In this section, we outline the journal’s policies for avoiding and handling violations of intellectual property right, including copyright and licensing, prior-publication and plagiarism.

Suspected violations of intellectual property will be taken seriously and handled according to the COPE guidelines.

Topics covered in this page include:

• Copyrighted material
• Prior publication
• Plagiarism
• Self-plagiarism and duplicate publication

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Copyrighted material

When submitting an article to EQUALEGUM International Law Journal, the corresponding (submitting) author agrees to publish the work under the conditions laid out in the journal’s policies on open access and copyright & license of journal.

Further, it is the corresponding author’s responsibility to obtain permission to use published copyrighted material, and state the licence and permission in the main text or figure caption(s). It is the corresponding author’s responsibility to ensure that the manuscript does not contain any confidential or copyrighted information without express permission for its use.

In submitting their work to Equalegum International Law Journal, the corresponding author agrees that:?

1. the manuscript contains no confidential information, publication of which is restricted.
2. permission has been granted to reuse, modify or redistribute any copyrighted material and the licence and permission are provided in the main text or caption.

Disputes over copyright of published scholarly content should be addressed to the editor in chief by email. Disputes of copyright in unpublished articles (i.e. during the review stage) should be reported to the subject editor of the work.

Prior publication

Equalegum International Law Journal only accepts manuscripts that have not been previously published in the peer-reviewed literature. We do not accept maunscripts that are under consideration for publication by another scholarly (i.e. peer-reviewed) journal.

Manuscripts that have not undergone a peer-review process, including institutional reports or manuscripts that appear on personal or institutional websites or recognised preprint servers, are not considered to be cases of prior publication. We therefore accept submissions that have been previously available online, in these formats. Authors should always acknowledge such circumstances upon submission and cite any previous versions of the submitted article.

Read more about preprints in the following page: Author self-archiving and preprints

Plagiarism

Submissions to Equalegum International Law Journal must not engage in plagiarism. In the publication ethics, the Council of Science Editors (CSE) defines plagiarism as “the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language (figures images or tables) and thoughts of others and the representation of them as one’s own original work without permission or acknowledgment by the author of the source of these materials.”

In 2023, Equalegum International Law Journal is introducing the use of Turnitin Similarity Check to routinely screen all submissions for plagiarism. Further, when submitting an article to Equalegum International Law Journal, the corresponding (submitting) author agrees to abide by the conditions described in this intellectual property policy.

Self-plagiarism and duplicate publication

Plagiarism can also apply to researchers who re-use their own text or duplicate their own previously published reports without acknowledgment. This, is sometimes called self-plagiarism, text recycling, duplicate or redundant publication.

In some instances, recycling of text may be appropriate. For example, overlap between the description of methods or some aspects of a study site, with citation of the original article, is likely to be acceptable. However, overlap of texts from the introduction, results, discussions or conclusions are unlikely to be acceptable.

Submissions to Equalegum International Law Journal must not engage in (undisclosed) self-plagiarism. To avoid this, authors should always cite or acknowledge the source of information and avoid reproducing text from their own publications.

Note that Equalegum International Law Journal does consider for publication studies based on data that were previously published in non-peer reviewed reports available in institutional repositories. Such instances must be declared upon submission and the extent of overlap described.