Scilight Press

1. Overview

Scilight Press committed to the guidelines and Code of conduct of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). As a publisher of academic works, Scilight Press is committed to upholding the principles of academic freedom, editorial independence, and the highest standards of research integrity.

By submitting a manuscript to a Scilight journal, the authors affirm that they have carefully reviewed and consented to the content and that the manuscript adheres to the journal’s specific policies and guidelines.

2. Communicate with Respect

At Scilight Press, we firmly believe that trust and high-quality publishing products and services can only be achieved through relationships built on mutual respect. Our staff are expected to maintain professionalism and respect in all interactions with authors, reviewers, and readers. Similarly, we uphold the expectation that the academic community and the public will engage with our staff in the same manner.

We do not tolerate aggressive behavior, harassment, bullying, or discrimination directed toward Scilight Press staff. In cases of serious violations, we reserve the right to report the matter to employers or local authorities as appropriate and may refuse to engage with individuals who repeatedly or egregiously breach this policy.

3. Authorship and Contribution

3.1. Authorship

Authorship is limited to individuals who make substantial contributions to the reported study. All individuals providing substantial contributions should be named as coauthors. Individual journals may maintain specific authorship definitions, and authors are responsible for complying with the policies of the target journal. Those who contributed to the work but do not qualify for authorship should be listed in the acknowledgments. More detailed guidance on authorship is provided by the COPE discussion about Authorship.

Different disciplines adopt distinct authorship criteria, including but not limited to ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) for biomedical fields, APA (American Psychological Association) for psychology, EuChemS (European Chemical Society) for chemistry, IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) for engineering and computing.

3.2. Authorship Changes

Authors are required to determine the author list and order prior to submission and to provide the definitive author list at the time of original submission.

Any subsequent request to add, remove, or rearrange authors will be considered only under exceptional circumstances and at the sole discretion of the Editor, and must be communicated to the Editor in writing with the explicit agreement of all named authors.

Scilight Press does not generally consider requests to add or remove authors between acceptance and publication of the article. If there are special circumstances that apply to your article such that a post-accept authorship change is needed, please contact the journal office.

Scilight Press journals follow the COPE guidelines and for changes in authorship.

3.3. Contribution

Authors must provide a statement describing each author's individual contribution to the work. The statement should accurately reflect the responsibilities undertaken by each author and should be reviewed and approved by all authors before submission.

Contributions may be described using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) including roles such as conceptualization, methodology, investigation, formal analysis, data curation, software, validation, visualization, supervision, and writing. CRediT describes contributors' roles but does not determine whether an individual qualifies for authorship.

For research articles with several authors, a short paragraph specifying their individual contributions must be provided. For example, Author 1 Full Name: conceptualization, methodology, software; Author 2 Full Name: data curation, writing—original draft preparation; Author 3 Full Name: visualization, investigation; Author 4 Full Name: supervision; Author 5 Full Name: software, validation; Author 6 Full Name: writing—reviewing and editing.

3.4. Acknowledgments

The Acknowledgments section is intended to recognize individuals who contributed significantly to the work but do not meet the criteria for authorship. Contributors who qualify for authorship, as outlined in our authorship criteria, should not be listed in this section.

Authors may acknowledge administrative or technical assistance, access to facilities or materials, and other support not described in the author contribution or funding statements. Permission must be obtained from every individual identified in the Acknowledgments section.

Acknowledgments should be concise and avoid thanking anonymous referees or editors, using unnecessary words, or including overly enthusiastic expressions of gratitude.

4. Conflict of Interests

Any interest or relationship, financial or otherwise that might be perceived as influencing an author's objectivity is considered a potential source of conflict of interest. These must be disclosed when directly relevant or directly related to the work that the authors describe in their manuscript. The existence of a conflict of interest does not preclude publication. If the authors have no conflict of interest to declare, they must also state this at submission. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to review this policy with all authors and collectively to disclose all pertinent commercial and other relationships during submission.

Declare conflicts of interest or state ”The authors declare no conflict of interest.” If there is no role, please state, “The funders had no role in the design of the study; the collection, analysis, or interpretation of data; the writing of the manuscript; or the decision to publish the results.”

5. Peer Review

Scilight Press journals operate one of two peer review models. Single-anonymous peer review means that reviewers know the authors' identities, but authors do not know the reviewers' identities. Double-anonymous peer review means that both authors and reviewers remain anonymous to each other throughout the review process. The specific peer review model used by each journal is stated in that journal's website. For further details, please refer to Peer Review Policy - Scilight Press.

6. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

These policies have been introduced in response to the rise of generative AI—a type of artificial intelligence technology capable of producing text, images, audio, and synthetic data. Examples include ChatGPT, NovelAI, Jasper AI, Rytr AI, and DALL-E. As AI-assisted technologies become increasingly integrated into content creation, these policies aim to enhance transparency and provide clear guidance for authors, reviewers, editors, readers, and contributors.

Scilight Press is actively monitoring advancements in this field and will review and update these policies as needed.

6.1. For Authors

Authors may use generative-AI and AI-assisted tools to support manuscript-related work including text refinement, graphical generation, code development, and data processing and analysis

Human authors retain full, ultimate accountability for all content within the submitted work, including all AI-assisted outputs. Failure to disclose substantial AI-assisted contributions constitutes misrepresentation and may lead to editorial measures including manuscript rejection, post-publication correction or retraction.

Scilight Press follows the COPE position for authorship and AI tools to state that AI tools cannot be listed as an author of a paper.

6.2. For Reviewers

A manuscript under peer review is unpublished work and must be treated as a confidential document. Reviewers should not upload any part of a submitted manuscript—including text, figures, tables, or data— into a generative AI tool, because doing so could expose the authors' unpublished findings and proprietary content and, if the submission contains personal or commercially sensitive information, may also breach data privacy.

The same confidentiality obligation applies to peer review reports, as they may contain confidential information about the manuscript and/or its authors. Accordingly, reviewers should not upload their peer review reports into any AI tool, even if the sole purpose is to improve language and readability.

Peer review rests on a named expert vouching for a manuscript's methods, evidence, and novelty. Scilight Press therefore holds that reviewing a scientific manuscript is a responsibility that can only be fulfilled by humans. Reviewers should not use generative AI or AI-assisted technologies to inform their scientific assessment of a manuscript: such tools cannot replicate the critical thinking and original judgment that peer review requires, and they may produce hallucinated, superficial, or skewed evaluations. The reviewer whose name appears on a report is answerable for every claim it contains.

Scilight Press's AI authorship policy permits authors to use generative AI and AI-assisted technologies during writing process before submission, but only to improve the language and readability of their paper, and only with appropriate disclosure as set out in the Instructions for Authors. Reviewers should be aware that such disclosure appears at the end of the paper, in a dedicated section immediately before the list of references.

6.3. For Editors

Editors must protect the confidentiality of all materials received during the editorial process. Manuscripts, supplementary files, author information, reviewer reports, editorial correspondence, and decision letters must not be entered into generative AI or AI-assisted tools. Uploading these materials may expose unpublished research, confidential communications, proprietary information, or personal data. For this reason, editors should not upload their letters into an AI tool, even if it is just to improve language and readability.

Editorial assessment and decision-making require independent human judgment. Editors must not use generative AI or AI-assisted technologies to evaluate the academic quality, validity, originality, significance, or publication suitability of a manuscript or to make editorial decisions. Outputs generated by such technologies may be inaccurate, incomplete, misleading, or biased. The handling editor remains responsible for the editorial process, the final decision, and all communications with the authors. If an editor suspects that an author or reviewer has failed to comply with the applicable AI policy, the matter should be reported to the Editorial Office for further assessment.

7. Research Ethics and Consent

Scilight Press fully adheres to the Core practices and the Guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The Editors of this journal are obligated to assist the scientific community in all aspects of publishing ethics, including plagiarism. As such, we endeavor to ensure a transparent and rigorous peer review process. Authors should comply with the publication ethics.

For more details, please refer to Scilight Press Publishing Ethics - Scilight Press.

8. Publication Policies

At Scilight Press, we are dedicated to advancing the principles of open research. Our publication policies are designed to enable authors to maximize the openness of their research while supporting compliance with the OA requirements set forth by their funding bodies and institutions.

8.1. Data Availability

Scilight journals aim to publish both experimental and observational research. Submission of study protocols is highly recommended, alongside the statistical codes underpinning the results (ideally available in web repositories, i.e., GitHub, and OSF). Results should be reported alongside measures of uncertainty (confidence or credible intervals), with emphasis on the effect size rather than “statistical significance”. Categorizing of continuous data is not recommended. Authors should clearly state how missing data and multiple testing were handled and the software used to perform statistical analyses should be mentioned in the statistical section, including non-routine packages/commands. Sensitivity analyses are encouraged to assess the robustness of the results.

In addition to the statistical reporting standards outlined above, all manuscripts reporting original research must include a Data Availability Statement describing where the data supporting the findings can be accessed, or providing the specific legal, ethical, or confidentiality restrictions that prevent public sharing of the data.

Regardless of the sharing status, authors are required to retain the underlying raw data for a minimum of 10 years after publication and, upon reasonable request from the editorial office or relevant regulatory bodies, to provide access to such data for verification and reproducibility purposes, subject to applicable legal and confidentiality obligations. Exceptions to this retention period may apply where local regulations or institutional policies specify different requirements.

8.2. Intellectual Property and Author Rights

In adherence to the principles of OA publishing and to facilitate widespread distribution, authors submitting to Scilight journals are under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This commitment to OA and the utilization of Creative Commons Licenses aligns with our mission to enhance the accessibility and impact of scholarly work within the academic community and beyond, which allows users to unrestrictedly read, print, download, disseminate, reproduce, alter, transform, or build upon the article, including for commercial and non-commercial purposes, as long as the original author is credited. For more information on Copyright Permission, click here.

Author Rights and Responsibilities:

• Intellectual Property Ownership:

Authors affirm that the submitted manuscript (and any accompanying materials) represents their original intellectual property, and they have not transferred the copyright to any third party.

• Integrity Assurance:

Authors certify that the manuscript contains no plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, or manipulated citations and conforms to Scilight Press authorship policies.

• Copyright Permissions:

Authors confirm that appropriate permissions have been secured from copyright holders for any copyrighted tables, figures, data, text, etc., reproduced in the manuscript.

• Confidentiality Agreement:

Authors commit to keeping confidential all communications, comments, or reports exchanged between authors and reviewers or editors. The privacy of these interactions is paramount to the integrity of the review process.

8.3. Third-Party Permissions

Third-party content refers to any material that is owned, either explicitly or implicitly, by parties other than the authors. This may include the authors’ previous work, content contributed by co-authors, work created by external parties, or external data sources. Authors intending to use third-party content in their research must fully understand the associated copyright considerations and reuse conditions. Compliance with these requirements is mandatory before submitting any work that incorporates third-party content.

Authors are responsible for securing the necessary permissions to reuse third-party material in their articles. Such materials may include, but are not limited to, text, illustrations, photographs, tables, datasets, audio recordings, videos, film stills, screenshots, or musical notation.

The use of short text excerpts and certain other materials may be permitted under "fair use" or similar provisions, typically for purposes such as criticism or review, without formal permission. However, for any content not covered by these exceptions, authors must obtain written permission from the copyright holders before submission.

9. Digital Preservation Policy

To support the long-term preservation of scholarly content, Scilight Press deposits eligible published content with the Home | National Library of Australia (NLA) under the applicable legal deposit arrangements.

Scilight Press retains records relating to published articles, including manuscripts, supplementary materials, editorial decisions, and peer-review correspondence, as necessary to maintain the integrity of the scholarly record. For manuscripts not accepted for publication, we will honor authors' requests to delete submission files.

10. Appeals and Complaints

The procedure covers appeals concerning editorial decisions, complaints about procedural matters like significant delays in paper handling, and concerns related to publication ethics. Authors who disagree with an editorial decision can submit a formal appeal to the Editorial Office, providing their reasons. The matter will be addressed promptly in accordance with COPE Guidelines.

The matter will normally be reviewed by the Editor-in-Chief or the Editor who handled the manuscript. If the appeal or complaint concerns that individual, it will be assigned to another Editor or an appropriate representative of Scilight Press who was not involved in the original decision.

Contact details are available on the relevant journal's website. If no appropriate publishing contact is listed, inquiries may be sent to info@sciltp.com.

 

Update in May 2025