Misconduct and Sanctions Policy

Environmental Reports is committed to upholding the highest standards of publication ethics. Suspected breaches of our policies, both before and after publication, as well as concerns related to research ethics, should be reported to the journal. Claimants may request anonymity.

Reporting Misconduct
Upon receiving information regarding potential misconduct, our editorial team will initiate a thorough investigation. Authors may be required to provide underlying data, images, and other supplementary materials. The journal will consult with editorial board members and may contact the authors’ institutions or employers to request an investigation.

Types of Misconduct
Misconduct includes, but is not limited to:

Duplicate submission
Fraudulent data
Plagiarism
Citation manipulation
False claims of authorship

If an article is found to violate our ethical publishing guidelines, it will be rejected.

Actions During the Review Process
If an article has been provisionally accepted and is in the ‘Online First’ stage, it will be removed from the website, and a withdrawal notice will be posted. If authors fail to respond to journal communications after review and provisional acceptance, this will also be considered a withdrawal of the article.
The journal uses creative commons’ Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license.

Actions Post-Publication
For articles already published, if misconduct is confirmed, the article will be retracted immediately in accordance with the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) Retraction Guidelines.

We adhere to COPE flowcharts for handling instances of misconduct. For more information, please visit [COPE Flowcharts](https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Flowcharts).

Sanctions
Depending on the severity of the misconduct, the following actions may be taken:
A ban on submissions for 1–3 years.
Prohibition from serving as an editor or reviewer.
Reporting the misconduct to the authors’ institutions, employers, and funding agencies.

Minor unintentional errors may be corrected through a corrigendum, while errors made by the publisher will be addressed with an erratum.