1. Introduction

The ethical policies of the Journal of Transportation Infrastructures Engineering are in accordance with the principles of the International Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE).

Dear researchers, you can access the detailed principles of the International Committee on Publication Ethics through the following address:

http://publicationethics.org

2. Duties and Responsibilities of Authors

•  The submitted articles must be in line with the goals of the journal and the compiled topics and have originality and innovation and the results of the authors' research.
• The articles submitted by the authors should not be previously published in a journal or conference or under review.
• All authors must be aware of and consent to submit articles to this journal.
• Declare any conflicts of interest.
  Check that all authors meet authorship criteria and ensure that appropriate approvals have been made to the manuscript.
• Include appropriate funding statements in the manuscript
• The discovery of any plagiarism in the articles will lead to its non-acceptance (at any stage) and the consequences will be directed at the authors.
• Authors are obliged to inform the journal immediately whenever they notice an error in their work

- Policies on authorship and contributorship: Only persons who meet authorship criteria should be listed as authors in the manuscript as they must be able to take public responsibility for the content including: (i) made significant contributions to the conception, design, execution, data acquisition, or analysis/interpretation of the study; (ii) drafted the manuscript or revised it critically for important intellectual content; and (iii) have seen and approved the final version of the manuscript and agreed to its submission for publication. All persons who made substantial contributions to the work reported in the manuscript (such as technical help, writing and editing assistance, general support) but do not meet the criteria for authorship must not be listed as an author, but in the "Acknowledgements" should be after their written permission. to be named has been obtained. The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate coauthors (according to the above definition) and no inappropriate coauthors are included in the author list and verify that all coauthors have seen and approved the final version of the manuscript and agreed to its submission for publication.

- Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest: Authors should at the earliest stage possible (generally by submitting a disclosure form at the time of submission and including a statement in the manuscript) disclose any conflicts of interest that might be construed to influence the results or their interpretation. Examples of potential conflicts of interest that should be disclosed include financial ones such as honoraria, educational grants or other funding, participation in speakers’ bureaus, membership, employment, consultancies, stock ownership, or other equity interest, and paid expert testimony or patent-licensing arrangements, as well as non-financial ones such as personal or professional relationships, affiliations, knowledge or beliefs in the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. All sources of financial support for the work should be disclosed (including the grant number or other reference number, if any).

- Data access and sharing: Authors may be asked to provide the raw data of their study together with the manuscript for editorial review and should be prepared to make the data publicly available if practicable. In any event, authors should ensure accessibility of such data to other competent professionals for at least 10 years after publication (preferably via an institutional or subject-based data repository or other data center), provided that the confidentiality of the participants can be protected and legal rights concerning proprietary data do not preclude their release.

3. Responsibilities of The journal

- Identification of and Dealing with Allegations of Misconduct

• If during any of the submission, review, edition or publication stages or after them, one of the following misconducts has been established, beyond doubt it is considered unethical ‘research and publication misconduct’ and the journal reserves the right to pursue legal action.
• Fabrication: defined as reporting inaccurate contents and presenting fabricated results or data instead of experimental data and studies or personal findings. Recording matters which have not been materialized or exchanging results of different studies are examples of this violation.
• Falsification: defined as recording and presenting the results of a research in a way that the details of the conducted research or the process of data collection is manipulated, or some data is removed or modified, or some insignificant results are magnified to cover more important facts (juicy quotes) so that the results of the research follow a certain aim or the presented results are not questioned.
• Plagiarism: defined as quotes that are taken near-verbatim from others’ thoughts and words, copying the expression of ideas, similarity in the structure of writing or presenting others’ ideas and results without proper citation, or introducing it as an authentic scientific research.
• Academic ghostwriting: which means hiring one or several authors to conduct the research and having it published under one’s own name after minor modifications.
• Unauthorized affiliation: defined as unfounded affiliation claim of the author(s) to an institute, organization, and educational research center or group which has not had a direct role in the research.
• Resubmission of an article, duplicate submission, including an honorary author or removing an original author

- The process of investigating “research and publication misconduct”:

In cases where the magazine proves any violation of ethical principles, the following actions should be taken:

1. The first step taken by the editor-in-chief is to inform the editorial board in a suitable manner and send a written notice to the corresponding author and request an explanation while maintaining a neutral and non-judgmental attitude.
2. If the author’s justification is unacceptable and it appears to be a serious case of misconduct, the editorial board will be informed and after deliberation, the committee will determine how serious the situation is and whether the author should be banned from future article submissions.
3. If the violation is minor, in consultation with the editorial board, the editor-in-chief will send a letter of reprimand to the author to remind them of the publication policies of the journal. If the article has been published, the author will be asked by the editor to publish an apology letter in the journal in order to rectify the report.
4. A notice will be sent to the corresponding author and any work done by this author who was responsible for the violation under investigation or the co-authors will be rejected.
5. The author will be prohibited from cooperation with the journal as a member of the editorial board or a reviewer.
6. In critical cases, a formal notice will be sent to the organization related to the authors and the authors will be prohibited from publishing in the journal for five years.
7. In serious cases of violation, a formal apology will be published in the journal and will be attached to the online version of the article. The online article will also be dated and marked under the title “apology”.

4. Duties and Responsibilities of The Editor in chief and Editorial board

• The editor in chief is responsible for deciding whether or not to publish an article in this journal.
• The editor in chief and editorial board of this journal are committed to keep the received articles confidential until their publication.
• The editor in chief and editorial board of this journal are committed to maintaining the anonymity of the reviewers and authors.
• The editor in chief and editorial board of this journal are obliged to review the received articles in terms of their compliance with the approved policies and laws of the journal. If an article does not have this principle, it will be removed from the agenda of the journal.
• The editor in chief and editorial board of this journal are committed to have an unbiased view of the received articles without personal opinions.
• Articles will be included in the agenda regardless of ethnic, racial, religious, regional issues and only based on scientific content and compliance with the rules of the journal.
• In the peer review process, reviewers and authors cannot see each other's names and details.
• The editor in chief and editorial board of this journal are obliged to comply with all the rules of the journal and the higher laws of the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology regarding publications.
• Unpublished transcripts will not be used by the editorial board or other members for personal purposes.

5. Duties and Responsibilities of Reviewers

• After accepting the reviewing of the article, the reviewers are obliged to send the result of the reviewing to the journal at the appointed time.
• Reviewers are required to review the article only based on scientific, technical and specialized content and not to contribute their personal and ideological interests in it.
• The reviewers are obliged to inform the journal of the misconduct of the authors in the articles, conflicts, copying of the whole or part of the text from other articles without respecting the copyright rights.

6. Journal’s policy on intellectual property

All intellectual property policies, including copyright and publishing licenses, are described below:

License terms

The definition of the Creative Commons CC BY License, as stated on the Creative Commons website, outlines its terms and condition as below:

"This license lets others distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation. This is the most compatible of licenses for maximum publication and use of licensed materials."

 Copyright Policy

Under license (CC-BY 4.0), copyright in any article published by Journal of Transportation Infrastructures Engineering is retained by the author(s), but allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, distribute, and copy the content as long as the original authors and source are cited properly. Authors retain unrestricted copyrights and publishing rights such as the right to reuse, distribute, republish, etc.

7. Policy on complaints and appeals

If the authors disagree with the editorial decision on their manuscripts, they have a right to appeal. Authors who wish to appeal an editorial decision should contact the Editor-in-Chief of the Transportation Infrastructure Engineering. In such cases the Editor-in-Chief will review the manuscript, the editorial and peer reviewers' comments and gives his/her decision for accepting or rejecting a manuscript. Editor-in-Chief may, if so required, send the manuscript to a new handling editor for a fresh editorial review and to new reviewer for further peer reviewing. In such case, the final decision maker will be the Editorial board of the journal.

- How to Make a Complaint against the Staff of Journal, Editorial Board or Publisher:

The procedure to make a complaint is easy. The complaint can be made by writing an e-mail. Please email to: JTIE@semnan.ac.ir

All complaints will be acknowledged within three working days.

8. policies on data sharing and reproducibility
Authors may archive the final published version of their articles in personal or institutional repositories immediately after publication.

9. Post-Publication Discussions

This journal allows post-publication Discussions through "Send letter to the Editor-In-Chief on journal’s site. Our mechanisms for correcting, revising or retracting articles after publication depends on the content of the received comment and must useful and applicable for readers/authors.

- Correction and retraction policy

The corrections must be made by the author during the revision step.

For Adding or Removing  a new author to manuscript should be requested from the corresponding author and all authors must signature it.

 * Please bear in mind that:

Adding or Removing  a new author to manuscript is possible before acceptance and publication.

Adding or Removing a new author to manuscript is impossible after acceptance and publication.

- Deceased Authors:

The policies of JTIE in the case of deceased authors are as follows:

Before acceptance of the manuscripts The name of the deceased author can be removed from the manuscript according to the agreement of all of the authors. This decision is depended on the contribution of the deceased author and the final decision needs the approval of the editor of JTLE.

If the deceased author is the corresponding of the submitted manuscript, it is necessary to change the corresponding author. The new corresponding author must be selected with the consent of all authors.

After acceptance of the manuscripts removing or adding the name of the deceased author is not possible.

The authors can change the deceased corresponding author after acceptance. The new corresponding author must be selected with the consent of all authors.

It should be noted that the name of the deceased author should be mentioned in the footnote of the paper.

This Journal retracts publication of article if:

• They have clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of major error (e.g., miscalculation or experimental error), or as a result of fabrication (e.g., of data) or falsification (e.g., image manipulation).
• It constitutes plagiarism.
• The findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper attribution to previous sources or disclosure to the editor, permission to republish, or   justification (i.e., cases of redundant publication).
• It contains material or data without authorisation for use.
• Copyright has been infringed or there is some other serious legal issue (e.g., libel, privacy).
• It reports unethical research.
• It has been published solely on the basis of a compromised or manipulated peer review process.
• The author(s) failed to disclose a major competing interest (aka, conflict of interest) that, in the view of the editor, would have unduly affected interpretations of the work or recommendations by editors and peer reviewers.