NIJEST is committed to promoting the highest practise of ethical publication. Allegations of misconduct will be thoroughly reviewed, as discussed in the related sections below, and in compliance with the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
All articles submitted are subject to peer examination and are required to conform to academic quality requirements. If approved by the editor, submissions will be considered by anonymous peer reviewers who are experts in related fields.
The author(s) shall confirm that the entire work is original and unpublished; it is submitted only to the Nigerian Journal of Environmental Sciences and Technology (NIJEST) and all text, data, figures/tables or other illustrations included in the work are completely original and unpublished, and these have not been previously published or submitted elsewhere in any form or media whatsoever. The author(s) shall also confirm that the paper contains no material that would violate the copyright or any other right of any other person. The authors will obtain and include with the paper where applicable written permission from any respective copyright owners for the use of any textual, illustrative, or tabular materials that have been previously published or are otherwise copyrighted and owned by third parties. All copyrighted material shall be clearly identified and properly acknowledged within the text.
NIJEST uses a third party software to detect submissions overlapping with published and submitted work. If the article do not exceed a limiting similarity level (15%), the articles may need to be corrected otherwise, the article will be withdrawn. Articles considered to have been plagiarised, whether before or after publication in NIJEST, would be retracted and the author(s) may face sanctions and barred from submitting articles to NIJEST in the future.
Duplicate publication is not acceptable in NIJEST. Authors must avoid duplicate publication, which is reproducing verbatim content from their other publications. The NIJEST Copyright Transfer Agreement, must be submitted before publication, and all authors must sign that the work under review is completely original and unpublished, and have not been previously published or submitted elsewhere in any form or media whatsoever. Anyone listed as an author in the paper should have made a substantial, direct, intellectual contribution to the work.
Submitted or published articles that are found to have fabricated or falsified the results, including the manipulation of images, may incur sanctions, and published articles may be retracted.
When absolutely necessary, authors should declare where image manipulations have been made. Original unprocessed images should be submitted alongside any images that have been processed.
For articles involving studies on human participants, it is recommended that authors include a document outlining the ethics committee and the process that lead to the approval of the research and also demonstrates that the research conforms to relevant and appropriate standards.
Authors will be required to confirm that ethical and legal approval was obtained prior to the start of the study and state the name of the body giving the approval. Authors should also state whether experiments were performed in accordance with relevant institutional and national guidelines and regulations.
Anyone listed as an author in the paper should have made a substantial, direct, intellectual contribution to the work. The authors may provide a short description of each author’s contribution in an “Authorship Contribution Statement” at the end of the manuscript.
NIJEST requires corresponding authors to confirm they have received written authorization from all their co-authors for publication of the article when signing the NIJEST Copyright Form and agree on the order in which their names will be listed in the manuscript. NIJEST shall refer to the flowcharts from COPE and “Advice on how to spot authorship problems”[1].
Authors should not engage in excessive self-citation of their own work. NIJEST editors and peer reviewers should not ask authors to add citations to their papers unless there is a strong scholarly rationale for doing so.
Authors are required to list all funding sources in an Acknowledgments section. Other sources of support should be clearly identified in the Acknowledgments section of the manuscript. For example, these might include funding for open-access publication, funding for writing or editorial assistance, or provision of experimental materials.
All manuscripts submitted shall be subjected to the “Double Blind Peer-Review” process. NIJEST ensures that the reviewers are experts in related fields and maintain confidentiality relating to the peer-review process. Peer reviewers shall disclose any conflicts of interest when they respond to an invitation to review and also when they submit their review.
Authors are allowed to nominate up to three peer reviewers or to request that particular individuals do not peer review their paper when submitting their manuscript.
All peer reviewers are required to:
The review process in NIJEST shall follow the sequence given below:
→ Author submit manuscript.
→ NIJEST Editorial Board assigns a Managing Editor for the manuscript from among the Editorial Board members.
→ Managing Editor send manuscript with author names and affiliations blinded out to nominated peer reviewers or to selected peer reviewers based on their expertise (three reviewers required).
→ Peer reviewers confirm acceptance to review (if a reviewer declines, another reviewer is selected).
→ Reviewer completes review and send review report with decision (publish as it is, revision required or reject) back to the Managing Editor.
→ Managing Editor carries out quality control on reviewer’s report and recommendations for objectivity and professionalism.
→ Managing Editor sends reviewer’s reports from all reviewers to the corresponding author and all co-authors (where contact details are provided) – A positive response is required from at least 2 of the 3 peer reviewers for the paper to be processed further for publication.
→ Authors are required to respond to the reviewers’ comments (where revisions are required) within 14 days (or write to the Managing Editor if this will take longer).
→ Authors send the revised manuscripts with a cover letter outlining point-by-point how they have responded to the reviewers’ comments.
→ Managing Editor sends the authors response and the revised paper to the reviewers for checks whether all issues have been addressed.
→ Reviewers send their decision (publish as it is or further revisions required) to the Managing Editor.
→ This process is repeated till the paper reaches a state satisfactory to all parties (authors, reviewers and editors).
→ The final revised paper is then sent for post-processing, DOI is assigned and the paper is uploaded online on the current issue.
→ Hard copy of the issue is prepared and sent to authors when the limit (number of articles or publication date) for the issue has been reached.
NIJEST shall target 30 working days from submission of the article to the time when an article is first available online. NIJEST shall work towards ensuring that publications avoid unnecessary delays. When there is an unexpected delay, NIJEST will share information with authors about the delay that occurs.
Editors and editorial team members are excluded from the peer-review process and publication decisions when they are authors or have contributed to a manuscript.
Editors, authors, and peer reviewers are required to disclose interests that might appear to affect their ability to present or review work objectively. These might include relevant financial interests (for example, patent ownership, stock ownership, consultancies, or speaker’s fees), or personal, political, or religious interests. This should be stated in a “Conflict of Interests” section at the end of the paper after the “Authorship Contribution Statement”.
Authors who are not satisfied with the review decision should send an email to the Editor-in-Chief (editor-in-chief@nijest.com), explaining why they do not agree and their basis for the appeal.
NIJEST encourage readers and authors to notify the Editor-in-Chief (editor-in-chief@nijest.com) if they find errors, especially errors that could affect the interpretation of data or information presented in an article. The Editorial Board will work with authors to correct errors and publish the corrections.
NIJEST encourages discussion of articles published, especially where the reader feels the contribution is significant in improving the quality of the published article for the benefit of other readers and the wider academic community.
To discuss any article published in NIJEST, please send up to 500 words to the editor-in-chief through the email: editor-in-chief@nijest.com. Your contribution will be sent to the author(s) for a response. On consideration and approval by the editorial board, both your contribution and the author’s response will be published as discussion in the next issue of NIJEST.
NIJEST is an Open Access Journal. NIJEST makes the final version of an article freely and permanently accessible online for everyone, immediately after publication. There are no financial, legal or technical barriers to accessing articles published in NIJEST. Anyone can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search for and search within the information, or use it in education or in any other way. The authors retain copyright for the articles.
All articles published in NIJEST are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
For each manuscript submitted, Authors will be required to pay an Article Processing Fee of NGN 5,000 (Five Thousand Naira). Authors whose manuscripts are accepted for publication will be required to pay a Publication Fee of NGN 35,000.00 (Thirty Five Thousand Naira). Two (2) Journal hard copies will be provided for each article published. Co-authors or individuals requiring additional hard copies will be required to pay a Journal Reprint Fee of NGN 3,000 (Three Thousand Naira). Posting of articles to addresses of authors via courier attracts a Postage Fee of NGN 5,000 (Five Thousand Naira).