Publication Ethics and Policies

Dan-ag: Journal of Educational Studies is committed to protecting the integrity, credibility, accessibility, and reliability of the scholarly record. These policies apply to authors, editors, editorial-board members, peer reviewers, and other individuals involved in the journal’s publication process. They cover submitted, accepted, and published content. The journal seeks to align its practices with recognized principles of transparency, research integrity, responsible authorship, ethical peer review, and scholarly publishing. Dan-ag does not claim organizational membership in any external publication-ethics body unless such membership is formally obtained.

CORE PRINCIPLES

AUTHORSHIP

Dan-ag observes the following principles:

Editorial decisions must be based on scholarly merit and ethical acceptability.
Authors must report their work honestly, accurately, and transparently.
Editors and reviewers must act independently and disclose conflicts of interest.
Human participants, especially children and vulnerable individuals, must be appropriately protected.
Unpublished manuscripts and editorial correspondence must remain confidential.
Research misconduct, plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, and deceptive reporting are unacceptable.
Errors discovered after publication must be corrected through a transparent process.

The journal will provide authors, reviewers, readers, and complainants with fair procedures for raising legitimate concerns.

Authorship should be limited to individuals who made substantial scholarly contributions to the work and who are willing to accept public accountability for their respective contributions.

Every author must:

Have made a meaningful contribution to the conception, design, conduct, analysis, interpretation, or preparation of the work
Participate in drafting the manuscript or critically revising its important scholarly content
Approve the version submitted for review and the final version approved for publication
Agree to the stated order of authorship
Accept accountability for the accuracy and integrity of their contribution

Honorary, guest, gift, and ghost authorship are prohibited.

Providing funding, access to participants, general supervision, administrative assistance, language editing, or routine data collection does not automatically qualify an individual for authorship. Such contributions may be recognized in the Acknowledgments when appropriate.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTION

AUTHORSHIP CHANGES

Dan-ag requires an author-contribution statement. Authors are encouraged to use the CRediT Contributor Role Taxonomy, which includes:

Conceptualization
Data curation
Formal analysis
Funding acquisition
Investigation
Methodology
Project administration
Resources
Software
Supervision
Validation
Visualization
Writing—original draft
Writing—review and editing

CRediT roles describe contributions but do not independently determine who qualifies for authorship.

Requests to add, remove, or reorder authors after submission must include:

A clear explanation for the requested change
Written agreement from all current and proposed authors
Confirmation from any author being added or removed
An updated author-contribution statement

The journal may investigate an authorship change when it appears inconsistent, disputed, or intended to manipulate credit or accountability.

Authorship changes after acceptance are permitted only in exceptional and adequately documented circumstances. Changes after publication may require a formal correction notice.

RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE CORRESPONDING AUTHOR

The corresponding author must:

Ensure that all authors qualify for authorship
Confirm that all authors approved the manuscript and its submission
Maintain accurate author names, affiliations, email addresses, and ORCID iDs
Disclose previous dissemination, related manuscripts, funding, conflicts of interest, and AI use
Communicate editorial decisions and reviewer comments to all authors
Coordinate and secure approval of all revisions
Inform the journal promptly of errors, disputes, or integrity concerns

The corresponding author acts on behalf of the author group but may not make undisclosed authorship or substantive manuscript changes without the other authors’ approval.

ORIGINALITY

PLAGIARISM

Submitted manuscripts must represent original scholarly work.

Authors must not present another person’s ideas, words, data, images, methods, instruments, or other intellectual contributions as their own.

All directly quoted, paraphrased, adapted, or reproduced materials must receive appropriate acknowledgment and citation.

The journal may use similarity-detection and other research-integrity screening procedures before or after peer review.

Dan-ag does not apply a single similarity-percentage threshold as automatic proof of acceptable or unacceptable practice. Editors evaluate the source, amount, attribution, pattern, and scholarly context of identified overlap.

Prohibited practices include:

Copying text or ideas without attribution
Inadequately paraphrasing a source
Using another person’s data or images without permission or acknowledgment
Translating previously published work without disclosure and attribution
Self-plagiarism or excessive reuse of previously published text without citation
Presenting AI-generated material or fabricated citations as independently verified scholarship

A manuscript may be declined, withdrawn, corrected, or retracted when plagiarism or other inappropriate reuse is established.

DUPLICATE AND REDUNDANT PUBLICATION

A manuscript must not have been published previously as a substantially similar journal article and must not be under consideration by another journal or publisher.

Dividing one study into multiple minimally different manuscripts to increase the number of publications may be considered inappropriate fragmentation or “salami publication.”

When several papers arise from the same dataset, intervention, participants, or research project, authors must:

Disclose the related papers
Cite them when appropriate
Explain how the submitted manuscript makes a distinct contribution
Provide copies when requested by the editor

Failure to disclose closely related publications or simultaneous submissions may result in rejection or other corrective action.

THESES, DISSERTATIONS, REPORTS, CONFERENCES, AND PREPRINTS

A manuscript derived from a thesis, dissertation, action-research report, institutional report, or conference paper may be considered when it has been substantially prepared as a journal article.

Repository deposit of a thesis or dissertation does not ordinarily constitute prior journal publication. Nevertheless, it must be disclosed.

Authors must also disclose previous conference presentations, published abstracts, working papers, institutional reports, and preprints.

Posting a preprint does not automatically make a manuscript ineligible. The authors must identify the preprint during submission and update its record with the published article information when the manuscript is accepted.

Previous dissemination must not violate copyright, confidentiality, contractual, or institutional restrictions.

RESEARCH INVOLVING HUMAN PARTICIPANTS

Studies involving human participants, students, personal information, school records, interviews, surveys, observations, assessments, classroom interventions, or identifiable human data must comply with applicable ethical and institutional requirements.

Authors must provide the name of the ethics committee, review board, or authorized reviewing body and the approval, clearance, exemption, or control number when available.

Ethics approval or a documented exemption should normally be obtained before data collection begins.

School, department, administrator, teacher, or site permission does not necessarily replace independent ethics review when such review is required.

The journal may request copies of ethics clearances, exemption notices, permission letters, protocols, consent forms, assent forms, data-management plans, and related documents.

INFORMED CONSENT AND ASSENT

Authors must explain how informed consent was obtained from adult participants.

For research involving children or individuals unable to provide full legal consent, authors must describe the applicable parental or guardian permission and participant assent procedures.

Consent should be voluntary, understandable, appropriately documented, and obtained without coercion or undue influence.

A waiver of consent must be supported by the responsible ethics or reviewing authority.

Separate consent may be required for the publication of identifiable photographs, recordings, quotations, case details, or other personal information.

PRIVACY AND CONFIDENTIALITY OF PARTICIPANTS

Authors must protect participant privacy and confidentiality.

Names, school identifiers, photographs, locations, demographic combinations, quotations, or contextual details should not be published when they could reasonably identify a participant without appropriate justification and consent.

Pseudonyms and anonymization should be used when appropriate. Authors should recognize that changing a name alone may not adequately protect identity.

Editors may require the removal or modification of identifying information before review or publication.

VULNERABLE PARTICIPANTS

Research involving children, learners with disabilities, economically or socially disadvantaged groups, dependent students, individuals under institutional authority, or other vulnerable participants requires careful ethical justification and appropriate safeguards.

Authors must explain:

Why the population’s participation was necessary
How recruitment avoided coercion
How consent and assent were obtained
How risks were minimized
How confidentiality was protected
How power differences were managed

The journal may decline a manuscript when participant protections are inadequate or cannot be verified.

RESEARCH INVOLVING SCHOOLS AND CLASSROOMS

Classroom or school-based action research remains subject to ethical requirements. The educational value of an activity does not automatically exempt the collection and publication of participant data from ethics review. Authors should distinguish routine instruction, institutional evaluation, and systematic research intended for dissemination. Necessary permissions, consent, assent, confidentiality, data protection, and risk-management procedures must be reported.

RESEARCH DATA AND RECORDS

Authors are responsible for the accuracy, authenticity, completeness, and appropriate retention of their research records. Fabrication, falsification, deceptive manipulation, selective omission intended to mislead, and destruction or concealment of relevant evidence are prohibited. The journal may request anonymized data, instruments, coding frameworks, analytic outputs, consent documentation, or other supporting records when necessary to evaluate the work. Failure to provide reasonable verification may result in suspension or termination of the review.

DATA AVAILABILITY

Every manuscript must include a Data Availability statement. Authors should explain whether and under what conditions the data, instruments, materials, code, or analytic documentation may be accessed. The journal encourages responsible data sharing when ethically, legally, and institutionally permissible. Public sharing is not required when it would violate participant consent, privacy, confidentiality, intellectual-property rights, contractual obligations, institutional policy, or applicable law. Any restriction should be clearly explained.

ACCURATE AND TRANSPARENT REPORTING

Authors must report methods, analyses, findings, limitations, and deviations from the original plan honestly and sufficiently. Results must not be omitted or selectively emphasized merely because they are unexpected, unfavorable, or statistically nonsignificant. Authors should use reporting guidelines appropriate to their research design when applicable. Statistical results, participant quotations, images, tables, and figures must not be altered in a way that misrepresents the evidence.

CITATIONS AND REFERENCES

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

Citations must be relevant, accurate, and used for legitimate scholarly purposes. Authors must not:

Add references solely to increase citation counts
Participate in citation cartels or coercive citation practices
Misrepresent a source’s findings
Cite sources that were not consulted
Include fabricated or unverifiable references

Editors and reviewers must not demand citations to their own work, the journal, or another publication unless the references are genuinely relevant and necessary. All DOI links, URLs, author names, titles, years, and publication details should be verified before submission.

Authors, editors, and reviewers must disclose any actual, potential, or perceived interest that could affect—or reasonably appear to affect—their judgment.

Conflicts may be:

Financial
Personal
Professional
Academic
Institutional
Supervisory
Collaborative
Ideological
Political

A conflict does not automatically disqualify a manuscript. It must be disclosed so that the journal can manage it appropriately.

When no conflict exists, authors should state: The authors declare no conflict of interest.

FUNDING

Authors must disclose all financial and material support related to the study. The funding statement should identify the funder and grant or project number when available. Authors should explain whether the funder influenced the study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, manuscript preparation, or decision to submit. When no specific funding was received, authors should state:

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BY AUTHORS

Artificial intelligence and automated tools may be used only in ways consistent with scholarly integrity, confidentiality, institutional requirements, and applicable law. Authors must disclose any generative or automated tool used in:

Drafting or revising text
Language editing or translation
Literature searching or synthesis
Transcription or qualitative coding
Data analysis or statistical programming
Image, figure, or visualization creation
Any other substantive research or publication activity

The disclosure should identify the tool, purpose, affected part of the work, and level of human verification. Artificial intelligence tools cannot be listed as authors because they cannot approve the manuscript or accept responsibility for its content. Authors remain accountable for all AI-assisted material, including its accuracy, originality, citations, calculations, interpretations, and potential biases.

UNACCEPTABLE USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Authors must not use AI to:

Fabricate, falsify, or alter research data deceptively
Generate fictitious participants, quotations, references, or findings
Conceal plagiarism or duplicate publication
Misrepresent AI-generated content as independently verified evidence
Process confidential participant data without appropriate authorization and safeguards
Create or manipulate images in a misleading manner
Replace necessary scholarly judgment and verification

Undisclosed or deceptive AI use may be treated as a research-integrity concern.

USE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE BY EDITORS AND REVIEWERS

Submitted manuscripts, supplementary files, reviewer reports, and editorial correspondence are confidential. Editors and reviewers must not upload these materials to public generative AI systems or unauthorized external services. Any limited use of an approved tool must receive appropriate authorization and must not compromise confidentiality, intellectual property, data protection, or independent editorial judgment. Editors and reviewers remain personally responsible for their assessments and decisions.

EDITORIAL RESPONSIBILITIES

EDITORIAL INDEPENDENCE

Editors must:

Evaluate manuscripts fairly and independently
Protect the confidentiality of submissions and reviews
Select qualified and impartial reviewers
Disclose and manage conflicts of interest
Avoid discrimination and personal bias
Provide authors with clear decisions and sufficient reasons
Investigate credible research-integrity concerns
Correct the scholarly record when necessary

Editors must not use unpublished information from a submitted manuscript for personal research, professional advantage, financial benefit, or retaliation.

Editorial decisions are based on scholarly and ethical considerations.

Decisions must not be affected by an author’s institutional affiliation, position, nationality, ethnicity, gender, disability, religion, political belief, personal relationship, or ability to provide financial or institutional support.

The publisher supports the journal but does not direct decisions on individual manuscripts for non-scholarly reasons.

SUBMISSIONS FROM EDITORS AND INSTITUTIONAL AUTHORS

Editors, editorial-board members, reviewers, and employees or students of Xavier University – Ateneo de Cagayan may submit manuscripts.

Such manuscripts must undergo the same requirements as other submissions.

An editor who is an author or has a conflict of interest must not participate in:
Editorial screening
Reviewer selection
Access to confidential reports
Editorial deliberations
The final decision

The manuscript will be handled by an eligible editor without the conflict and evaluated by independent reviewers.

REVIEWER RESPONSIBILITIES

Reviewers must:

Accept only manuscripts within their competence
Disclose conflicts of interest promptly
Treat the manuscript and review as confidential
Provide respectful, specific, evidence-based, and constructive comments
Evaluate the work rather than the author
Identify important errors or integrity concerns
Complete the review within the agreed period
Inform the editor when additional expertise is needed
Avoid direct contact with the authors

Reviewers advise the editors but do not independently accept or reject manuscripts. Personal attacks, discriminatory remarks, coercive citation requests, appropriation of ideas, or deliberate delay are unacceptable.

DOUBLE-ANONYMOUS REVIEW

CONFIDENTIALITY

Dan-ag follows double-anonymous peer review for scholarly manuscripts.

Authors’ identities are concealed from reviewers, and reviewers’ identities are concealed from authors.

Authors must remove identifying information from the blinded manuscript and supplementary materials.

The journal will take reasonable measures to preserve anonymity but cannot guarantee that an individual will never infer an identity from the topic, citations, data, preprint, or research context.

All submitted manuscripts, author information, reviewer identities, reports, deliberations, and correspondence are confidential unless disclosure is authorized or required to address a serious ethical, legal, or institutional matter.

Editors and reviewers must not share, reproduce, circulate, or use unpublished material without authorization.

Reviewer reports may be shared with other reviewers assigned to the same manuscript when necessary for editorial evaluation, but reviewer identities remain protected.

RESEARCH MISCONDUCT

HANDLING ALLEGATIONS

Research misconduct may include:

Fabrication
Falsification
Plagiarism
Duplicate or redundant publication
Improper authorship
Undisclosed conflicts of interest
Citation manipulation
Manipulation of the peer-review process
Deceptive image or data alteration
Ethics violations
Misappropriation of confidential material
Deliberately misleading AI use

Honest error, scholarly disagreement, and differences in interpretation are not automatically misconduct.

Concerns may be raised by editors, reviewers, authors, readers, participants, institutions, or other individuals.

When a credible concern is received, the journal may:

Conduct a confidential preliminary assessment
Request an explanation and supporting records from the authors
Pause editorial review or publication
Consult relevant experts
Notify the appropriate institution, ethics committee, funder, or authority when necessary
Allow affected individuals a reasonable opportunity to respond
Take corrective action based on the available evidence

The journal does not ordinarily conduct institutional investigations itself. Serious matters may be referred to the institution or authority capable of conducting a formal investigation.

PROTECTION OF COMPLAINANTS

POSSIBLE ACTIONS

Good-faith concerns will be treated respectfully and as confidentially as reasonably possible. The journal will not tolerate retaliation against a person who raises a genuine concern. Anonymous allegations may be considered when they contain sufficient specific and verifiable information. Unsupported accusations, harassment, and knowingly false allegations are unacceptable.

Depending on the seriousness and stage of the matter, the journal may:

Request clarification or correction
Require additional documentation
Issue a warning
Return or decline the manuscript
Suspend or terminate peer review
Withdraw an acceptance decision
Notify authors’ institutions, ethics bodies, or funders
Publish a correction or expression of concern
Retract the article
Restrict future submissions or reviewing activities for a defined period

Any action will consider the available evidence, seriousness of the concern, due process, and need to protect the scholarly record.

CORRECTIONS

EXPRESSIONS OF CONCERN

A correction may be published when an error affects the interpretation, reliability, attribution, or discoverability of an article but does not invalidate its central findings.

The correction notice will identify the article, describe the change, and remain permanently linked to the published record.

Minor typographical or formatting errors that do not affect meaning may be corrected without a formal notice when appropriate.

An expression of concern may be issued when credible doubts arise about a publication but the evidence remains incomplete, disputed, or subject to an external investigation.

The notice will explain the reason for concern without making unsupported conclusions.

RETRACTIONS

REMOVAL OF PUBLISHED CONTENT

An article may be retracted when its findings are unreliable because of misconduct or major error, when it contains substantial plagiarism or redundant publication, when it reports unethical research, or when another serious issue makes continued reliance on the article inappropriate.

A retracted article will normally remain accessible as part of the scholarly record but will be clearly marked as retracted and linked to a notice explaining the reason.

Retraction is intended to correct the literature and protect readers, not merely to punish authors.

Published content will not ordinarily be removed from the website.

Removal may be considered only in exceptional circumstances involving a serious legal requirement, immediate risk to participant privacy or safety, defamatory content, or another compelling reason.

When possible, a bibliographic record and explanatory notice will remain available.

APPEALS

COMPLAINTS

Authors may appeal an editorial decision when they believe that a significant factual error, procedural irregularity, undisclosed conflict, or serious misunderstanding affected the outcome.

An appeal must:

Be submitted by the corresponding author
Identify the manuscript and decision
Explain the specific basis of the appeal
Provide relevant evidence
Be submitted within 14 calendar days of the decision unless exceptional circumstances apply

Disagreement with a reviewer’s opinion, by itself, is not sufficient grounds for appeal.

Whenever practicable, the appeal will be assessed by an editor or senior editorial-board member who was not primarily responsible for the original decision.

The outcome of the appeal will be communicated in writing.

Complaints regarding editorial conduct, reviewer behavior, confidentiality, conflicts of interest, discrimination, delays, or procedural irregularities may be submitted through the official journal email address.

Complaints involving the Editor-in-Chief may be directed to the Publisher’s Representative and Institutional Adviser.

The journal will examine complaints fairly, confidentially, and without retaliation.

COPYRIGHT

OPEN-ACCESS LICENSE

Authors retain copyright in their published articles.

Upon acceptance, the authors grant Dan-ag: Journal of Educational Studies and the School of Education, Xavier University – Ateneo de Cagayan the right of first publication and the nonexclusive right to publish, reproduce, distribute, preserve, index, and display the article in print and digital formats.

Authors are responsible for ensuring that the submitted work does not unlawfully reproduce copyrighted or protected material.

Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, also known as CC BY 4.0.

Under this license, readers may share and adapt the published work for any lawful purpose, provided that appropriate credit is given, a link to the license is supplied, and any changes are indicated.

The license does not remove privacy, moral, publicity, trademark, or third-party rights. Separate permission may still be required for material not owned by the authors.

LICENSE LINK: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

THIRD-PARTY MATERIALS

AUTHOR SELF-ARCHIVING

Authors must obtain permission when required to reproduce or adapt copyrighted tables, figures, photographs, assessment instruments, substantial quotations, or other third-party content.

Authors must provide accurate source acknowledgment and submit permission documents when requested.

Material excluded from the article’s Creative Commons license must be clearly identified in its credit line.

Authors may deposit and share the published version of their article through institutional repositories, professional profiles, personal academic websites, and other lawful platforms.

The deposited version should acknowledge its first publication in Dan-ag and link to the journal’s official version when available.

OPEN ACCESS

PUBLICATION FEES

All published articles and journal issues are made freely accessible through the official Dan-ag website without subscription or pay-per-view charges.

Readers may access, download, read, and cite the journal’s content subject to the applicable license and third-party rights.

Dan-ag does not currently charge submission, editorial-processing, peer-review, or article-publication fees.

Any optional cost associated with printed copies, special production requirements, or author-requested services will be disclosed in advance.

Fees, waivers, sponsorships, or institutional support will not influence editorial or peer-review decisions.

REVENUE AND INSTITUTIONAL SUPPORT

ADVERTISING

Dan-ag is published by the School of Education, Xavier University – Ateneo de Cagayan.

The journal’s operations are supported through institutional resources and authorized forms of assistance.

Funding or sponsorship will not give a person or organization control over individual editorial decisions.

Dan-ag does not currently accept commercial advertising on its journal website or within published articles.

Announcements directly related to the journal, School of Education, publisher, academic events, or scholarly opportunities may be displayed when appropriate.

Announcements will remain separate from editorial decision-making.

SPECIAL ISSUES

PRIVACY AND PERSONAL INFORMATION

Special issues must follow the journal’s authorship, ethics, peer-review, conflict-of-interest, correction, and publication requirements.

A guest editor, when appointed, must disclose conflicts and work under the supervision of the Editor-in-Chief.

Guest editors may not guarantee acceptance or bypass independent peer review.

The final authority over special-issue content remains with the journal’s authorized editors.

Names, email addresses, affiliations, uploaded files, reviewer details, and other personal information collected by Dan-ag will be used only for legitimate journal purposes.

These purposes include:

Editorial screening
Peer review
Publication processing
Journal communication
Indexing and metadata preparation
Research-integrity evaluation
Reviewer and editorial records

Information will not knowingly be sold, used for unrelated marketing, or disclosed to unauthorized parties.

Access will be limited to individuals who require the information for legitimate journal responsibilities.

DIGITAL STORAGE AND PRESERVATION

POLICY UPDATES

Dan-ag will maintain master copies of submitted and published materials in institutionally controlled digital storage with appropriate access restrictions.

Published articles, issue files, and essential metadata will be backed up to reduce the risk of accidental loss.

The journal will pursue appropriate institutional-repository and long-term digital-preservation arrangements as its digital platform develops.

These policies may be revised to reflect developments in scholarly publishing, research ethics, technology, law, institutional requirements, and recognized standards.

Material policy changes will be dated and posted on the journal website.

A policy revision will not be used retrospectively to disadvantage an author unless necessary to protect participants, address misconduct, comply with law, or correct the scholarly record.

POLICY VERSION

Effective date: August 20, 2026

Last updated: August 22, 2026

Approved by: School of Education, Xavier University – Ateneo de Cagayan

CONTACT

Questions, complaints, appeals, corrections, or concerns regarding research and publication integrity should be sent through the official Dan-ag journal email address. Complaints involving the Editor-in-Chief may be directed to:

Publisher’s Representative and Institutional Adviser

Dean, School of Education

Xavier University – Ateneo de Cagayan

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