Ethics and Malpractice Policies
Gamevironments has developed policies on ethics and academic malpractice based on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Core Practices and the COPE guidelines for editors and publishers. The journal’s processes for dealing with malpractice cases are laid out in flowcharts produced by COPE.
Authorship and Contributions
Gamevironments follows the definition of authorship set out by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG): “An author is an individual who has made a genuine, identifiable contribution to the content of a research publication of text, data or software.” A “genuine, identifiable contribution” entails that an individual contributes to at least one of the following:
- “the development and conceptual design of the research project, or
- the gathering, collection, acquisition or provision of data, software or
- sources, or
- the analysis/evaluation or interpretation of data, sources and conclusions drawn from them, or
- the drafting of the manuscript.”
In addition, “all authors agree on the final version of the work to be published. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, they share responsibility for the publication. Authors seek to ensure that, as far as possible, their contributions are identified by publishers or infrastructure providers such that they can be correctly cited by users.” (DFG, Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice: Code of Conduct, 2022, p. 19)
Individuals who have contributed to the research but do not meet these criteria can be listed in the acknowledgements, with their consent.
Conflicts of Interest
Conflicts of interest must be declared along with submission of the article. A conflict of interest is defined as any financial, commercial, personal or professional relationship that may be seen to prejudice or compromise the integrity of the work.
If an author is not sure whether something constitutes a conflict of interest, they should ask the editorial team at the earliest instance.
If there is a conflict of interest that does not invalidate the work, this must be declared clearly in an endnote indexed to the article’s title.
Data Sharing
Where possible and ethical, authors should make their data freely available for reproducibility purposes according to the rules and regulations of the authors’ home institutions.
Ethical Oversight
Authors are liable for the ethical design of their studies, as gamevironments is an interdisciplinary journal and guidelines can differ from discipline to discipline. Generally speaking, gamevironments recommends the ethical guidelines of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR).
Authors are responsible for ensuring that all ethical requirements comply with the regulations of the respective home institution, e.g., the approval of an ethics board.
Authors receive a final PDF proof which they must consent to before the article can be published.
Any issues pre- or post-publication regarding ethics should be brought up with the editorial team at games2@uni-bremen.de, and they will be handled swiftly on a case-by-case basis.
Intellectual Property
When authors submit to gamevironments, they must declare that their work is original, has not been published elsewhere and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
Authors remain the copyright holder of their final work and grant permission to gamevironments and the State and University Library Bremen to store, distribute and publish their work.
Post-Publication Discussions and Corrections
Articles cannot normally be edited post-publication. It is important that authors check their final proofs carefully, and are aware that nothing can be changed after publication. The author(s) are fully responsible for their content, are required to sign a declaration of consent regarding this and cannot expect post-publication corrections on a regular basis.
However, in very exceptional cases corrections can be made. For instance, if deanonymised data subjects rescind their consent to be deanonymised, this request will be honoured in cases of complaints or misconducts that have been reviewed and found to be relevant. Corrections will be accompanied with a ‘Notice of Correction’ which states concisely and clearly what has been altered in the new version of the article.
More serious cases, such as plagiarism or serious errors in data, may result instead in retraction of the article. The retraction will be accompanied with a ‘Notice of Retraction’ on the website and the editorial team will send a notice to the offender’s institution.
Requests for post-publication corrections can be made by the corresponding author, or the directly affected party (for example, a participant rescinding their consent to be deanonymised). Requests will be assessed by the managing editor and the editors-in-chief, who will will examine the case and assess whether the allegation is substantive enough to necessitate a post-publication correction or a retraction. In exceptional cases, the editorial board may also be consulted.
The author and any other affected parties will be notified as soon as any corrections or retractions are live on the website.
Complaints and Appeals
Complaints to the journal can be sent to games2@uni-bremen.de. The managing editor will decide if the complaint has substance. If the complaint concerns the managing editor, then the complaint will be immediately passed onto the editorial team, who will decide whether the complaint has substance.
If a complaint is deemed to have substance, then the editorial team will act depending on the nature of the complaint in discussion with the complainant. The editorial team may decide to contact the editorial board.
