Ethical Principles and Publication Policy

Dibon Journal of Languages (DJL) is committed to upholding the highest standards of publication ethics and research integrity. The journal follows the Core Practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and draws on the authorship standards of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), the principles of the Singapore Statement on Research Integrity, and (for research involving human participants) the Declaration o.f Helsinki. Given its interdisciplinary focus, DJL also aligns its ethics framework with the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Guidelines for Ethical Research, the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) Code of Ethics, and the European Society for Translation Studies (EST) guidelines. All parties involved in publishing with DJL (editors, authors, and reviewers) are expected to observe the responsibilities set out below.

Duties of Editors

Publication decisions. The Editor-in-Chief holds final responsibility for deciding which submissions are published, on the basis of scholarly quality, originality, relevance to the journal's scope, and the reviewers' assessments (never on the authors' identity, nationality, institution, or beliefs).

Editorial independence. Editorial decisions are made independently of commercial considerations and free from any influence by the publisher, Dibon Publishing House. The editorial and business functions of the journal are kept separate.

Fairness and confidentiality. Editors evaluate manuscripts on their intellectual merit alone and treat every submission as confidential, disclosing its content only to those involved in the editorial process.

Conflicts of interest. Editors recuse themselves from handling any manuscript in which they have a competing interest, for example, a personal, financial, or institutional relationship with an author, and arrange for an alternative editor to oversee the review.

Integrity of the record. Editors act promptly when concerns are raised about a published work, and are prepared to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, or expressions of concern as warranted.

Duties of Authors

Reporting standards and originality. Authors must present their work accurately and honestly, describe their methods with enough detail to permit replication, and submit only original work. All sources must be properly cited and, where words are used verbatim, properly quoted.

Authorship. In keeping with ICMJE criteria, authorship should be limited to those who have (1) made a substantial contribution to the conception, design, or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of the work; (2) drafted or critically revised it for important intellectual content; (3) approved the final version; and (4) agreed to be accountable for the work. Contributors who do not meet all four criteria should be acknowledged rather than listed as authors. Gift, ghost, and guest authorship are not permitted. Any change to the author list after submission requires the written consent of all authors.

Originality and prior publication. Submission of a manuscript indicates that the work has not been published elsewhere and is not under consideration by another journal. Redundant publication and the division of one study into multiple submissions ("salami slicing") are not acceptable.

Conflicts of interest and funding. Authors must disclose all financial and non-financial interests that could be perceived to influence the work, and must identify all sources of funding.

Research Involving Human Participants and Language Data. For studies involving human participants (including classroom-based research with students, language teachers, language learners, translators, and other members of the educational community), authors must confirm that appropriate ethical approval was obtained from a named institutional or national ethics committee, and that informed consent (and, where relevant, assent) was secured in accordance with applicable ethical standards and the Declaration of Helsinki. This requirement applies to research involving interviews, questionnaires, classroom observations, focus groups, language testing, speech or audio recordings, corpus collection, and other forms of linguistic data.

Studies Not Requiring Institutional Ethical Approval: Institutional ethical review may not be mandatory for secondary data analysis of fully anonymized, publicly available, or historical text corpora, provided no living individuals can be identified. Similarly, standard pedagogical text evaluations conducted as part of normal, non-experimental classroom activities may be exempt depending on local institutional guidelines. Authors must explicitly state in their methodology section if their study falls under these categories and justify the exemption based on their institution's regulations.

Vulnerable Participants. DJL takes particular care with research involving minors and other vulnerable groups, including migrant communities, refugees, non-native speakers with limited language proficiency, or linguistically marginalized populations. Where participants are children or young people, authors must confirm that informed consent was obtained from a parent or legal guardian, along with the child's assent where appropriate, and that the study actively protected participants' welfare, privacy, and right to withdraw. Researchers must ensure that language barriers do not compromise the clarity of the informed consent process; consent forms and information sheets must be provided in a language the participants fully understand.

Data Availability and Linguistic Datasets. Authors should be prepared to provide the data underlying their findings if requested during the review process or after publication. DJL highly encourages authors to include a formal Data Availability Statement in their manuscript. For papers involving computational linguistics, natural language processing (NLP), or corpus linguistics, authors are strongly encouraged to deposit their anonymized linguistic datasets, source code, annotated corpora, or trained models into public, long-term repositories such as GitHub, Zenodo, Hugging Face, or the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC). Authors must ensure that any shared public language data or speech/audio recordings have been thoroughly processed to completely protect participant anonymity, unless explicit, written consent for public data sharing was obtained.

Use of Generative AI and AI Authorship. Authors must disclose any use of generative AI tools (such as Large Language Models, automated translators, or text-generation utilities) in preparing the manuscript, specifying the tool, version, and exact purpose, within their methodology or acknowledgments section. AI tools, including ChatGPT or similar models, cannot be credited as authors or co-authors, as authorship carries legal and ethical accountabilities that machines cannot fulfill. Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, validity, and integrity of all content, including any sections or references produced with AI assistance. The use of basic spelling, grammar, and localized style checking software does not require formal disclosure.

Ethics in Publicly Available Online Language Data & Translation. Research utilizing text or speech harvested from public online sources (e.g., social media platforms, online forums, digital chat rooms) must respect user privacy. Even if the data is publicly visible, authors should evaluate potential risks to individuals. Text fragments or direct quotes that could lead to the identification of private users should be paraphrased or anonymized unless explicitly permitted by the platform's terms of service and ethical norms. Furthermore, studies in translation and interpreting must reflect professional integrity, ensuring that translations used as primary data or generated via Machine Translation (MT) tools are credited accurately, and that contextual, cultural, and situational meanings are treated with scholarly precision.

Errors in published work. Authors who discover a significant error in their published article must notify the editorial office promptly and cooperate in issuing a correction or retraction.

Duties of Reviewers

Contribution and promptness. Peer review assists editorial decisions and helps authors improve their work. Reviewers who feel unqualified to assess a manuscript, or who cannot complete a review within the agreed time, should notify the editor and decline.

Confidentiality. Manuscripts under review are confidential documents. Reviewers must not share, discuss, or make any use of a manuscript's content, and must not upload any part of a manuscript to public generative-AI tools, as doing so breaches confidentiality.

Objectivity. Reviews must be conducted objectively and expressed with supporting arguments, free of personal criticism of the author.

Conflicts of interest. Reviewers must decline any manuscript in which they have a competing interest, and must not use knowledge gained through review for personal advantage. Reviewers should not require authors to cite the reviewer's own work in order to increase its citation.

Plagiarism Screening and Handling

All submissions are screened for similarity using Turnitin. As general guidance, DJL expects an overall similarity index below 20%, interpreted by the editorial team rather than applied as an automatic threshold. Suspected plagiarism or misconduct is handled in accordance with the relevant COPE flowchart. Depending on the stage and severity, this may result in rejection, a request for clarification, correction, an expression of concern, or retraction. Authors are given an opportunity to respond before any final decision, and in serious cases the author's institution may be informed.

Corrections, Retractions, and Expressions of Concern

DJL is committed to maintaining the integrity of the published record. Where necessary, the journal will publish a correction (for significant errors that do not affect the reliability of the findings), an expression of concern (where a matter is under investigation), or a retraction (where findings are unreliable or serious misconduct is confirmed). Retracted articles remain accessible, clearly marked as retracted, with an accompanying explanatory note.

Appeals and Complaints

Authors who believe a decision was reached in error may submit a reasoned appeal to the editorial office. Appeals are reviewed by the Editor-in-Chief, whose decision is final. Complaints regarding the conduct of the journal should also be directed to the editorial office and will be handled in line with COPE guidance.

For any questions regarding these principles, or to raise an ethical concern, please contact the editorial office at editor@dibonjournals.com.