Publication ethics and malpractice statement
The journal’s policies are based on the guidelines published by COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics.
The journal is published with the assistance of the Editor’s University and partially funded through grants from various European Research Centres.

Copyrights
By submitting manuscripts for publication, authors acknowledge that their article is not published anywhere else and assign their copyrights to ©Diavlos Publishing House. Authors retain many rights under the Diavlos rights policies, which can be found at www.diavlos-books.gr. Authors are also responsible for obtaining permission to use copyright material from other sources, where necessary.
The content of the mTm Journal website can be accessed, downloaded and/or printed for personal non-commercial use. Authors may use their text elsewhere after publication provided that mTm Journal is acknowledged as the original source of publication.
mTm Journal’s outputs are therefore licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license which allows re-distribution and re-use of a licensed work on the condition that the original source is appropriately credited.

Plagiarism and data accuracy
The mTm Journal editorial team checks articles against plagiarism using plagiarism detection software. Where an article is found to have copied previous work, plagiarised other work or fails to acknowledge existing material the article is barred from publication. The editorial team also cross-checks data for accuracy and authenticity.

Editors’ responsibilities
The editorial board considers and reviews the journals policies, standards and publication mechanisms as well as editorial decisions for each journal issue. Members of the board discuss ethical issues and contentious publication matters, such as cases of plagiarism or potential retraction of articles, for future and published issues. The editorial board comprises the general editor, the managing editors, a language editor, a reviews editor and the international advisory board. They work in collaboration with the web publishing and technical team and with a promotion manager who disseminates information regarding new issues. All editors are committed to treating authors with fairness, courtesy, objectivity, honesty and transparency. They are bound to protect authors’ confidentiality and commit to declare any conflict of interest. They also aim to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies as required.

The general editor has the ultimate responsibility for the editorial process and the provision of clear guidelines regarding manuscript submission and authorship criteria. The general editor has final authority regarding editorial decisions, including accepting or rejecting an article.

The managing editors are the author’s first point of contact, inform the author of the decision-making process regarding their submission and initiate the peer-review system. They also ensure that an effective system is in place for sending articles for evaluation and communicating with authors on the evaluation schedule. The managing editors protect authors’ confidentiality, the anonymity of reviewers, keep track of all submissions and peer-review reports, collaborate with editors select appropriate referees, and ensure that reports are received and sent to authors with reasonable speed. They collaborate with the language editor who style-edit articles,

Peer-reviewers’ responsibilities
Reviewers should have no conflict of interest with respect the research which they are evaluating and agree to provide an objective and informed assessment, using the evaluation criteria provided by the peer-review manager. Reviewers are committed to confirm the academic integrity of the paper which they are reviewing to the best of their ability.

Authors’ responsibilities
Authors pledge to submit authentic research and agree to take part in a peer-review process and to revise articles as required. They agree to comply to standard requirements of academic publishing such as including secondary references in support of their own theories, displayed a bibliography at the end of their article. Should they discover errors in their work, they should notify the editor for corrections. They agree to comply with the journal’s stylesheet regarding formatting, references, and acknowledgement of financial support if relevant. They are aware that plagiarism, the inclusion of fraudulent data, and previous publication of their research in another book or journals, including in another language, would lead to the retraction of their article.

Guidelines for retracting articles
The general editor will contact the author in case of the potential retraction of an article. An article will be considered for retraction in the interest of academic integrity in the following cases:
  - the article content provides substantial false or unreliable information which cannot be corrected either through fraud or genuine error
  - the article was previously published elsewhere
  - the article plagiarises previously published information.
Retracted articles will be removed from the journal’s site and a notice of retraction posted on the issue’s table of contents.