Code of Conduct and Publishing Ethics

As a society publisher, EMS Press is deeply committed to applying the highest ethical standards, and is devoted to strengthening the integrity of mathematical research and publications. Our policies and practices are governed by well-established regulations such as the EMS Code of Practice and recommendations by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the latter adapted to the special features and traditions of mathematics publishing.

The present statement applies to all research journals fully published by EMS Press, comprising the major part of the publisher's journals portfolio. Their titles and ISSNs are listed in the appendix at the end of this statement. A few serials of different nature, like the European Mathematical Society Magazine, are naturally out of its scope.

1. Submissions

1.1. Originality

Only original papers can be submitted to EMS Press research journals. Works that are already published in or submitted to any peer-reviewed electronic or printed medium in any form and any language are excluded. On the other hand, manuscripts that are available in non-peer-reviewed form – for example, as a thesis or part thereof, a lecture, a research report, a preprint in any of the arXiv, an institutional repository, or the author’s web page – are still considered original and thus are welcome as submissions. 

1.2. Authorship

Sincerity about the authorship is a basic requirement. All researchers making a significant intellectual contribution to a submitted paper must be listed as authors, and no-one else is allowed to be named as an author. Providers of financial support or technical equipment and help can only be acknowledged (in a particular section of the paper serving this purpose).

Authorship changes after submission are only possible in very special cases (for example, if a revision contains significant new results proven in collaboration with a further author, or if one of the authors no longer wants to take responsibility for the work, etc.). All authors need to agree on such a change. 

1.3. References

Proper credits and detailed references must be given to any result utilised from earlier work by the author or others, published or unpublished. Nonetheless, citation manipulation – that is, the inclusion of irrelevant references for increasing citation records – is considered misconduct and is not tolerated to any extent.

1.4. Data sharing and reproducibility

While data-based research is not common in pure mathematics, it may occur in more applied mathematical fields. We encourage the authors of such papers to also publish their data – as supplementary material to the paper, in some data repository, or on their personal web page. We recommend providing a hyperlink to this archived data in the online version of published papers.

Reproducibility in mathematical works means the obvious requirement of complete mathematical proofs of stated results. If computer programs are applied in some parts of a proof, then the code is expected to be shared for reproducibility.

1.5. Frequency of submissions

Some of our journals dealing with a particularly high number of submissions restrict the frequency of different submissions from the same authors. Since this is journal-specific, such details are presented on the submission webpages of these journals.

1.6. Research funding and conflict of interest

All kinds of research funding, financial or material, must be listed at the end of each paper. Potential cases of conflict of interest must also be declared. Since mathematical research rarely conflicts with other interests, we do not ask for negative statements – the absence of a statement is understood as a confirmation of no conflict.

1.7. Applying artificial intelligence technologies

Authors who use artificial intelligence tools for enhancing the mathematical contents of their work are required to state this fact clearly and with precise details upon submission of their works for publication. Such statements will appear in the published versions of works.

2. Evaluation of submissions

2.1. Transparency

Submissions and peer reviews are performed in the online editorial system of EMS Press for the majority of journals, with a few exceptions where this is done via email. Authors can track their submission's status through the system and contact the journal editors in case of questions.

Submissions not fitting the stated scope of a journal or being significantly below its standard may be rejected by the editorial board without external review. Acceptance, however, is always based on one or more single-blind peer reviews. Since most mathematical papers are available as preprints on the arXiv or elsewhere, double-blind peer review is hardly ever applicable in mathematics.

Each submission is handled by a particular member of a journal's editorial board. In some journals the authors can suggest handling editors, in other ones the editor-in-chief assigns each submission to the editor closest to the submission's contents or handles it themselves (details are made clear during the submission process). Different journals follow different practices regarding disclosing the handling editor's identity.

In the rare case where a member of a journal's editorial board submits a paper to a journal they are editing, they are completely excluded from the evaluation process. In particular, such submissions are invisible to the submitting editor in the journal's editorial system.

Referees are chosen by the handling editor on the basis of their expertise, taking any possible conflict of interest into account. Authors may include a cover letter along with their submission, including information about the work and potential referee suggestions. Such referee suggestions may be considered by the handling editor, but without any obligation to follow them.

The first word about acceptance, rejection, or revision of a submission is made by the handling editor based on the peer-review results. Depending on the journal, such recommendations may be followed by a discussion among the editorial board members, and they are concluded by the final decision made by the editor-in-chief. 

Whenever the peer-review results contain relevant feedback to the authors, this is forwarded to them while fully respecting the anonymity of the referees.

2.2. Fairness

The members of a journal's editorial board as well as the external referees are autonomous scholars. Their recommendations and decisions are solely based on their scientific conviction without any external influence from the publisher or anyone else.

When making decisions about acceptance or rejection, only the submission in question is considered. Additional information about the authors – their affiliation, geographic location, gender, seniority, reputation, or the impact of their earlier work – cannot be taken into account.

As a part of fairness, all parties aim to make the evaluation process as fast as possible without jeopardising its thoroughness.

2.3. Dealing with conflicts of interest

Recent co-authorship, employment in the same department, advisor-advisee relations are the most usual forms of professional ties. All of them, together with kinship relations are considered as potential conflict of interest. External referees with such ties to submitting authors cannot be asked for a report, and affected editorial board members are excluded from the entire evaluation process (as above, the submissions are invisible to them in the editorial system).

3. Author rights

3.1. Licensing

EMS Press publishes journals using the Subscribe To Open model as well as a small number of journals that are diamond open access. For those journals published through Subscribe To Open, it cannot be foreseen if an article will be published with Open Access before it is assigned to a journal issue. The license agreement that authors are asked to sign upon acceptance of a submission addresses this situation delicately.

Authors are asked to grant to the journal's proprietor (the European Mathematical Society or other societies or institutions EMS Press is publishing on behalf of) the right to exclusively publish the work.

Open Access publication in any of the journals published by EMS Press entails no fees for authors. Such works are licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.

Authors of papers that are not open access are offered the so-called Green Open Access option, meaning that the latest version of the accepted manuscript – content-wise final, but not formatted in the publisher's layout – can be freely shared in institutional repositories and on the personal webpages of the authors. Such articles become freely available on the publisher's platform – but remain copyright protected – five years after their publication year.

Text and data mining is only allowed with an explicit permission from the publisher.

More detailed information on the above issues is provided in our Terms of Digital Access.

In order to give the right of decision to all authors, a signed licence agreement must be separately signed by each one of them.

3.2. Confidentiality

Author and reviewer data, unpublished results as well as all details of the review process, are treated in confidence by all involved parties. 

3.3. Intellectual property

While the copyright of each journal is owned by its proprietor (not the publisher), the intellectual rights to published works are retained by their authors following Sec. 38 (4) and 40a of the German Copyright Act (“UrhG”).

3.4. Accessibility

EMS Press is committed to ensuring digital accessibility for people with disabilities. We are continually improving the user experience for everyone, and applying the relevant accessibility standards (cf. European Accessibility Act). Further information is provided in our Accessibility Statement.

4. Corrections

4.1. Proof corrections

Typeset proofs are sent to the corresponding author asking them to discuss any corrections with their co-authors. As many proof-correction rounds as necessary are allowed to arrive at the final version to be published.

In the proof-correction stage, it is expected that only misprints or typographical errors are corrected. Changes affecting the mathematical content must be approved by the handling editor of the submission and/or the editor-in-chief of the journal.

4.2. Post-publication corrections

Any mathematical mistakes in a published paper can and should be corrected appropriately. While no unmarked changes are allowed in a published paper, including online-first publication, we offer various fair and transparent ways of correction. (Online-first publication refers to the final publication of papers online, but before they are eventually assigned to a journal issue.)

Should an author or any reader notice a mathematical mistake, they should inform all authors, the editor-in-chief, and/or the publisher. It is then their shared responsibility to find the best-fitting scenario:

• Between the versions published online-first and in an issue, the following differences are allowed:

  • Page numbers. While the page numbers of an online-first article always start with 1, the pages in an issue are numbered consecutively.

  • Licensing information. In the Subscribe-To-Open model of EMS Press, only published papers in a journal issue are licensed under CC BY 4.0 (excluding online-first ones). Such additional licensing information is added to a published paper's first page.

  • Updated references. If a reference is cited in a yet-unpublished state in an online-first paper, but it is published by the time the citing paper is included in an issue, then its bibliographic data can be added without explicitly marking the change. 

• Online metadata that are correct in the print version (for example, a misspelt name or affiliation), can be corrected after publication without marking the change.

• Minor mistakes that are to be left unchanged in the print version can be corrected online, but the change must be clearly marked (for example, in an endnote), showing unmistakably what was changed to what, why and when.

• More substantial changes can only be made via a correction note – a corrigendum if the mistake is due to the authors, or an erratum for mistakes caused by the publisher – published both online and in print. The online correction note will be interlinked with the original publication. Such correction notes should be formally submitted to the journal, and they will be evaluated and accepted (or rejected) as normal submissions.

• In extreme situations, all results in a published paper may be undermined by an erroneous statement that cannot be corrected through a corrigendum or erratum. Not even in such cases can the online version of the article be completely removed from the journal's webpage. Retracted papers remain accessible but are watermarked as “retracted”, and they are accompanied by an interlinked retraction note published online and in print. 

Author requests for retrospectively changing their names in already published works will be treated individually and in a highly confidential manner. Authors are kindly requested to contact our editorial director via email or post regarding such matters.

5. Research and publication misconduct

5.1. Preventing misconduct

Most obviously, in no case shall a journal or its editors encourage any misconduct, or knowingly allow such misconduct to take place. Indeed, serious efforts are made to avoid any such event.

Since in mathematics several standard results are often recalled and reused, plagiarism checks using software tools are not very efficient. Instead, EMS Press trusts the integrity of its publications to the familiarity of editorial board members and expert reviewers with the existing literature. It is their task to identify any suspected plagiarism, as well as to check the relevance of all bibliography items during the peer review and the subsequent editorial board discussion of each submission.

5.2. Complaints and appeals

Complaints and appeals should be addressed, and ethical misconducts be reported to the publisher via the email address editorial@ems.press or via post. Every case will be investigated as recommended by the COPE regulations. The process will be jointly handled by the editor-in-chief of the journal and the publisher. The Ethics Committee of the European Mathematical Society may be contacted if other avenues do not resolve the issue.

Appendix: List of research journals published by EMS Press

The present code of conduct and publishing ethics statement applies to the following research journals:

Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincaré C (ISSN 0294-1449, eISSN 1873-1430) Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincaré D (ISSN 2308-5827, eISSN 2308-5835) Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici (ISSN 0010-2571, eISSN 1420-8946) Documenta Mathematica (ISSN 1431-0635, eISSN 1431-0643) Elemente der Mathematik (ISSN 0013-6018, eISSN 1420-8962) EMS Surveys in Mathematical Sciences (ISSN 2308-2151, eISSN 2308-216X) Groups, Geometry, and Dynamics (ISSN 1661-7207, eISSN 1661-7215) Interfaces and Free Boundaries (ISSN 1463-9963, eISSN 1463-9971) Journal of Combinatorial Algebra (ISSN 2415-6302, eISSN 2415-6310) Journal of Fractal Geometry (ISSN 2308-1309, eISSN 2308-1317) Journal of Noncommutative Geometry (ISSN 1661-6952, eISSN 1661-6960) Journal of Spectral Theory (ISSN 1664-039X, eISSN 1664-0403) Journal of the European Mathematical Society (ISSN 1435-9855, eISSN 1435-9863) L’Enseignement Mathématique (ISSN 0013-8584, eISSN 2309-4672) Mathematical Statistics and Learning (ISSN 2520-2316, eISSN 2520-2324) Memoirs of the European Mathematical Society (ISSN 2747-9080, eISSN 2747-9099) Portugaliae Mathematica (ISSN 0032-5155, eISSN 1662-2758) Quantum Topology (ISSN 1663-487X, eISSN 1664-073X) Rendiconti del Seminario Matematico della Università di Padova (ISSN 0041-8994, eISSN 2240-2916) Rendiconti Lincei – Matematica e Applicazioni (ISSN 1120-6330, eISSN 1721-0768) Revista Matemática Iberoamericana (ISSN 0213-2230, eISSN 2235-0616) Zeitschrift für Analysis und ihre Anwendungen (ISSN 0232-2064, eISSN 1661-4534)

Last modified on August 20, 2024