Ethics & Misconduct Policy

CARDINAL follows established best practice for academic publication ethics, covering authorship, conflicts of interest, plagiarism, data fabrication or falsification, duplicate submission, and appropriate handling of human/animal-subjects research.

Authorship

All listed authors must have made a substantive contribution to the work and must consent to be listed. Author order and affiliations are collected as structured metadata at submission and are not editable after acceptance without an editorial correction record.

Reporting concerns

Concerns about a published or in-review article — including suspected plagiarism, data manipulation, or undisclosed conflicts — can be raised with the handling branch editor or the Editor-in-Chief. Confirmed misconduct is addressed via correction, retraction, or expression of concern, each recorded as a permanent, versioned note on the article record rather than a silent edit.

This policy page is a Phase 0/1 deliverable published ahead of DOAJ application, per the platform roadmap.