Redundant/Duplicate Publications
About the Journal
The journal started in 1998 as one of the earliest journals in the Davao region, formerly called the Davao Oriental State College of Science and Technology (DOSCST) Research Journal, which was conceptualized to be a platform for local and regional researchers in the Davao region to publish their works. In recent times, this has changed, and all contents of the previous issues of this journal have been made available online for further utilization in other research, policies, as well as for evidence-based decision-making. The journal is now fully online and published by the office of the Journal Publication Unit of the Davao Oriental State University (DOrSU). The journal adheres to the strictest core values of research and publication as it endeavors to follow the COPE guidelines in its editorial process (https://publicationethics.org/core-practices).
Aims and Scope of the Journal
The Davao Research Journal (DRJ) publishes peer-reviewed articles of original investigations not published elsewhere except as a brief abstract in a scientific meeting, proceedings, or symposium. It aims to publish original articles on applied or scientific research in Agriculture, Life Sciences, Environmental Science, Fisheries, Linguistics, Pedagogy and Education, Social Sciences, and Humanities that directly or indirectly affect communities, students, and researchers. It aims to provide an avenue for experts and scientists in their fields of study to share and discuss their high-quality research.
Publication Process
The DRJ uses the Open Journal System, which is an open-source journal management and publishing software developed, supported, and freely distributed by the Public Knowledge Project under the General Public Licence (GNU). All articles received through the DRJ website are evaluated by members of the Editorial Team for preliminary checking based on the aims and scopes of the journal. The submission can be rejected without resorting to an external peer review process if the manuscript is below the required level of quality, lacks adherence to the submission guidelines, or does not follow the required ethics consideration for publication, which includes evidence of plagiarism or fraud. Manuscripts that pass the initial stage of the evaluation process are then submitted to more than two peer reviewers who are specialists in the field and evaluated under the "double-blind" peer review system. The peer reviewers must not belong to the same institution where the article came. The peer reviewers assess the quality of the paper based on their conceptual rigor, academic relevance, originality, and clarity of presentation. Once the reviewed paper is returned by the peer reviewers, the Editor-in-Chief will decide based on the decision of the peer reviewers to accept or reject the authors' works and then send the paper back to the authors for minor revision, major revision, or rejection, depending on the reviewers' comments and decision. Once the paper is revised by the authors and sent back to the journal together with the answers to the questions, the Editor-in-Chief will decide on its final acceptance. Once the Editor-in-Chief decides in favor of its acceptance, the authors will receive a certificate of acceptance. Then the article goes to the production stage, e.g., proofreading, plagiarism checking, correction of style, design, layout, and publication.
Publication Frequency
The Davao Research Journal was initially published as an annual from 1998 to 2020 and then as a semi-annual publication from 2021 to 2023, which comes out around June and December. In 2024, because of increasing submissions to the journal, the Editorial Board decided to change the publication frequency to a quarterly basis, coming out every March, June, September, and December.
Peer Review Process
This journal employs a double-blind peer review system, where authors are unaware of the peer reviewers and vice versa. Once the Managing Editor receives submitted papers, these are acknowledged and then checked for formatting, rigor, or novelty to be published in the journal. If the paper is deemed publishable and requires additional changes, the authors are asked to make the necessary revisions before it is sent for peer review. After the peer review of the evaluators, the paper is sent back to the journal for acceptance with no revision, acceptance with minor revision, acceptance with major revision, or rejection. In the case of revision, the authors are asked to revise their papers based on the comments of the reviewers, and once the manuscript meets all the requirements of the peer reviewers, this will be checked by the Editor-in-Chief for publication. In the case that the article is rejected, and does not meet the minimum standards for publication, the judgment of the peer reviewers and with the concurrence of the Editor-in-Chief, will be final. In the case that an accepted paper took time to be revised, the authors' paper will be scheduled for another issue or volume, as it did not meet the deadline for production. If the authors meet the deadline for production and make the necessary corrections, then the article will be published online.
Notification
The Editorial Team will respond promptly to email correspondence made by authors and reviewers. The journal will provide notices to the authors on the status of their manuscripts once the peer review results are available.
Article Processing Charges (APC)
The Davao Research Journal (DRJ) is freely available online, and its publication is subsidized by the Davao Oriental State University (DOrSU), with no APC fee required during this time.
Publication Ethics
The Davao Research Journal (DRJ) is committed to upholding the highest standards of research ethics and publication integrity. All manuscripts submitted to DRJ must adhere to ethical principles in the conduct of research involving human participants, animals, and the environment.
1. Human Subjects Research
Research involving human participants must comply with recognized ethical standards such as the Declaration of Helsinki and relevant national guidelines. Authors must clearly state in their manuscripts that the study protocol was reviewed and approved by an appropriate Institutional Review Board (IRB) or Ethics Review Committee.
Informed consent must be obtained from all participants (or their legal guardians, in the case of minors or vulnerable groups) before participation. Authors must explain how participant confidentiality and privacy were protected throughout the study.
For studies involving interviews, surveys, or focus group discussions, participants must be informed about the purpose of the study, their right to withdraw at any time, and the measures taken to ensure anonymity.
2. Anonymity and Confidentiality
Identifiable personal information (e.g., names, photos, personal identifiers) must not be published unless explicit written consent has been obtained. Authors must describe in their manuscripts the steps taken to safeguard anonymity, including data handling and reporting practices.
3. Research Involving Animals
Studies involving animals must comply with established international guidelines for the ethical treatment of animals in research (e.g., ARRIVE Guidelines, OECD Principles). Authors must state whether an institutional or national committee approved the research protocol and confirm that animal suffering was minimized.
4. Data Protection and Integrity
Authors are responsible for ensuring that data are collected, stored, and reported honestly and transparently.
Fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or manipulation of data are considered serious ethical violations and will result in rejection or retraction. Where appropriate, authors should make anonymized data available for verification, in line with open science principles and institutional requirements.
5. Author Responsibility and Declaration
All authors must include an Ethics Statement in their manuscripts, explicitly confirming compliance with ethical standards relevant to their study. Manuscripts without sufficient ethical clearance or documentation will not be considered for peer review.
Redundant/Duplicate Publications
The journal does not allow the publication of redundant manuscripts that have already been published elsewhere, whether in local, national, or international journals. This practice constitutes a violation of the code of conduct for ethical research practices, and any type of submitted manuscript that has been flagged as redundant or very similar to another published article will be rejected. The use of software to aid in detecting such redundancies or copies of another work will be utilized for this purpose.
Data Fabrication and Falsification
The journal has zero tolerance for fabricated or falsified data, and this constitutes a failure in ethics or research integrity for any researcher who is aspiring for future research careers. Any paper that has been found to violate this policy after being flagged and investigated by the Editorial Team will be rejected, or if already published, will be retracted.
Plagiarism Policy
Plagiarism constitutes a failure in ethics or research integrity. Plagiarism can occur through a lack of proper citation, review, or awareness about the substance of ideas that are being used in the paper. To prevent plagiarism, all accepted papers will be checked by a plagiarism checker to give proper recognition to the authors of the original ideas by attributing their works. A similarity percentage of 15-20% is acceptable provided that these are only about the author's affiliation addresses, or very similar titles or methods used, but different locale of the study, and at a different time that this has been conducted. The journal reserves the right to remove any article that contains plagiarism, manipulated data, or results.
Withdrawal Policy
All submitted articles for peer review should be allowed to finish the process to avoid hindering the work of peer reviewers. Nonetheless, if the authors decide not to pursue its publication, they are advised to write to the Editor-in-Chief a letter of withdrawal, justifying their reasons for withdrawing their paper from the journal.
Policy on Retraction
The journal reserves the right to retract any paper that has been examined as fraudulent or that does not conform to COPE practices for ethical research. The journal Editorial Team will ensure that all papers accepted are not authored by fake researchers or fake authors by thoroughly examining these papers with the aid of available software technology.
Authorship is both a privilege and a responsibility for all the writers of a submitted paper, and they must therefore adhere to a very high level of research ethics and integrity. This journal conforms to the following definition of who must be included as an author of a paper based on the definition of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) of who qualifies to be included as an author:
- Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work;
- Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
- Final approval of the version to be published.
- Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
The following works alone do not qualify as part of an authorship:
- Funding acquisition for research or funding used to transport researchers;
- General supervision of a research group or general administrative support for a project
- Photo-editing, writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading do not qualify as authorship.
All submitted papers must follow the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) guideline, where authors must recognize the roles that they have contributed to the crafting of the research paper being submitted. This proper attribution will help minimize or remove courtesy authorships in submitted papers and will help reduce authorship disputes. Credit statements must be provided during the submission process (under the section Author Contributions).
Sample CRediT author statement based on the initials of authors:
EDM: Conceptualization, Methodology, Data Visualization;
LLS: Methodology, Data curation, Writing- Original draft preparation;
ISM: Visualization, Investigation;
MAC: Supervision;
ESA: Software, Validation;
RPB: Writing- Reviewing and Editing;
LDS: Funding Acquisition, Project administration.
Conflict of Interest
All authors must disclose any conflict of interest that might influence their objectivity or the paper. Conflicts of interest are defined as financial, personal, social, or other interests that can directly or indirectly influence the author’s writings or submission of the manuscript. If there is no conflict of interest, then the authors must state it explicitly, both in the cover letter and the manuscript (under the section Conflicts of Interest). A potential conflict of interest includes the following examples: a) The suggested reviewer has a substantial direct or indirect financial interest in the subject matter of the manuscript; b) One of the authors belong to the same institute as the suggested reviewer; c) The suggested reviewer has an on-going research collaboration or grants with one of the authors; d) The suggested reviewer is a friend of one of the authors.
Licensing Information
Davao Research Journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Under the Open Access Policy, appropriate attribution can be provided by simply citing the original article (e.g., Laureano, L., Simo, Wilkin, Nanual, B., Sacay, A.-J., & Dongiapon, D. (2022). RDInfratech: An Online Repository of Species and Research for Mt. Hamiguitan Range. Davao Research Journal, 13(2), 67–77. https://doi.org/10.59120/drj.v13i2.95).
If you have a question about the license, please email editor.drj@dorsu.edu.ph.
Open Access Policy
The Davao Research Journal adheres to the 'open access policy', which means that once published online, the published original articles, review papers, policy briefs, research notes, letters and commentaries, viewpoints, book reviews, and editorials are freely available on the internet. Allowing anyone to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purposes, without any financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inextricably linked to obtaining access to the web itself. The only restriction on replication and distribution should be to give contributors control over the quality of their work and the right to be properly credited and cited by others.
Davao Research Journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Copyright Notice
This is an open-access journal, which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author.
Self-archiving policy
The Davao Research Journal permits self-archiving, and authors are encouraged to deposit their final published PDF in their institutional repository or any suitable repository on publication. Moreover, authors are encouraged to provide a link from the deposited version to the URL of the journal website, with the online published version on the journal website clearly identified as the definitive version of the record.
Repository Policy
Since this journal is fully open-access, authors are highly encouraged to deposit their data, software, and computer codes underlying reported findings should be deposited in proper public repositories, unless already provided as part of the published article. Repositories may be either subject-specific repositories that accept specific types of structured data and/or software, or cross-disciplinary generalist repositories that accept multiple data and/or software types. In the case of field-specific standards for data or software deposition, authors are required to comply with these standards. In the case where no available community repositories exist, institutional repositories that adhere to unrestricted use or public domain, and that adhere to best practices pertaining to responsible sharing, digital preservation, proper citation, and openness are also deemed suitable repositories.
