Journal Policies

Editorial Policies

Editorial decisions at IJAPS are based only on the originality, scientific validity, relevance to the journal’s scope and clarity of a manuscript. Decisions are not influenced by the authors’ nationality, institution, gender, religion or seniority, or by the payment or waiver of any charge.

• Independence: the Editor-in-Chief has full responsibility for editorial decisions. Article processing charges and waiver requests are handled separately and are not disclosed to editors or reviewers.
• Conflicts of interest: editors and reviewers withdraw from any manuscript in which they have a personal, professional or financial interest. Manuscripts by editorial board members, or by colleagues or students of the Editor-in-Chief’s institution, are handled by an editor with no conflict and go through the same peer review.
• Confidentiality: submitted manuscripts and reviews are confidential and are not shared outside the editorial process.
• Authorship: all listed authors must meet the ICMJE authorship criteria. Changes to the author list after submission require a signed request from all authors.

Article Withdrawal

Before publication: authors may withdraw a manuscript at any stage before acceptance by writing to the editorial office with the reasons, signed by all authors. Withdrawal after acceptance is permitted only for serious reasons accepted by the Editor-in-Chief. A withdrawn manuscript must not be submitted elsewhere until the withdrawal has been confirmed in writing.

After publication: published articles form part of the permanent scholarly record and are not removed. In line with COPE guidance, problems found after publication are handled as follows:

• Correction: for honest errors that do not affect the conclusions, a corrected version is published with a dated note describing the change.
• Expression of concern: issued while an investigation of a serious concern is in progress.
• Retraction: for unreliable findings, plagiarism, duplicate publication, unethical research or other serious misconduct. The article remains online, clearly watermarked “Retracted”, with a linked retraction notice giving the reason.
• Removal: only in exceptional cases, such as legal requirements or a serious risk to health; a notice of removal is published in its place.

Complaints & Appeals

Authors may appeal an editorial decision by writing to the Editor-in-Chief within 30 days, giving the scientific reasons why the decision should be reconsidered. Appeals are reviewed by an editor not involved in the original decision, who may seek another review. The decision on an appeal is final.

Complaints about the journal’s processes or concerns about possible misconduct in a submitted or published article should be sent to ijapseditor@gmail.com. They are acknowledged and investigated following the relevant COPE flowcharts.

Privacy Statement

The names, email addresses and other personal details entered in the journal’s submission system or sent to the editorial office are used only for the journal’s stated purposes – handling submissions, peer review and publication – and are not sold or made available to any other party.

• Author names, affiliations and the corresponding author’s email address are published with each article.
• Reviewer identities are kept confidential.
• Users may ask the editorial office to correct their details or to delete their account, except for information that must be kept as part of the publication record.

Archiving

All published articles and issues are permanently archived on the journal’s own server and are available as full-text PDFs from the Archives. Article metadata are registered with Crossref through Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), prefix 10.68879, for articles from Volume 8 (2026) onwards.