietnam

Matters Arising

General information

VUJS recognize the importance of post-publication commentary on published research as necessary to advancing scientific discourse. Formal post-publication commentary on published articles can involve either challenges or clarifications of the published work and may, after peer review, be published online as Matters Arising, usually alongside a Reply from the original authors. Matters Arising are exceptionally interesting and timely scientific comments and clarifications on original research articles published in VUJS. These comments should ideally be based on knowledge contemporaneous with the original article, rather than subsequent scientific developments.

If the submission serves only to identify an important error or mistake in the published article, it will usually lead to the publication of a clarification statement (correction or retraction, for example). Please contact us if this is the case. Comments can also be posted at the journal's website, under the full-text online version of the article. Online posted comments can make reference to citable materials such as a preprint if necessary.

In all cases, VUJS strongly encourages correspondents to first contact the authors of the article directly, as this can often resolve matters if they arise from a simple misunderstanding.

VUJS does not consider Matters Arising on articles published in other journals.

Contributions that do not comply with our submission criteria (see sections below) will not be considered.

Manuscripts (both Matters Arising and Replies) should be formatted according to these instructions.

• The main text should be as concise as possible, and ideally not exceed 1,200 words. Any extended Methods may be reported as Supplementary Information.
• Contributions should start with a brief paragraph that summarizes the message of the article without specialized terminology, for a non-specialist readership. This paragraph should be used as the abstract for submission purposes.
• Contributions should have a simple message that ideally requires only one or two small figures or tables. Complex figures or tables may be presented as Extended Data items (ideally no more than three such items).At submission, figures should be of sufficient quality to be assessed by referees, ideally as JPEGs.
• Contributions should have a simple message that ideally requires only one or two small figures or tables. Complex figures or tables may be presented as Extended Data items (ideally no more than three such items).
• At submission, figures should be of sufficient quality to be assessed by referees, ideally as JPEGs.
• As a guideline, contributions may have up to 15 references; reference style is accordance with Serie A or Serie B&C
• Supplementary Information is permitted at the editor's discretion.
• A competing interests statement is required.
• An author contributions statement is required.
• Before peer review, authors of life sciences contributions that include new data must provide details about elements of experimental and analytical design and must provide a completed reporting summary that will be made available to editors and referees during manuscript assessment. The reporting summary will be published with all accepted contributions.
• Before peer review, the corresponding author must complete an editorial policy checklist to ensure compliance with VUJS editorial policies. Please note: because of the advanced features used in these forms, you must use Adobe Reader to open the documents and fill them out. Guidance and resources related to the use and reporting of statistics are available.