Publication Ethics

Corrections, Retractions and Post-Publication Updates

Publication Ethics

The VTEI authors, editors and reviewers follow the following rules and principles of publication ethics, which are based on international ethical standards, especially the Publishing Ethics Resource Kit /PERK/ of Elsevier and COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics).

Author’s code of ethics

The VTEI Journal only publishes original scientific or review studies, summarizing their authors’ own research results, while the authors are obliged to comply with the ethical principles of research work.
The authors are responsible for the fact that the article has not yet been published either in printed or electronic form (with the exception of preprint servers). Only new, fundamentally revised versions of an already published work (e.g., a significant expansion of a paper presented at a scientific conference) are admissible. Authors are obliged to inform the editors about all previously published versions (including versions on preprint servers) of the article and send these versions to the editors together with the manuscript for assessment of the extent of the revision.
Authors may not offer the article for printing to several editors simultaneously.
Authors are responsible for crediting all co-authors who participated in the preparation and creation of the text, and for the fact that all co-authors have seen and approved the version of the article submitted for review and agree to list their names as co-authors.
In the final acknowledgment, the authors are obliged to indicate the sources of financial support for the project.
The authors are responsible for the correct citation of the materials used and the proper indication of all sources used.
They also give an assurance that they have obtained permission to use copyrighted materials. The editors can request this permission at any time.
The editors do not tolerate any form of plagiarism, while reserving the right to check all articles using appropriate automatic plagiarism detection tools, such as “Similarity Check”.
The VTEI Journal editors do not support duplicate and redundant publishing, which occurs when a paper, or its essential parts, is published by the author(s) more than once without proper justification of the overlap and without proper citation.
Authors are obliged to follow the instructions for formal editing, i.e., observe the method of citation, the format of the supplied materials, etc. (see Binding rules regarding formal editing).
Authors are obliged to report any conflict of interest arising from relations with the editorial and scientific board as well as the editorial office and its members or other entities and actively cooperate in the review procedure.
Authors are also responsible for final proofreading and error correction prior to publication.
To assure transparency and openness regarding data and other materials, authors are obliged to provide supporting evidence of published results upon relevant request, or to allow access to them (also see Data articles).
As part of the affiliation, the authors indicate their institution, or the institution that approved or guaranteed the research, the results of which are presented in the article.
The VTEI Journal publishes its content in Open Access mode. Therefore, users can download, distribute, and refer to the articles without the prior author’s consent.
By sending the manuscript to the editorial office, the authors (or the person sending the manuscript to the editorial office) grant the VTEI publisher a non-exclusive license Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial” 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) to publish the article in printed and electronic form. If the person sending the manuscript to the editorial office is not authorized to grant such a license, a license agreement signed by all authorized persons must be sent together with the manuscript. If a separate license agreement is not attached to the e-mail with the manuscript sent, the publisher considers that the person sending the e-mail with the manuscript is entitled to grant such a license. Neither copyright nor property rights in the article are affected by granting of this license.
Authors are not charged any fees for publishing; all costs are borne by T. G. Masaryk Water Research Institute, p. r. i.

Responsibility of the publisher, editorial board, scientific board, and editors

- The Editorial and Scientific board protects the principles of publication ethics, publishes the principles for reviewing papers and updates them when necessary.
- The Editorial and Scientific board has the exclusive right to accept or reject a paper to the review procedure.
- Only expert articles that have successfully passed the review procedure may be published. Articles of an informative and data nature are subject to approval by the Editorial and Scientific board or Editorial office.
- The VTEI Journal implements a unilaterally blind review procedure, i.e., the authors do not know the names of the reviewers, but the reviewers know the names of the authors.
- The final decision on publication of a paper, which belongs to the Editorial and Scientific board, is based solely on the appropriate scientific value of the article, its contribution, originality, clarity, and compliance with the journal’s focus. The Editorial and Scientific board does not pursue any commercial goals when deciding whether to accept an article for publication.
- In the case of a negative opinion and the reviewers’ proposal to reject the article, the matter must be discussed by the Editorial and Scientific board. The author is then informed of the Editorial and Scientific board’s decision and the reasons for rejection of the article.
- The publisher, Editorial and Scientific board, and Editorial office strictly observe the principles of editorial independence and ensure that there is no conflict of interest, not only in relation to accepted and rejected papers, but also in terms of funding or institutional, commercial, and personal interests.
- The Editorial and Scientific board also focuses on ensuring that erroneous or falsified results, incomplete citation of sources, and non-compliance with professional and ethical principles do not occur.
- In the event of any doubts regarding the published papers, these doubts are submitted by e-mail to the Chairman of the Editorial and Scientific board and, at the same time, to the VTEI Journal Editor-in-Chief (see Editorial team). The Editor-in-Chief, together with the editors, will ensure an objective investigation in accordance with the relevant recommendations of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and submit its results for discussion to the Editorial and Scientific board. In the event that the activities of the Editorial and Scientific board are in doubt, they submit the investigation results to the publisher’s statutory representative for discussion. If the activity of the Editorial office is in doubt, the Chairman of the Editorial and Scientific board ensures an objective investigation in accordance with the relevant recommendations of COPE and inform the statutory representative of the VTEI Journal publisher about its results. If necessary, explanations, apologies and possibly also notices about the withdrawal of texts from the online version of the journal are published directly with the individual electronic versions of the articles, and are also published in the next printed issue.
- Changes/additions to articles accepted for publication are subject to review by the editors and subsequently by the Editorial and Scientific board. If authors wish to add to their article after it has been accepted, they must submit a request to the editors and the new content is reviewed. If the new material supplements an already published article, it must be submitted for review as a new manuscript with a reference to the original article. If new material should replace the original content of a published article, the editors may consider issuing an Erratum or Corrigendum.
- Erratum refers to the editors’ error correction. All changes introduced by the editors are brought to the author’s attention at the proofreading stage, and ideally all errors are identified by the author and corrected by the editors before final publication. If authors notice an editorial error after the article has been published, they should contact the Editor-in-Chief. Erratum in the form of a new version of the article with a note on the change/s is immediately published electronically on the website of the relevant article. The pdf version of the article and the whole journal is corrected in a similar way. The printed Erratum is published in the next printed issue.
- Corrigendum refers to a change to an article that the author wishes to publish at any time after its publication. Authors should contact the journal editors, who will determine the impact of the change and decide on the appropriate course of action. The Editorial and Scientific board will decide on the publication of the Corrigendum of the published article based on the editors’ opinion. When issuing a Corrigendum in electronic form, the procedure is similar to when issuing an Erratum, unless the Editorial and Scientific board decides otherwise on the basis of the editors’ recommendation.
- Discussion articles and comments on published articles are assessed by the editors and subsequently by the Editorial and Scientific board. These articles may also be subject to peer review. However, the editors invite authors of discussion articles and comments to consider using online tools for post publishing review, such as the PubPeer portal or academic social networks ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.
- Articles are accepted by the journal’s editors, assessed by reviewers, and approved by the Editorial and Scientific board without any discrimination against the authors.

Privacy Policy

Names and email addresses entered on this page will be used solely for the stated purposes of the VTEI Journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any third party.

Authorship Policy

Authorship of an article must reflect the actual scholarly contribution of each person involved in the submitted manuscript. A person may be listed as an author or co-author only if they have made a substantial contribution, in particular to:

the concept of the article, study design, or interpretation of results,
drafting the manuscript or critically revising it for important intellectual content,
approving the final version of the manuscript intended for publication,
taking responsibility for the content of the published article.

All persons listed as authors must meet the above criteria. Individuals who contributed only technical, administrative, language-related, financial, or other supporting assistance should be acknowledged in the acknowledgements section and should not be listed as authors.

The order of authors is a matter of agreement between the co-authors. The corresponding author is responsible for communication with the Editorial Office and confirms that:

all listed authors have agreed to the submission of the manuscript,
no person meeting the authorship criteria has been omitted,
no person not meeting the authorship criteria has been included as an author.

Any change in authorship after submission, including the addition, removal, or re-ordering of authors, may only be made upon a written request to the Editorial Office and with the consent of all authors concerned. The Editorial Office reserves the right to request an explanation and supporting documentation.

If the Editorial Office identifies suspected unethical authorship practices, including ghost authorship, guest authorship, or authorship disputes, the editorial process may be suspended until the matter has been clarified.

Corrections, Retractions and Post-Publication Updates

The journal VTEI is committed to the accuracy, transparency, and integrity of the published record. If an error or a serious concern is identified after publication, the Editorial Office will act according to the nature and seriousness of the issue. Where appropriate, the Editorial Office may publish:

a correction (erratum / corrigendum) if the error does not invalidate the article as a whole but needs to be publicly corrected,
an expression of concern if there is serious suspicion of publication misconduct or unreliability of the published content and the matter has not yet been fully resolved,
a retraction if it is established that the article contains seriously flawed or unreliable data, was published in breach of ethical standards, involves plagiarism, unethical authorship, duplicate publication, or any other serious breach of publication ethics.

The decision to publish a correction, expression of concern, or retraction is made by the Editorial Office based on an assessment of the individual case. The Editorial Office may request statements from the author, reviewer, author’s institution, or other relevant parties.

Any correction, expression of concern, or retraction must be clearly labelled, published separately, and linked to the original article. The original published article will not be silently altered without notice; where technically possible, it will remain available with an appropriate indication of the correction or retraction.

Authors are required to promptly notify the Editorial Office if they discover a serious error or inaccuracy in their published article and to cooperate fully in correcting the published record.

Use of Artificial Intelligence Tools

The journal VTEI allows the reasonable use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including generative AI and other AI-assisted technologies, provided that such use is transparent, ethical, and does not compromise the credibility, originality, or scholarly quality of the submitted manuscript.

Authors are required to disclose the use of AI tools if they were used in the preparation of the manuscript, especially in drafting, editing, revising, translating, summarising, analysing data, or creating tables, figures, graphical elements, or other parts of the submission. The disclosure should include at least the name of the tool and a brief description of how it was used.

AI tools cannot be listed as authors or co-authors of a manuscript. Authorship belongs exclusively to natural persons who meet the journal’s authorship criteria. Human authors remain fully responsible for the entire content of the manuscript, including its accuracy, originality, proper citation of sources, absence of plagiarism, and compliance with publication ethics.

The use of AI is acceptable, in particular, as a supporting tool for language improvement, stylistic editing, text structuring, or technical assistance in data analysis, provided that the authors carefully review and verify all outputs. Authors must not rely on AI to generate factual claims, references, bibliographic data, interpretations, or conclusions without their own expert verification.

If authors use AI to create images, diagrams, graphical elements, or other visual content, this must be explicitly disclosed to the Editorial Office upon submission. The Editorial Office reserves the right to reject such material if its origin, accuracy, copyright status, or scientific reliability is questionable.

Reviewers and editors must not upload unpublished manuscripts or any part of them into publicly available generative AI tools or other external systems where this could compromise confidentiality, personal data protection, or the rights of the authors.

The Editorial Office may ask authors to supplement or clarify their disclosure regarding AI use and to explain how AI-generated outputs were verified. Undisclosed or unethical use of AI may be treated as a breach of publication ethics.

Recommended disclosure wording for authors:

“In the preparation of this manuscript, the authors used [tool name] for [brief description of use]. The authors reviewed all outputs and take full responsibility for the final version and content of the article.”