PARKS Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement 

PARKS is committed to ensuring ethics in publication and quality of articles. PARKS editors and publishers support COPE’s Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors. Conformance to standards of ethical publishing behaviour is expected of all parties: authors, editors and reviewers.

Authors: should present content of a consistently high professional standard and all claims must be verifiable. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behaviour and are unacceptable. Papers should be objective and comprehensive. Authors should ensure that their work is entirely original, and if the work and/or words of others have been used, this has been appropriately referenced. Plagiarism in all its forms is considered unethical publishing behaviour and is unacceptable. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behaviour and is unacceptable. Authors should not submit articles describing essentially the same research to more than one journal. The corresponding author should ensure that there is a full consensus of all co-authors in approving the final version of the paper and its submission for publication.

Editors: should evaluate manuscripts exclusively on the basis of their contribution to the stated objectives of PARKS (see guidelines for authors). Editors must not use unpublished information in the editor’s own research without the express written consent of the author. Editors should take reasonable measures to respond when complaints have been presented concerning a submitted manuscript or published paper.

Reviewers: should treat any manuscripts received for review as confidential documents. Information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage. Reviews should be conducted objectively (as per reviewers’ guidance circulated with every review request) and observations should be formulated clearly with supporting arguments, so authors can use them for improving their paper. Any selected reviewer who feels unqualified to review a manuscript should notify the editor. Reviewers should inform the editors if they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative or other relationships or connections with any of the authors or institutions connected to papers they have been asked to review; the editors will decide whether any conflict will impact the objective review of the paper.

Version 1: 2014