The Editorial Board of the TARE journal comprises Editor-in-Chief, National Editorial Board, and International Editorial Advisory Board. Editor-in-Chief remains the chairperson of the board, hence allowed to take the final decision in any regard.
The formation of the Editorial Board and the International Editorial Advisory Board is done through incorporating global experts with excellent academic track record and expertise in the journal subject. There is no restriction on the number of the Editorial Board members and the International Editorial Advisory Board. The Editorial Board and the International Editorial Advisory Board members must qualify the following major facts:
All Editorial Board members must obey the direction provided by the Editor-in-Chief of the journal.
Once the plagiarism check is completed every article will be assigned to an Editorial Board Member according to their expertise to check the suitability for publication and further improvement before sending to reviewers. It is expected that the assigned member will take up the assignment at the earliest possible time. If he or she wants to deny the assignment due to some personal reason, that should also be informed to the Editor-in-Chief at the earliest possible convenience.
The assigned member should not have any conflict of interest with any assignment, if so then he or she should decline the assignment stating the proper reason to the Editor-in-Chief.
Authorship offers credit for the contributions of a researcher to a study and carries accountability. Authors are expected to fulfil the criteria below.
adapted from McNutt et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Feb 2018, 201715374; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1715374115; licensed under CC BY 4.0):
An author is expected to have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data, or the creation of new software used in the work, or have drafted the work or substantively revised it;
AND to have approved the submitted version (and any substantially modified version that involves the author's contribution to the study);
AND to have agreed on both to be personally accountable for the author's own contributions and even ones in which the author was not personally involved, are appropriately investigated, resolved, and the resolution documented in the literature, to ensure that questions related to the accuracy and/or integrity of any part of the work.
TARE encourages collaboration with colleagues in the locations where the research is conducted, and expects their inclusion as co-authors when they fulfil all authorship criteria as described above. Contributors who do not meet all criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgements section.
TARE does not require all the contributing authors of a research paper to sign the cover letter upon the submission, nor do they impose an order on the list of authors.
Submission to TARE is taken by the publication to mean that all the listed authors have agreed to all of the contents. The corresponding (submitting) author is responsible for having ensured that this agreement has been reached, and for managing all communication between the publication and all co-authors, before and after publication.
TARE uses double-blind review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process.
To facilitate this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give away their identity. To help with this preparation please ensure the following when submitting manuscripts to TARE:
Editors, authors and reviewers are required to keep confidential all details of the editorial and peer review process on submitted manuscripts. Unless otherwise declared as a part of open peer review, the peer review process is confidential and conducted anonymously; the identities of reviewers are not released. Reviewers must maintain the confidentiality of manuscripts. Regardless of whether a submitted manuscript is eventually published, correspondence with the journal, referees' reports and other confidential material must not be published, disclosed or otherwise publicized without prior written consent. Reviewers should be aware that it is our policy to keep their names confidential and that we do our utmost to ensure this confidentiality. We cannot, however, guarantee to maintain this confidentiality in the face of a successful legal action to disclose identity. TARE reserves the right to contact funders, regulatory bodies, journals and the authors’ institutions in cases of suspected research or publishing misconduct.
It is difficult to specify a threshold at which a financial interest becomes significant. Therefore the journal offers one possible practical alternative guideline: "Any undeclared competing financial interests that could embarrass you were to become publicly known after your work was published."
We do not consider diversified mutual funds or investment trusts to constitute a competing financial interest.
Non-financial competing interests can take different forms, including personal or professional relations with organizations and individuals. We would encourage authors and referees to declare any unpaid roles or relationships that might have a bearing on the publication process. Examples of non-financial competing interests include (but are not limited to):
Authors must disclose and specify any competing interest during the submission process, via declarations in the manuscript submission system. The corresponding author is responsible for providing a declaration on behalf of all authors.
At the time of submission, authors must list all competing interests relevant to the submitted research. Examples may include but are not limited to:
The TARE journal invites peer-reviewers to exclude themselves in cases where there is a significant conflict of interest, financial or otherwise. We ask peer-reviewers to inform the editors of any related interests, including financial interests as defined above, that might be perceived as relevant. Editors will consider these statements when weighing reviewers' recommendations.
All editorial staff of the TARE journal are required to declare to their employer (Faculty of Agriculture, University of Ruhuna) any interests, financial or otherwise that might influence, or be perceived to influence, their editorial practices. Failure to do so is a disciplinary offence.
These editorial board members and external editors are required to declare any competing interests and may be excluded from the peer review process if a competing interest exists.
In addition, they should exclude themselves from handling manuscripts in cases where there is a competing interest. This may include but is not limited to having previously published with one or more of the authors, and sharing the same institution as one or more of the authors.
Where an editorial board member or external editor is on the author list they must declare this in the competing interests section on the submitted manuscript. If they are an author or have any other competing interest regarding a specific manuscript, a member of the editorial board will be assigned to assume responsibility for overseeing peer review. These submissions are subject to the same review process as any other manuscript.
Editorial board members and external editors are welcome to submit papers to the journal. These submissions are not given any priority over other manuscripts, and editorial board member or external editor status has no bearing on editorial consideration.
The authors have the right to complain and ask for an explanation if they perceive any misconduct in any applicable policies and ethical guidelines. The authors can raise their complaints by submitting a letter to tare.agricc@gmail.com.
All the complaints regarding delinquencies in the work processes are investigated according to the prevailing publication ethics practices.
Once a complaint is received, at first, an acknowledgement is sent by the Editor-in-Chief to the complainant with the assurance that appropriate action will be taken on the complaint.
The investigation process is initiated by the Journal Editorial Board. After the investigation is over, a decision is taken in and the same is forwarded to the concerned author/scholar through his/her submitted email. We consider complaints as an opportunity to enhance our existing Manuscript Processing System. All the received complaints are dealt with in a polite, impartial and timely manner.
The journal of Tropical Agricultural Research and Extension is available for LOCKSS harvesting through the SLJOL platform (https://tare.sljol.info/), to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.
See: LOCKSS harvesting start page
The journal strongly encourages that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers and to provide a statement of Data availability in their article. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found, including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. Data availability statements can also indicate whether data are available on request from the authors and where no data are available, if appropriate.
Data Availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):