Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria adheres to the ethical guidelines for journal publications of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which can be found on the COPE website or in other relevant COPE documents.
Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria publishes articles from all areas of theoretical computational linguistics and the currently available resources, datasets and technologies for natural language processing and artificial intelligence. The focus is on new approaches and methods, especially with regard to their application to small and low-resource languages such as Bulgarian, in order to bridge the gap between large and small languages in terms of language technologies.
Ethics Guidelines for the Editorial Board
The Editorial Board shall be committed to fair and professional principles in every aspect of the process of submission, evaluation, acceptance and publication of papers in the journal. They shall make fair and unbiased decisions independent of commercial consideration and should ensure a fair and appropriate peer review process.
The Editorial Board shall evaluate and select manuscripts for publication in the journal exclusively on the basis of their scientific merit. The selection shall be made in careful consideration of the originality, contribution, scientific and methodological quality, technical soundness and clarity of the presented research. These particularities shall be evaluated through a double-blind reviewing process carried out by anonymous reviewers appointed to the task who are experts in the relevant field(s). The members of the Editorial Board who participate in the selection process must not be involved in the assessment of the manuscript in any other capacity (i.e. as reviewers).
The Editorial Board shall in no way consider manuscripts which present conflicts of interest arising from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections involving any of the authors or their companies, or institutions. Upon the establishment of such conflicts, the manuscript shall be rejected without review.
The Editorial Board shall by all means respect the confidentiality of the reviewers and authors involved in the process of anonymous review.
The Editorial Board shall always be willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed.
The Editorial Board shall have appropriate policies in place for handling editorial conflicts of interest and is in charge of managing the conflicts of interest of the staff, authors, reviewers, editors, etc.; it shall respond promptly to complaints and should ensure there is a way for dissatisfied complainants to take complaints further. The Editorial Board takes it upon itself to make every possible effort to resolve any conflict or complaint that may arise in line with the best available practices.
The Editorial Board shall be responsible for familiarising in due course all parties involved in the publication process with these Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Guidelines.
Ethics Guidelines for Authors
By submitting a paper to the journal, the authors acknowledge that the research reported has been conducted in an ethical and responsible manner and complies with all relevant legislation.
Authors shall present their results honestly, without fabrication, falsification or inappropriate data manipulation. They shall justify the significance of their scientific research while at the same time providing comprehensive detail and citations/references to their sources so that any interested parties be able to reproduce the study analysis. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical conduct and shall therefore be deemed unacceptable.
Authors shall strive to ensure that their work is entirely original, and therefore wherever and whenever the work and/or words of others are used, all instances shall be appropriately acknowledged. Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical publishing conduct and shall therefore be deemed unacceptable.
In case of submitting the same manuscript to other journals or conferences, the authors must notify the Editorial Board in due time, so that the Editorial Board is aware of the fact that the manuscript might be withdrawn depending on the results from other journals or conferences.
The corresponding author shall strive to ensure that there is full consensus of all co-authors in approving the final version of the paper and its submission for publication. Submission is taken to mean that all the listed authors have agreed to the submitted manuscript.
In case significant errors are discovered, authors shall duly notify the Editorial Board so that the publication could be withdrawn and revised accordingly in due time.
Authors shall ensure that the authorship accurately reflects the individuals’ contributions to the work and its reporting.
Authors shall disclose relevant funding sources and any existing or potential conflicts of interest.
Authors take full responsibility for the submitted work(s).
Copyright of the manuscripts remains with the respective authors. The papers and all other material included in the journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. International Licence (CC BY 4.0).
By submitting their work for publication, the authors agree with the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Licence details.
Ethics Guidelines for Reviewers
The reviewers are selected from a pool of leading experts in various areas of computational linguistics and NLP. Reviewers are assigned to review manuscripts according to their fields of expertise.
The Editorial Board notifies the reviewers by email about all the relevant information related to the reviewing process and provides access to the Review Form.
The Editorial Board guarantees that peer reviewers’ identities and those of the authors are protected according to the requirements of the double-blind review procedure.
The reviews are crucial for the attestation of the quality of the submitted manuscripts and shall play a primary role in the decision making process as regards the acceptance or rejection of the manuscripts for publication in the journal.
Reviewers shall not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions.
Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review shall be kept confidential and shall not be used for personal advantage of the reviewer or anyone else.
Reviews shall be conducted in an objectively, comprehensive, and accurate manner. Any observations, recommendations or critique must be formulated clearly and supported by relevant arguments according to the requirements stated in the Review Form. Reviewers must present their judgment in a respectful, non-offensive way.
In case an appointed reviewer feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript, or is otherwise aware that a prompt or accurate review will be impossible, he or she shall notify the Editorial Board in due time and shall step down from his or her appointment as a reviewer.
COPE Ethics Policies
• Authorship and contributorship
Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria follows the criteria for authorship and contributorship set up by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines for authorship and contributorship.
The contribution of each author, as reflected in the order of the authors’ names, should be determined by the authors themselves. The corresponding author is responsible for the adequacy and completeness of the author list, appropriate credit attribution and the agreement of all authors to the journal’s open access, ethics and, if applicable, data release policies. The corresponding author should also ensure that all appropriate co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the manuscript and agree to its publication.
Acknowledgements can be used to identify contributions that do not fulfil the criteria for authorship.
• Use of AI tools
The journal does not allow artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT or large language models (LLMs) to be listed as authors of publications. The journal agrees with the position of the Committee on Publication Ethics that AI tools do not meet the requirements for authorship since they cannot assume ethical and legal responsibility for their work.
Authors who use AI tools to generate content (text, images/graphics, etc.) or to collect data must indicate this in their manuscripts so that readers can understand the contribution of these tools to the development of the work.
• Handling of complaints and appeals
Any complaints or appeals should be submitted in writing to the editorial email address no later than the deadline for submission of the final version of the accepted paper.
Complaints and appeals received will be investigated in accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines and related documents on handling complaints and appeals.
• Handling allegations of research misconduct
Misconduct in research may include falsification of data, fabrication, plagiarism, or unethical treatment of research participants or subjects, or any behaviour that violates established ethical standards and/or compromises the integrity of the research.
All authors are obliged to refrain from such practices in their work. Suspected research misconduct identified in a paper under review must be clearly described and emphasised by the reviewers as part of the written review.
Appropriate action will be taken in accordance with the Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE) guidelines on plagiarism (in a submitted / published manuscript), redundant (duplicate) publication (in a submitted / published manuscript), research fraud (in a submitted / published manuscript) and other related documents.
Anyone who believes that research published in the journal involves scientific misconduct should report their concerns to the Editorial Board by email to the editorial address.
• Conflicts of interest
A conflict of interest may exist if an author or the author’s institution has financial or other relationships with persons or organisations that could inappropriately influence the author’s work. Conflicts of interest include financial relationships (e.g., employment, consulting work, stock ownership, or other forms of compensation) as well as personal relationships and academic competition or rivalries. In general, authors should avoid entering into agreements with study sponsors that could influence or compromise the authors’ access to all study data or their ability to analyse and interpret the data and to write and publish manuscripts independently.
Conflicts of interest may also occur between an author and a reviewer. Such conflicts are avoided by ensuring the mutual anonymity of authors and reviewers during the review process.
In addition, the review process allows reviewers to decline to review a paper if they recognise a potential conflict of interest.
Reviewers must not be involved in any way with a submitted paper if they have recently collaborated with the author(s) on the same project, if they have received or may receive financial compensation for the work described in the paper, if they are or have been in any way personally or familially related to the author(s), or if they are close/direct competitors of the author(s). In any of the above cases, the reviewer must decline to review the paper.
To avoid potential conflicts of interest, the submission management system automatically distributes the papers to the reviewers, ensuring a broad match between the keywords provided by the authors and the topics reflecting the reviewers’ research interests and capacities that they themselves have indicated prior to the review. A further restriction is that the author(s) of a paper and the reviewers to whom it is assigned must not belong to the same institution.
• Data sharing and reproducibility
Authors who submit papers to the journal are free:
- to share their research data, code, or other relevant materials in appropriate repositories or archives to ensure the accessibility, transparency and credibility of their research;
- to provide detailed documentation of shared data to facilitate the understanding and replication of the study;
- to supplement the shared data and documentation with more detailed information on the methods and procedures used in the analyses so as to enable the reproducibility of the results;
- to follow best practices for data management and documentation, such as the use of standardised formats and metadata.
• Policy on ethical oversight
In all matters requiring ethical oversight, such as falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, duplicate publication, the journal will be guided by the COPE Guidelines on Ethics as described in the Ethics toolkit section and in the detailed Ethics Toolkit Guide.
• Policy on intellectual property
The authors are responsible for the content of the submitted manuscript and all supporting items, data, materials, codes, etc. All responsibility regarding the intellectual property of the work lies with the authors.
In order to meet the conditions of open access publication and to promote the widest possible distribution, the works included in the journal are licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. International Licence (CC BY 4.0).
By submitting a paper to the journal, authors confirm that they accept the terms and conditions of the Licence.
No author or reader fees are charged for access to the journal.
• Post-publication corrections
In cases where post-publication corrections may be required, the journal will refer to the Post-publication discussions and corrections section of the COPE website.
• Policy on retractions and corrections
During the review process, reviewers exercise ethical oversight with respect to possible reasons that could lead to the retraction of an accepted paper (e.g. discovery of plagiarism, lack of proper attribution, unreliable findings, fabrication or falsification, copyright infringement, etc.). The reviewers are instructed to report all such cases that they discover during the review.
In addition, the reviewers are instructed to look for errors in the submitted papers and to point them out to the authors in the review so that they can correct them.
• Policies for ensuring the integrity of the scholarly literature
The guidelines for ensuring the integrity of the scientific literature adopted by the journal are based on the COPE Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.
The strategies and procedures for dealing with plagiarism, the manipulation of citations and the falsification of data are based, among other things, on the COPE Core Practices Guide and the relevant publications made available in this section of the COPE website.