• word-for-word copying of portions of another’s writing without enclosing the copied passage in quotation marks and acknowledging the source in the appropriate scholarly convention;
• the use of a particularly unique term or concept that one has come across in reading without acknowledging the author or source;
• the paraphrasing or abbreviated restatement of someone else’s ideas without acknowledging that another person’s text has been the basis for the paraphrasing;
• material that has not been attributed to the source from which it has not been obtained;
• the submission of the same or a very similar paper to two or more publications at the same time (self-plagiarism).

Publication Decisions
The Editors of the Conference Proceedings are solely and independently responsible for deciding which of the articles submitted to the conference should be published. The validation of the work in question and its importance to researchers and readers must always underwrite such decisions. The Editors may be guided by the policies of the Conference and constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding issues such as libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. The Editors may confer with the International Program Committee (IPC) members of the conference and reviewers in making these decisions. All of them are responsible for the contents and overall quality of publication, while the it is the Editors’ the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of articles.

Peer Review
The Editors of the Conference Proceedings operate a double-blind review process. All contributions will be initially assessed by the editor for suitability for the conference. Papers deemed suitable are then typically sent to a minimum of two external and independent expert reviewers, and where necessary the Editors should seek additional opinions. The Editors shall select reviewers who have suitable expertise in the relevant field and shall follow best practice in avoiding the selection of fraudulent peer reviewers. The Editors shall review all disclosures of potential conflicts of interest and suggestions for self-citation made by reviewers in order to determine whether there is any potential for bias. The factors that are taken into account by reviewers are relevance, significance, soundness, originality, referencing and language. If authors are encouraged to revise and resubmit a submission, there is no guarantee that the revised submission will be accepted by the Editors.

Fair Play
The Editors should evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors. The editorial policies of the conference should encourage transparency and complete, honest reporting, and the Editors should ensure that peer reviewers and authors have a clear understanding of what is expected of them. The Editors shall establish, along with the Organizer, a transparent mechanism for appeal against editorial decisions. In particular, the Editors shall not require that references to the conference’s articles be included except for genuine scholarly reasons and authors should not be required to include references to the Editors’ own articles or products and services in which the Editors have an interest.

Confidentiality
The Editors must protect the confidentiality of all material submitted to the conference and all communications with reviewers, whose identities must be protected. In exceptional circumstances and in consultation with the Organizer, the editor may share limited information where deemed necessary to investigate suspected research misconduct. Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in an Editor’s own research without the express written consent of the author. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage.

Declaration of Competing Interests
Any potential editorial conflicts of interest should be declared to the Organizer in writing prior to the appointment of the Editors, and then updated if and when new conflicts arise. The Editors must not be involved in decisions about papers which they have written themselves or have been written by family members or colleagues or which relate to products or services in which the Editors have an interest. Further, any such submission must be subject to all of the conference’s usual procedures, peer review must be handled independently of the relevant author/editor and their research groups.

Vigilance over the Published Record
The Editors should work to safeguard the integrity of the published record by reviewing and assessing reported or suspected misconduct (research, publication, reviewer and editorial), in conjunction with the Organizer. Such measures will generally include contacting the author of the manuscript or paper and giving due consideration to the respective complaint or claims made, but may also include further communications to the relevant institutions and research bodies. The Editors shall further make appropriate use of the Organizer’s systems for the detection of misconduct, such as plagiarism. An editor presented with convincing evidence of misconduct should coordinate with the Organizer to arrange the prompt publication of a correction, retraction, expression of concern, or other correction to the record, as may be relevant.

Guardianship of the scholarly record
It is an important role of the Organizer to maintain the integrity of the scholarly record. Although ethical codes inevitably concentrate on the infractions that sometimes occur, it is crucial that the system works well and that problems are comparatively rare. The Organizer has a supporting, investing and nurturing role in the scholarly communication process and it is also ultimately responsible for ensuring that best practice is followed in its publications, ethical matters, errors and retractions.

Editorial Independence
The Organizer strongly believes in ensuring that the editorial decision-making processes are completely separate from revenue interests. Safeguarding this editorial independence requires that all editorial decisions, or concerns or complaints about editorial decisions, are dealt with strictly within the editorial structures of the conference. It further requires that no one on the commercial or executive side of the business can get involved in, interfere with, or even comment on editorial decisions under any circumstances. To deviate from the rigorous application of this principle in any individual situation would ultimately serve to undermine the integrity of the principle of editorial independence altogether.

Confidentiality
The Organizer recognizes that personal data and information can be leveraged to deliver tremendous value. The Organizer must protect the confidentiality of all personal (first and family names), contact (telephone numbers, fax, mailing address, residence address, and billing address) and other information (affiliation, data regarding submission and photos) and ensure the proper handling and storage of data and information in accordance to all applicable laws and regulations concerning the privacy and/or security of personal information, including, but not limited to, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (“HIPAA”) and other U.S. federal and state laws relating to privacy and security of personally identifiable information, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679 and member state implementing legislation, Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, India’s Information Technology Act and related Privacy Rules, (together “Data Protection and Privacy Laws”). The Organizer collect and process data for multiple purposes, such as (i) the upload of the program committee on the submission system; (ii) sending all the information related to the submission of the paper and registration to the conference; (iii) the management and organization of the event; (iv) processing and solving questions and request; (v) the inclusion of the paper in the conference proceedings; (vi) sending informative material, follow up, news, and invitation to the events organized by the Organizer. Data will be shared with the MSC-LES Laboratory of the Department of Mechanical, Energy and Management Engineering of the University of Calabria, the Organizer’s research partner. In order to provide opportunities to the conference authors to extend their work on special issues of international journals, data may be shared with editors of such journals. In order to manage the conference participants’ registration fees, data will be shared with a selected third-party by using special scripts. Photographs taken during conference will be shared on conference website and social networks, unless otherwise requested by the participants. Data will be kept for as long as the Organizer needs it for the purpose it is being processed, or until the authors ask the Organizer the opposite, or up to a maximum of 10 years.

Education on Ethics in Publication
The Organizer shall provide extensive education and advice on publishing ethics standards, particularly for the Editors, reviewers, authors and early career researchers.

Contribution to Editorial Decisions
Reviewers assist the Editors in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communications with the author may also assist the author in improving the paper. In addition to the specific ethics-related duties described below, reviewers are asked generally to treat authors and their work as they would like to be treated themselves and to observe good reviewing etiquette. Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments and identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors. Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the Editors and decline to participate in the review process.

Confidentiality
Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. Reviewers must not share the review or information about the paper with anyone or contact the authors directly without permission from the Editors. Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in a reviewer’s own research without the express written consent of the author. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage.

Alertness to Ethical Issues
A reviewer should be alert to potential ethical issues in the paper and should bring these to the attention of the Editors, including any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which the reviewer has personal knowledge. Any statement that an observation, derivation, or argument had been previously reported should be accompanied by the relevant citation.

Standards of Objectivity & Competing Interests
Reviews should be conducted objectively. Reviewers should be aware of any personal bias they may have and take this into account when reviewing a paper. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Referees should express their views clearly with supporting arguments. Reviewers should consult the Editors before agreeing to review a paper where they have potential conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers. If a reviewer suggests that an author includes citations to the reviewer’s (or their associates’) work, this must be for genuine scientific reasons and not with the intention of increasing the reviewer’s citation count or enhancing the visibility of their work (or that of their associates).

When the manuscript is accepted for publication as part of the conference proceedings, the author should grant to the Organizer an exclusive publishing and distribution license of the manuscript and any tables, illustrations or other material submitted for publication as part of the manuscript in all forms and media (whether now known or later developed), throughout the world, in all languages, for the full term of the copyright, effective when the manuscript is accepted for publication. This license includes the right to enforce the rights granted by this license against third parties and to sublicense such rights.

In order to ensure articles wide dissemination, the Organizer shall publish the conference proceedings on an Open access basis. The publication of the articles is completely funded by the payments of the full registration fee that are made by authors, their institution or funding bodies to participate to the conference.

With respect to Supplemental Materials that the authors wish to make accessible through a link in the manuscript, the Organizer shall be entitled to publish, post, reformat, index, archive, make available and link to such Supplemental Materials on a non-exclusive basis in all forms and media (whether now known or later developed), and permit others to do so. “Supplemental Materials” shall mean additional materials that are not an intrinsic part of the manuscript, including but not limited to experimental data, e-components, encodings and software, and enhanced graphical, illustrative, video and audio material. The authors shall ensure that any software contained in the Supplemental Materials is free from viruses, contaminants or worms. If the manuscript or any of the Supplemental Materials were prepared jointly with other authors, the authors have informed the co-author(s) of the conference policies at the moment of the submission.

Articles that have been published shall remain extant, exact and unaltered as far as is possible. However, very occasionally circumstances may arise where an article is published that must later be retracted or even removed. In all cases, the Organizer will retain all article versions, including retracted or otherwise removed articles. Articles that have been accepted for publication but which have not been formally published and that include errors, or are discovered to be accidental duplicates of other published article(s), or are determined to violate the publishing ethics guidelines in the view of the Editors (such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like), may be “Withdrawn”. Withdrawn means that the article will not appear as part of the conference proceedings and therefore will not be published. Occasionally a retraction will be used to correct errors in submission or publication. The retraction of an article by its authors or the Editors under the advice of members of the scholarly community is possible. In this case, the online article is preceded by a screen containing the retraction note, titled “Retraction: [article title]” signed by the authors and/or the Editors. The reader can then proceed to the article itself. The original article is retained unchanged save for a watermark on the .pdf indicating on each page that it is “retracted. The HTML version of the document is removed. In an extremely limited number of cases, it may be necessary to remove an article from the online database. This will only occur where the article is clearly defamatory, or infringes others’ legal rights, or where the article is, or we have good reason to expect it will be, the subject of a court order, or where the article, if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk. In these circumstances, while the metadata (Title and Authors) will be retained, the text will be replaced with a screen indicating the article has been removed for legal reasons. In cases where the article, if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk, the authors of the original article may wish to retract the flawed original and replace it with a corrected version. In these circumstances the procedures for retraction will be followed with the difference that a link to the corrected re-published article and a history of the document will be published.