Policies and Guidance
Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
The following provides policy statements for ASCILITE Publication's ethical publication process.
Peer Review Process
All manuscripts submitted to ASCILITE Publications undergo a double-blind peer review process conducted by qualified experts in educational technology and related fields. Peer review is undertaken in accordance with the Open Access Publishing Association Publishing Policy. Editorial decision-making is led by the Editor-in-Chief and Senior Editors, who hold the final authority to accept, reject, or request revisions to any manuscript. Associate Editors are appointed annually as part of the ASCILITE conference editorial structure. Their role is to manage assigned manuscripts, oversee the peer review process, and provide well-reasoned recommendations to the Senior Editors and Editor-in-Chief. These recommendations inform, but do not determine, final editorial decisions. Reviewers’ anonymised reports, Associate Editor recommendations, and the overall fit of the submission with the publication’s scope collectively guide the Editor-in-Chief and Senior Editors in rendering a final decision.
Ownership
APUBs is owned by Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education and published by the Open Access Publishing Association. APUBs has a shared management committee convened by the Editor-in-Chief comprising one representative from the Publisher, the Owner, and the Editor-in-Chief. The Editor-in-Chief appoints Associate Editors for handling papers, and an Editorial Review Board to advise on journal strategy and support review.
Copyright
APUBs applies the following copyright statement to all articles: Copyright © by the authors, in its year of first publication. This publication is an open access publication under the Creative Commons Attribution CC BY-ND 4.0 license.
Article Processing Charges (APCs) and Fees
APUBs does not have any fees or charges associated with publication, in line with its commitment to being diamond open access.
Process for Complaints, Appeals, and Misconduct
All forms of complaints, appeals, and misconduct should be initially addressed to the Editor-in-Chief. Where the complaint pertains to the Editor-in-Chief, or the matter is not resolved satisfactorily, please address the complaint to the Publishing President: president@open-publishing.org. COPE Guidelines for investigation are used for handling complaints, appeals, and allegations of misconduct. This includes, but is not limited to, allegations of plagiarism, duplicate submission, citation manipulation, data fabrication or falsification, unethical research practices, and AI use inconsistent with the declarations made by authors.
Authorship and Conflicts of Interest
APUBs expects that all authors named meet at least two of the substantive elements of significant contributions (Section 2.1) under the Australian Research Council's authorship policy, irrespective of country of authorship. Authors remain accountable for their research, and must declare all perceived and actual conflicts of interest at point of submission.
Data Sharing and Reproducibility
Authors are encouraged to make underlying research data, instruments, and analytic procedures available where possible to support transparency and reproducibility, subject to ethical, legal, or privacy constraints. Where data cannot be shared, authors must clearly state the reasons within the manuscript.
Ethical Oversight
Research involving human participants or animals must have received appropriate institutional ethics approval and comply with recognised ethical standards. Authors must clearly state ethics approval and consent procedures within the manuscript where applicable.
Publication Schedule
APUBs produces one large core issue per annum associated with the ASCILITE Conference. APUBs does periodically allow for Special Issues to supplement this.
Archival Records
The Publisher retains six-hourly backups of all manuscripts and persistent archiving through a third-party Australian-based provider.
Revenue
APUBs is funded by ASCILITE, and may periodically seek sponsorship through the OAPA Partnership Committee, noting that publication decisions are made independent of any funding, and are in compliance with the OAPA Ad Policy.
Post-publication Discussion
APUBs welcomes scholarly discussion of published articles. Substantive concerns raised post-publication may be addressed through editorial correspondence, corrections, expressions of concern, or retractions where appropriate.
Corrections and Retractions
APUBs follows COPE guidelines for issuing corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions when errors or ethical issues are identified. All notices will be clearly linked to the original published article.
Integrity of the Scholarly Record
APUBs is committed to maintaining the integrity of the scholarly literature. This includes active measures to prevent, detect, and address plagiarism, citation manipulation, data fabrication or falsification, unethical research practices, and other breaches of publication ethics, in accordance with COPE guidance.
AI Use Policy
The APUBs editorial team outline the following rules in relation to how APUBs authors and editorial members should work with Artificial Intelligence tools and platforms.
1. AI cannot be listed as an author on APUBs submissions. An author must be able to agree to and be accountable for the aspects of their authorship under the CRediT taxonomy, which an AI cannot do.
2. Authors must acknowledge the contribution made by AI tools to any aspects of the submissions published. In the acknowledgement section the authors should outline the specific tasks AI was used to complete, including (but not limited to) research design, data analyses, data visualisation, text creation/editing, etc.
3. APUBs reviewers do not have permission to use Generative AI to complete any reviews of APUBs submissions. Sharing articles under review with third party AI providers for this purpose may contravene authors’ intellectual property rights to their work.
