Civil and Geoengineering Letters is committed to maintaining the highest standards of publication ethics, research integrity, editorial independence, and responsible scholarly communication. This Publication Ethics Statement describes the principles and procedures used by the journal to prevent, identify, investigate, and correct publication malpractice.
The journal follows the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, the COPE Core Practices, the DOAJ Transparency and Best Practice Principles, and internationally recognised standards of research and publication ethics. The journal also takes account of established publishing-ethics practices described by Elsevier and Springer Nature.
This statement applies to all manuscripts, published articles, editorials, reviews, corrections, supplementary materials, special issues, and other scholarly content handled or published by the journal.
1. Responsibilities of the Publisher and Editorial Office
The publisher and editorial office are responsible for safeguarding editorial independence, supporting editors in the fair application of journal policies, maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record, and ensuring that commercial considerations do not influence editorial decisions.
The journal will take reasonable steps to investigate credible concerns about submitted or published content. Where necessary, it may consult reviewers, editorial-board members, authors, research institutions, funders, ethics committees, or other appropriate bodies. Decisions will be based on available evidence, applicable journal policies, and relevant COPE guidance and flowcharts.
2. Editorial Independence and Fair Decision-Making
Editorial decisions are made independently and are based on academic merit, originality, methodological soundness, ethical compliance, clarity, and relevance to the journal’s aims and scope. Decisions are not influenced by nationality, ethnicity, gender, religious or political beliefs, institutional affiliation, personal relationships, advertising, sponsorship, or the payment of Article Processing Charges.
Editors must act objectively, maintain confidentiality, avoid discrimination, disclose relevant competing interests, and recuse themselves whenever a conflict could affect—or reasonably appear to affect—their judgement. In such cases, responsibility for the manuscript will be assigned to an independent editor.
3. Peer Review Ethics
Research articles are evaluated through the journal’s double-blind peer-review process and are reviewed by at least three independent reviewers with appropriate expertise in the relevant subject area. Reviewers are selected on the basis of their subject expertise, academic qualifications, and absence of relevant conflicts of interest, and are expected to provide objective, constructive, timely, and evidence-based assessments.
Reviewers must treat manuscripts as confidential, must not share or use unpublished material for personal advantage, and must disclose any competing interest that could prevent an impartial review. Reviewers must not contact authors directly concerning a submission. Suspected plagiarism, duplicate publication, data irregularities, undisclosed conflicts, or other ethical concerns must be reported confidentially to the editor.
The journal does not tolerate fabricated reviewer identities, manipulated peer review, coercive citation requests, reviewer rings, or any attempt to interfere improperly with editorial evaluation.
4. Authorship and Contributorship
Authorship must be limited to individuals who have made substantial scholarly contributions to the conception or design of the work; the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; or the drafting or substantive revision of the manuscript. Every author must approve the final version, agree to its submission and publication, and accept accountability for the integrity of the work.
The corresponding author is responsible for confirming that all eligible contributors are included, that no ineligible person has been listed, that the author order has been agreed upon, and that all authors have approved the submission. Guest, gift, honorary, purchased, and ghost authorship are prohibited.
Contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be acknowledged with their permission. Authors should describe individual contributions clearly, preferably using the CRediT Contributor Roles Taxonomy where appropriate.
Requests to add, remove, or reorder authors after submission must be explained in writing and approved by all affected authors. After acceptance or publication, such changes will be considered only in exceptional circumstances and may require a formal correction.
5. Originality, Prior Publication, and Duplicate Submission
Submitted work must be original and must not be under consideration by another journal. Authors must disclose related manuscripts, conference papers, preprints, reports, theses, datasets, or earlier publications that overlap substantially with the submission.
Redundant publication, duplicate publication, salami slicing intended to divide one study inappropriately, and undisclosed text or data recycling are not permitted. Legitimate reuse must be transparent, appropriately cited, and compliant with copyright and licensing requirements.
6. Plagiarism and Text Reuse
All submissions may be screened with plagiarism-detection software and may undergo additional editorial checks. Plagiarism includes presenting another person’s words, ideas, methods, data, images, or results without proper attribution. Self-plagiarism and excessive unattributed reuse of an author’s previously published material may also constitute unacceptable practice.
Where significant overlap or plagiarism is identified before publication, the manuscript may be rejected. Where it is identified after publication, the journal may issue a correction, expression of concern, or retraction, depending on the seriousness and effect of the problem.
7. Citation Practices and Citation Manipulation
References must be relevant, accurate, and used for legitimate scholarly purposes. Authors must not manipulate citations to increase the citation count of an author, journal, institution, or particular body of work.
Editors and reviewers must not request citations merely to increase citations to themselves, their associates, or the journal. Requests for additional references must be academically justified and directly relevant to the manuscript. Citation cartels, coercive citation, excessive self-citation, and the use of irrelevant references are prohibited.
8. Data Accuracy, Fabrication, Falsification, and Image Integrity
Authors are responsible for the accuracy, authenticity, and appropriate presentation of all data, calculations, analyses, tables, figures, maps, photographs, and supplementary materials.
Data fabrication, data falsification, selective alteration or omission of results, inappropriate statistical manipulation, and misleading modification of images are prohibited. Adjustments to images must be applied consistently and must not obscure, remove, introduce, or misrepresent information. Authors may be asked to provide original data, unprocessed images, analytical files, or other supporting records for editorial assessment.
The journal may reject a submission or correct or retract a published article when the reliability of the findings is seriously compromised, whether because of misconduct or major error.
9. Data Sharing and Reproducibility
Authors should preserve the data and materials underlying their work and, where legally, ethically, and practically possible, make them available through a trusted repository or provide them upon reasonable request. Manuscripts should contain a clear Data Availability Statement explaining where supporting data can be found or why access is restricted.
Methods, computational procedures, software, models, parameters, and analytical steps should be described with sufficient detail to permit verification and reproducibility. Restrictions relating to privacy, confidentiality, security, contractual obligations, cultural sensitivity, or intellectual property must be stated transparently.
Authors must not fabricate data-availability statements or provide inaccessible, incomplete, or misleading repository links. Persistent identifiers should be used for deposited datasets whenever available.
10. Ethical Oversight
Research involving human participants, identifiable human data, human biological materials, animals, hazardous procedures, protected environments, vulnerable communities, or other ethically sensitive matters must comply with applicable laws, institutional requirements, and internationally accepted ethical standards.
Where required, authors must provide the name of the approving ethics committee or institutional review board, the approval or exemption reference number, and an appropriate statement of informed consent. Consent for participation does not automatically constitute consent for publication of identifiable information; specific publication consent may be required.
Research involving animals must describe the relevant approval, welfare standards, and measures taken to minimise harm. The journal may request supporting documentation and may reject work that does not meet appropriate ethical standards, even where formal approval has been obtained.
11. Conflicts of Interest and Competing Interests
Authors, editors, reviewers, and editorial-board members must disclose financial and non-financial interests that could influence, or reasonably be perceived to influence, the conduct, interpretation, review, or publication of the work.
Relevant interests may include employment, consultancy, share ownership, honoraria, grants, patents, personal or professional relationships, academic competition, institutional responsibilities, political or religious commitments, and other circumstances capable of affecting impartial judgement.
Authors must include a competing-interests statement in the manuscript. The absence of competing interests must also be stated. Editors and reviewers with relevant conflicts must decline or be removed from handling the manuscript. Failure to disclose a significant conflict may lead to editorial action before or after publication.
12. Funding and Sponsor Involvement
All sources of financial and material support must be disclosed. Authors must describe the role, if any, of the funder or sponsor in study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, manuscript preparation, the decision to submit, or restrictions on publication.
Funders and sponsors must not control editorial decisions. Any contractual arrangement that prevents authors from independently analysing data or publishing legitimate findings must be disclosed to the journal.
13. Intellectual Property, Copyright, and Permissions
Authors must respect copyright, database rights, moral rights, trademarks, licences, and other applicable intellectual-property rights. Material reproduced or adapted from third-party sources—including figures, tables, maps, photographs, illustrations, questionnaires, and substantial text—must be appropriately attributed and accompanied by permission from the relevant rights holder where such permission is required.
Copyright in articles published in Civil and Geoengineering Letters is retained by the author(s). Authors grant the journal the right of first publication and agree to the publication and distribution of their article under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Under the CC BY 4.0 licence, readers and other users may copy, share, distribute, display, reproduce, and adapt the published work for any lawful purpose, including commercial use, provided that appropriate credit is given to the original author(s) and source, a link to the licence is provided, and any changes made to the original work are clearly indicated. Further information about the licence and permitted reuse is available from Creative Commons.
Authors are responsible for ensuring that all material included in their submission can lawfully be published under the journal’s licensing terms. Where third-party material is not covered by the article’s CC BY 4.0 licence, its copyright status and any applicable reuse restrictions must be clearly identified in the article.
Authors are responsible for obtaining and retaining any permissions required for the use, reproduction, or adaptation of third-party copyrighted material and must provide evidence of such permission to the Editorial Office upon request. Unauthorised use of copyrighted material may result in rejection before publication or appropriate corrective action after publication, including correction, removal, or retraction where warranted.
The journal’s copyright and licensing practices are intended to support immediate open access and lawful reuse of scholarly content in accordance with the DOAJ guidance on copyright and licensing and the Creative Commons licensing framework.
14. Confidentiality and Protection of Submitted Material
Submitted manuscripts and associated correspondence are confidential. Editors, reviewers, and editorial staff must not disclose manuscript content, author information, reviewer identities, or editorial deliberations except as required for the legitimate operation of peer review, investigation of ethical concerns, or compliance with law.
Unpublished ideas, methods, results, or data obtained through editorial handling or peer review must not be used for personal research, commercial benefit, or any other unauthorised purpose.
15. Use of Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) and AI-assisted tools cannot be listed or credited as authors because they cannot take responsibility for the work, approve the final version, disclose competing interests, or enter into publishing agreements.
Authors may use generative AI or AI-assisted tools for routine language correction, proofreading, editing, and improvement of readability, provided that such use does not alter the scientific content, meaning, interpretation, or conclusions of the work. Disclosure is not required when these tools are used solely for routine language editing. Any use of generative AI beyond routine language editing must be appropriately disclosed. Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, integrity, citations, and scientific content of their manuscripts.
Generative AI must not be cited or referenced as a source of scientific information. Authors are responsible for consulting, verifying, and citing the original and authoritative sources supporting their work.
Generative AI must not be used to fabricate, falsify, or improperly manipulate scientific content, research data, images, results, analyses, methods, conclusions, references, or citations. Where AI or automated tools form part of the research methodology, their use must be described with sufficient detail to permit appropriate editorial assessment and, where applicable, reproducibility.
Editors and reviewers must protect the confidentiality of all submitted material and must not upload manuscripts, figures, data, supplementary materials, correspondence, or peer-review reports to generative AI or other third-party automated systems where doing so could compromise confidentiality. Generative AI must not be used to generate or substitute for independent editorial assessments or peer-review reports.
Any routine use of automated tools by the journal for editorial, technical, or research-integrity purposes must be appropriately supervised by humans. Automated outputs, including those relating to text similarity, image integrity, undeclared AI use, or reviewer suggestions, will not by themselves determine an editorial decision. Final responsibility for editorial assessment and decision-making remains with the journal’s editors.
16. Allegations of Research and Publication Misconduct
The journal will consider credible allegations regardless of whether the manuscript is under review, accepted, or already published. Concerns may involve plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, authorship abuse, undisclosed conflicts, ethical violations, peer-review manipulation, citation manipulation, image manipulation, duplicate publication, paper-mill activity, or other conduct that threatens the integrity of the scholarly record.
Allegations should be sent to info@jcivilgeo.com with sufficient information and supporting evidence. The journal will acknowledge and assess the concern, preserve confidentiality as far as reasonably possible, avoid unsupported public accusations, and provide affected parties with an opportunity to respond.
The editor may request original data or documents, consult independent experts, suspend editorial processing, or contact an author’s institution, funder, ethics committee, or another journal when appropriate. The journal does not determine legal guilt or conduct institutional disciplinary proceedings, but it may take editorial action necessary to protect the literature.
Where allegations concern an editor, editorial-board member, or publisher representative, the matter will be handled by an independent person who was not involved in the original decision.
17. Complaints and Appeals
Authors, reviewers, readers, and other stakeholders may submit complaints about editorial procedures, staff conduct, publication policies, ethical handling, or published content. Complaints should be specific, supported by relevant evidence, and sent to the journal’s official email address.
Authors may appeal an editorial decision when they can demonstrate a material error, misunderstanding, procedural irregularity, undisclosed conflict, or failure to consider important evidence. Disagreement with the reviewers’ academic judgement alone is not normally sufficient.
Appeals should identify the manuscript, explain the grounds clearly, and respond to the relevant editorial and reviewer comments. The appeal will be considered by the Editor-in-Chief or an independent senior editor who was not materially involved in the disputed decision. The outcome of the appeal is final unless substantial new evidence becomes available.
Complaints about the Editor-in-Chief will be referred to an independent member of the editorial board or another suitably qualified person. No complainant will be disadvantaged merely for raising a concern in good faith.
18. Post-Publication Discussion
The journal welcomes scholarly discussion of published work through reasoned correspondence, letters to the editor, commentaries, or documented communications to the editorial office. Post-publication comments must address the content of the work, use appropriate evidence, and avoid defamatory, abusive, discriminatory, or irrelevant statements.
When a comment raises a substantive concern, the authors may be invited to respond. The journal may publish the comment and response, initiate an editorial review, request data or clarification, or take corrective action where warranted.
19. Corrections, Expressions of Concern, Retractions, and Removal
The journal is committed to correcting the scholarly record promptly and transparently. Authors who discover a significant error in a submitted or published work must inform the editorial office without delay.
A correction may be issued when an error affects part of an otherwise reliable article. An expression of concern may be issued when serious questions remain unresolved or an investigation is incomplete. A retraction may be issued when findings are unreliable because of major error or misconduct, when publication is redundant, when peer review or authorship has been manipulated, or when the work reports unethical research.
Retraction is a mechanism for correcting the literature and is not intended as punishment. Notices will state the reason for the action, identify who initiated it where appropriate, remain freely accessible, and be linked to the affected article. The original article will normally remain available and be clearly marked unless removal is required for exceptional legal, privacy, security, or public-safety reasons.
The journal follows relevant COPE Retraction Guidelines and takes account of established article correction, retraction, and removal practices.
20. Preservation of the Scholarly Record
The journal will not suppress well-founded ethical concerns merely because the conduct occurred before publication or because an author, reviewer, editor, institution, or sponsor objects to an investigation. Editorial actions will be proportionate to the reliability and integrity of the affected content.
Where an investigation concerns multiple articles or journals, the editorial office may coordinate confidentially with other editors, publishers, institutions, or appropriate bodies. Corrections and retraction notices will be designed to make the status of the scholarly record clear to readers and indexing services.
All articles published in Civil and Geoengineering Letters are made immediately and freely available on the journal website under the journal’s open-access terms. Published articles remain accessible through the journal website for as long as the journal and its publishing platform remain operational. The journal maintains its published content and associated article information as part of its commitment to ensuring continued access to the scholarly record.
In addition to the journal website, published articles are deposited, indexed, and made accessible through established external scholarly platforms, including Scientific Information Database (SID), Magiran, and CIVILICA. These external records provide additional independent routes for the discovery and continued accessibility of the journal’s published content.
21. Special Issues and Guest Editors
Special issues and other collections are subject to the same editorial, peer-review, transparency, ethical, and quality standards as regular journal content. All research articles submitted to a special issue undergo the journal’s established external peer-review process, including evaluation by at least three independent reviewers, and are clearly identified as part of the relevant special issue or collection.
Each special issue is overseen by a Supervising Editor appointed from the journal’s Editorial Team. The Supervising Editor provides editorial oversight throughout the development of the special issue, monitors compliance with the journal’s policies and standards, and oversees the work of the Guest Editors. Overall responsibility for the journal and its special issues remains with the Editors-in-Chief.
Guest Editors are appointed on the basis of their academic qualifications, subject expertise, publication record, institutional affiliation, and suitability for the proposed topic. Their credentials and relevant competing interests are reviewed before appointment. Guest Editors are required to follow the journal’s editorial, peer-review, confidentiality, conflict-of-interest, and publication-ethics policies throughout the editorial process.
Guest Editors may coordinate the academic development of the special issue and participate in the editorial handling of submissions within their area of expertise under the oversight of the Supervising Editor. They must not handle manuscripts where an actual or perceived conflict of interest could compromise editorial independence. The Supervising Editor and Editors-in-Chief may review editorial decisions, reassign manuscripts, replace a Guest Editor, reject submissions, or discontinue a special issue where the journal’s editorial, ethical, or quality standards are not met.
Manuscripts submitted by a Guest Editor, or manuscripts involving a relevant conflict of interest with a Guest Editor, are handled independently by the Supervising Editor, an Editor-in-Chief, or another suitably qualified member of the Editorial Team who has no relevant conflict of interest. The Guest Editor concerned must not participate in reviewer selection, peer-review management, editorial assessment, or the publication decision for such manuscripts.
Articles submitted by the Guest Editor(s) of a special issue must collectively constitute no more than 20% of the total articles published in that special issue. All editorial decisions are based solely on academic merit, methodological rigour, ethical compliance, and relevance to the scope of the journal and the special issue.
22. Article Processing Charges and Editorial Separation
Any Article Processing Charge is payable only after formal acceptance. Payment does not guarantee acceptance and has no influence on reviewer selection, peer review, editorial assessment, or the final decision.
Editors responsible for academic decisions must not be influenced by the journal’s financial interests. Waiver or discount requests must not affect editorial evaluation.
23. Policy Review and Updates
This Publication Ethics Statement is reviewed periodically and may be updated to reflect developments in publication ethics, research integrity, law, technology, and international best practice. The policy version displayed on the journal website applies to current editorial handling, while serious concerns about older content may also be assessed under the ethical principles in force at the time of review.
Submit Paper Open Access