The publication ethics and malpractice statement supports combined efforts by authors, programme committee members, and organizers to produce a responsible research publication. Please note that the instructions for authors and reviewers are to be found on the conference website. Specifically, when not differently specified, EDM’s authors, programme committee members, and organizers are expected to follow the ethical standards of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), including:
- the International Standards for Authors;
- the Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers (as for programme committee members);
- the Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Editors (as for organizers).
Authorship and Contributorship
We follow the authorship and contributorship criteria of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). Specifically, authors assert they have:
- made substantial contributions to conception/design/analysis or interpretation in the study;
- been involved in the writing of the manuscript to be submitted;
- approved the final submitted version and taken responsibility for the integrity of its content.
Only those who meet these three criteria should be listed as authors. Contributors who meet some but not all criteria should be listed in the acknowledgments section. It is the responsibility of all listed authors to ensure authorship meets EDM guidelines.
Complaints and Appeals
Complaints and appeals must be reported to the EDM program chairs by email with the subject line “EDM 2024 – Complain/Appeal”. Received complaints and appeals will be investigated according to the recommendations by the Committee on Publication Ethics. If the requesters are unsatisfied with the response they may contact the International Educational Data Mining Society.
Integrity and Misconduct
In case of misconduct, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication among others, or if a paper is found not to be original, it will be rejected or removed, following the COPE retraction guidelines. All the suspected unethical behaviors will be investigated by a dedicated ethics board. Individuals found violating rules may face sanctions. We collect names of individuals found to violate standards; if individuals representing conferences, journals, or other organizations request this list, we may make this information available to them.
Competing Interests and Conflicts
In compliance with the author guidelines, authors are required to declare competing interests and conflicts during submission. Organizers and programme committee members involved in competing interests and/or conflicts, which they can also declare during the bidding process, will be removed from any decision-making process on such papers. In general, programme committee members and organizers should decline to handle the review and/or decision process if they have a competing interest and/or conflict of interest with the submission. Examples include, but are not limited to:
- employment:
- holding a position in the same institution as the authors;
- seeking employment at the same institution as the authors;
- financial:
- have ownership in an equity or enterprise that would benefit from the publication;
- would directly/indirectly receive income as a result of publication;
- personal:
- author has been family member, professional/business partner, former PhD student;
- author has been a collaborator in the past 48 months;
- author has been a co-editor in the past 24 months.
Programme committee members and organizers should report a competing interest and/or conflict of interest if a reasonable person with all relevant facts would question their impartiality.
Data Sharing and Reproducibility
Authors are encouraged to conduct their scientific inquiry using emerging best practices in open science. Authors are encouraged to pre-register their study design, hypotheses, and analysis plans, and publish these using platforms such as OSF.io or AsPredicted.org. Whenever possible, feasible, and ethical, authors are encouraged to make their data, materials, and scripts openly available for inspection, replication, and follow-up analysis (the best way is to use a platform like OSF.io).
Authors are also encouraged to post pre-prints of their submissions with preprint hosting sites such as EdArXiv.org or on their own sites. If accepted, any preprint version should be updated to refer readers to the version as the document of record. We support open dissemination of knowledge as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation (see effect of open access).
Links to existing source code are encouraged. During reviewing, to keep it double-masked, we suggest using an anonymized service like Anonymous GitHub (https://anonymous.4open.science). As for reproducibility, we suggest that the authors should follow the guidelines provided by the McGill School of Computer Science, which are well-known in sister communities.
Ethical Oversight
All suspected unethical behaviors will be investigated by a dedicated ethics board. The ethics board provides feedback to the EDM program chairs regarding risks and harms of the work as well as any misconduct, and recommends mitigations or follow-ups with all the involved parties. Individuals or groups of individuals found violating rules may face sanctions. Consequences for violating ethical aspects will be decided by the EDM program chairs and may include a formal or informal warning, expulsion from the conference with no refund, barring from participation in future conferences or the EDM organization, reporting the incident to the offender’s local institution or funding agencies, or other actions. If an action is taken, an appeals process will be made available.
Intellectual Property
All the accepted papers will be published in the open-access proceedings of the conference on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge, except for the Journal track. More specifically, we operate under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Following this license, authors retain copyright and grant the EDM conference the right of first publication. We follow the same full statement on copyright provided by the Journal of Educational Data Mining. Conference proceedings are associated with an ISBN, and DOIs will be assigned to papers via Zenodo.
Post-Publication Discussions, Corrections and Retractions
Any post-publication discussions should be sent to EDM program chairs through email. Requests for corrections must be made by the authors and be sent to EDM program chairs. We mainly manage two types of corrections. Errata are issued when a production-related error or omission by EDM proceedings chairs has occurred inside the paper during the publication process. Corrigenda are similar to errata and are typically issued alongside the published paper when an author has made a mistake or error and notifies the EDM program chairs. Corrigenda for items with multiple authors must be approved by all authors of the paper, without coercion by the other authors. Corrigenda are otherwise handled in the same manner as errata. On the other hand, retractions are issued to correct the literature and notify readers that the paper contains significant flaws and/or errors that could impact the findings or conclusions of the paper, such that they should not be relied upon. Retractions may be warranted as the result of either honest errors, or some form of research misconduct or violation. Retractions will be managed by following the COPE retraction guidelines. For any questions concerning retractions, please reach out to Anna Rafferty <arafferty@carleton.edu>.