Research and Publication Ethics

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Journal of Multimedia Information System (JMIS), published by the Korea Multimedia Society, is committed to the highest standards of publication ethics, research integrity, and editorial independence. Editors, authors, and reviewers share responsibility for maintaining these standards throughout submission, peer review, publication, and post-publication correction.

For policies not explicitly stated on this page, JMIS follows the COPE Core Practices (https://publicationethics.org/core-practices) and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (https://publicationethics.org/sites/default/files/principles-transparency-best-practice-scholarly-publishing.pdf). Detailed requirements for human and animal research, generative AI, and related-party co-authorship are provided in the corresponding policies in the For Authors menu.

Ethical Obligations of Editors

1. Editors must evaluate submitted manuscripts fairly and without discrimination based on religion, sex, gender, race, nationality, seniority, social status, institutional affiliation, or other irrelevant characteristics. Decisions must be based on originality, methodological and technical quality, significance, and relevance to the scope of JMIS.

2. Editors must process manuscripts in a timely manner and keep all information about submitted manuscripts confidential. Information may be shared only with persons directly involved in the editorial evaluation. Reviewer identities must not be disclosed unless the journal's review model expressly provides otherwise.

3. An editor who submits a manuscript to JMIS must take no part in its evaluation or editorial decision. Another qualified editor must manage the manuscript independently, including any post-publication discussion.

4. Editors must avoid conflicts of interest and the appearance of conflicts. They must not assign a manuscript to reviewers known to have a personal, professional, or financial conflict with the authors or the subject of the manuscript.

5. Unpublished information, arguments, data, or interpretations in a submitted manuscript are confidential and must not be used for an editor's own research or disclosed without the authors' permission.

6. When credible evidence shows that a published article contains a material error, the editor must work with the authors and publisher to issue an appropriate correction promptly.

7. When credible evidence suggests plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, or other research misconduct, the editor must refer the matter for investigation under the JMIS Research and Publication Ethics policy and applicable COPE guidance.

8. Editors must not require authors to cite JMIS, any other particular journal, or the editor's own work in order to increase citation counts. A request to add references must rest on scholarly grounds, must be explained to the authors, and must leave the decision to the authors. Citations to JMIS are not a factor in any editorial decision.

Ethical Obligations of Authors

1. A submitted manuscript must describe the work accurately and in sufficient detail, with appropriate data and references, to permit scholarly evaluation and, where applicable, replication.

2. Information obtained privately through conversation, correspondence, review, grant evaluation, or another confidential service must not be used or reported without explicit permission from the source.

3. Submitted manuscripts must not contain plagiarized material or fabricated, falsified, or improperly manipulated data. JMIS defines plagiarism as using another person's words, ideas, data, images, or interpretations without appropriate attribution.

4. Authors must not submit the same or substantially overlapping work to more than one journal at the same time.

5. Scholarly criticism of published work is permitted, but personal criticism or abusive language is not acceptable.

6. Only persons who have made substantial intellectual contributions and who accept responsibility for the work may be listed as authors. The corresponding author must confirm that all co-authors approved the final manuscript and agreed to submission.

7. Manuscripts must not be submitted primarily for advertising or other undisclosed commercial purposes.

8. Authors should not submit a discussion of their own published article except as a formal response, rebuttal, or closure invited or permitted by the journal.

9. Authors must cite only sources that are directly relevant to the manuscript and must not add citations in order to increase the citation counts of themselves, of their collaborators, or of a particular journal.

Ethical Obligations of Reviewers

1. A reviewer who lacks the necessary expertise or cannot complete the review within the requested time must promptly notify the editor and decline the assignment.

2. Reviewers must evaluate manuscripts objectively and respect the intellectual independence of the authors. Personal criticism is strictly prohibited.

3. A reviewer with an actual, potential, or perceived conflict of interest must promptly disclose it to the editor and decline the review when appropriate.

4. Unpublished information, arguments, data, or interpretations in a submitted manuscript are confidential and must not be used for the reviewer's own research or disclosed without the authors' permission.

5. Reviewers must protect manuscript files and review materials, must not discuss them with others except with prior editorial permission, and must not upload them to external generative AI or other automated systems where confidentiality cannot be assured.

6. Reviewers must alert the editor to any substantial similarity between the submitted manuscript and published or concurrently submitted work of which they are aware.

7. Reviewers must not use unpublished information obtained through peer review for personal or professional advantage and must provide appropriate attribution when editorially authorized to refer to it.

8. A reviewer who has credible evidence of plagiarism, fabricated or falsified data, or other misconduct must promptly notify the editor. The matter will be handled under the policies of the Journal of Multimedia Information System (JMIS).

9. Reviewers must not ask authors to cite the reviewer's own work, or work published in a particular journal, without a clear scholarly justification directly related to the manuscript under review. Suggested references must be identified as suggestions that the authors are free to decline.

Duplicate Publication and Simultaneous Submission

Any manuscripts submitted to the Journal must be original and the manuscript, or substantial parts of it, must not be under consideration by any other journals. All manuscripts submitted to the journal are checked for possible plagiarism or duplicate publication by CrossCheck’s plagiarism detection. Any suspected cases of covert duplicate manuscript submission will be handled and the editor may contact the authors’ institution. Before reviewing, all submitted manuscripts are inspected by Similarity Check powered by iThenticate (https://www.crossref.org/services/similarity-check/), a plagiarism-screening tool.

Simultaneous submission is prohibited. A manuscript, or a manuscript with substantially overlapping content, must not be submitted to or be under review by any other journal, conference, or publication venue while it is under consideration by JMIS. By submitting a manuscript, the corresponding author confirms on behalf of all authors that it is not under consideration elsewhere, and undertakes not to submit it elsewhere until the editorial decision of JMIS has been communicated or the manuscript has been formally withdrawn. Authors who wish to submit the manuscript to another venue must first request withdrawal in writing and receive confirmation from the Editorial Office.

Posting a manuscript on a recognized preprint server does not constitute prior publication or simultaneous submission, provided that the preprint is disclosed in the cover letter and cited in the manuscript. Presentation of an abstract, a poster, or a talk at a meeting whose proceedings are not formally published likewise does not constitute prior publication.

An extended version of a paper previously presented at a conference or workshop with formally published proceedings may be submitted, provided that it is a substantial extension of the earlier version. JMIS regards a submission as a substantial extension when at least 30 percent of the submitted manuscript is new relative to the previously published version, and when that new material constitutes a genuine technical contribution rather than presentational change.

New material includes, for example, a new or generalized method, a new theoretical result or proof, additional experiments on new datasets, tasks, or baselines, ablation, sensitivity, or error analyses, a new application, user study, or deployment evaluation, and a substantially expanded analysis and discussion of results. Rewriting or reorganizing existing text, translation, reformatting, an expanded related-work section, additional references, and figures or tables that do not report new results are not counted as new material.

At submission, the authors must cite the conference version in the reference list, state its title, venue, and full publication details in the cover letter, and provide an extension statement that describes what is new in the submitted manuscript and approximately what proportion of it is new. The authors must also confirm that reuse of the conference version does not infringe the copyright held by the conference publisher, and must obtain written permission where required. A disclosed conference version is taken into account when the similarity report is assessed, whereas undisclosed overlap with a previously published conference paper is treated as duplicate submission under this policy.

If simultaneous submission is identified at any stage, the manuscript will be rejected without further review or, if it has already been published, retracted. The Editorial Office may notify the other journal or conference and the authors' institutions, and may restrict further submissions by the authors for a period determined by the Editorial Board.

Authorship

An 'author' is generally considered to be someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a published study. According to the ICMJE guidelines (https://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf), authorship credit should be based on:

1) Substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, and/or analysis and interpretation of data; AND

2) Drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND

3) Final approval of the version to be published; AND

4) Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Authors wishing to make any changes to authorship will be asked to make and submit an official letter to the editor. Please note that changes to authorship cannot be made after acceptance of a manuscript.

Conflicts of Interest

JMIS requires authors to disclose all financial and non-financial competing interests that could influence, or reasonably be perceived to influence, the work. Editors and reviewers must also disclose relevant conflicts and recuse themselves when appropriate.

Ethical Oversight

JMIS requires ethical oversight for research involving human participants, human data, identifiable personal information or media, biometric identifiers, or animals, where such review is required by institutional or national regulations. Manuscripts must clearly state the name of the IRB, ethics committee, or IACUC, the approval or exemption number, and the approval date, or explain why ethical review was not required.
Authors must also state whether informed consent was obtained or waived, and whether written consent for publication was obtained for identifiable materials. Detailed requirements are available on the Human and Animal Research Policy page. When an approval or exemption number is reported, authors must also upload a copy of the corresponding approval letter or exemption determination at submission.

Complaints and Appeals

JMIS has a clearly described process for handling complaints against the journal, its editorial staff, editorial board, reviewers, publisher, or editorial process, and for handling appeals against editorial decisions.
Appeals against editorial decisions must be submitted in writing to the Editorial Office and should provide a detailed scientific or procedural rationale. Appeals are reviewed by the Editor-in-Chief or a designated senior editor who was not responsible for the original decision whenever possible. The journal may seek additional peer review, editorial consultation, or independent advice. The original decision will be upheld unless a material error in editorial process, factual assessment, or peer review is identified.
Complaints regarding editorial conduct, delays, conflicts of interest, breaches of confidentiality, or concerns about published content should be submitted in writing to the Editorial Office. Complaints will be handled confidentially, fairly, and in accordance with COPE guidance. Where necessary, the journal may consult the publisher, editorial board, reviewers, authors' institutions, or other relevant bodies. The journal may issue a correction, expression of concern, retraction, apology, or other appropriate notice when warranted.

Data Sharing and Reproducibility

JMIS supports transparency, reproducibility, and responsible sharing of research materials. All manuscripts must include a Data Availability and Reproducibility statement before the References. Authors should state whether the underlying data, code, models, prompts, annotations, or other materials are openly available, available upon reasonable request, restricted for legal, ethical, privacy, security, or contractual reasons, included in the article or supplementary files, or not applicable.
Where ethically and legally possible, authors are encouraged to deposit datasets and reproducibility materials in a trusted public repository and provide a persistent identifier such as a DOI or stable URL. When open sharing is not possible, authors must state the reason and whether controlled access is possible.
Authors are expected to retain the original data and relevant records for a reasonable period after publication and to provide them to the editorial office if questions arise concerning the accuracy, reproducibility, or integrity of the work.

Generative AI and AI-Assisted Technologies

Authors must disclose the use of generative AI or AI-assisted technologies, remain fully responsible for all submitted content, and must not list an AI tool as an author. Editors and reviewers must not upload confidential manuscripts or review materials to external AI systems where confidentiality cannot be assured. Full requirements are stated in the Generative AI and AI-Assisted Technologies Policy.

Related-Party Co-authorship

Authors must disclose at submission any co-author who falls within the Related-Party Co-authorship Policy. Every listed author must satisfy the journal's authorship criteria, and the corresponding author must provide any required consent and contribution information to the Editorial Office. A family or minor relationship alone does not constitute misconduct.

Managing Research and Publication Misconduct

When the journal faces suspected cases of research and publication misconduct such as a redundant (duplicate) publication, plagiarism, fabricated data, changes in authorship, undisclosed conflicts of interest, an ethical problem discovered with the submitted manuscript, a reviewer who has appropriated an author’s idea or data, complaints against editors, and other issues, the resolving process will follow the flowchart provided by COPE (https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). The Editorial Board will discuss the suspected cases and reach a decision. The journal will not hesitate to publish errata, corrigenda, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed. JMIS also accepts post-publication discussion through editorial correspondence and will consider corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions when appropriate.

Corrections, Retractions, and Expressions of Concern

JMIS corrects the published record promptly and transparently. The type of notice is determined by the nature and the severity of the problem. A correction, published as an erratum or a corrigendum, is issued when a limited part of an otherwise reliable article is inaccurate. An expression of concern is issued when a substantial concern about an article exists but the investigation is incomplete or inconclusive. A retraction is issued when the main findings are unreliable as a result of misconduct or of honest error, or when the article reports unethical research, has been published redundantly, contains plagiarism, or infringes the rights of others.

Corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions are published in the next available issue and on the journal website as citable notices that carry their own DOI. Each notice states the reason for the action and who is issuing it, is linked to and from the original article, and is made freely available to all readers. The original article is not removed from the record. A retracted article is clearly marked as retracted on every page while its content remains accessible so that the scholarly record stays complete.

A correction, an expression of concern, or a retraction may be requested by the authors or initiated by the editor. Where an investigation is required, it proceeds as described above and follows COPE guidance, and the authors are given an opportunity to respond before a decision is made. Only in exceptional cases, such as an article that is defamatory, infringes legal rights, or presents a serious risk to health or safety, may the content be removed and replaced by a notice explaining the reason, and the bibliographic metadata are retained in all such cases.

A manuscript that has been accepted but not yet assigned to an issue may be withdrawn by the editor if a serious problem is identified, and it is replaced by a notice explaining the reason. A request by the authors to withdraw a manuscript after acceptance requires the approval of the Editor-in-Chief.

Contact

Questions or complaints regarding this policy, and appeals against editorial decisions, should be directed to the Editorial Office at jmis@kmms.or.kr.

Adopted on October 25, 2013

Revised on June 1, 2014

Revised on September 15, 2026