Policy on publication ethics
Communications in Cryptology (CiC) is committed to ensuring ethics and quality in research. We therefore expect everyone involved in the journal to follow our principles (see below) and ethics. See the related IACR docs here and here.
Duties for Authors
Confidentiality
You may not ask Editorial Board members for information about your submission before the Editorial Board decisions are made; nor may you ask for information about discussions after the event (except, perhaps, for asking on general advice about a re-submission). In all cases, any questions must be addressed to the Editors-in-Chief rather than to individual Editorial Board members.
Conflicts of Interest
Your papers will not be reviewed by reviewers who have a conflict of interest with at least one author of the submission. When submitting your article for review, you have to list any conflict of interest you are aware of. See here for detailed definition of conflict of interests.
Anonymity
No information that allows to identify the authors must be given in a submission. Author names must not appear on a submission, and no funding information or identifying information must appear within the submission document such that it is possible for reviewers to do a blind review. This includes obvious self-references or links to non-anonymized further material. It is however acceptable to post full versions of your work on the Cryptology ePrint Achive, give presentations of your work etc. as long as you are not referencing these from within the paper.
Irregular Submissions
You should be aware of the CiC Policy on Irregular Submissions.
Sticky Reviews
The CiC acknowledges that the process of submitting a rejected paper from one venue to another can lead to disparity of reviewing opinions and to additional workload for reviewers. The CiC encourages authors to include in their Supplementary Material responses to reviews from previous IACR events.
Note that the Editorial Board members reviewing the new paper will not have access to the old version nor the previous reviews thus your comments should be understandable without these items.
For revised resubmissions to CiC this is mandatory.
Duties for Editorial Board Members
Confidentiality
You must hold any information on the assigned submissions in confidence. You cannot disclose information about the authors, the content of submissions, other reviews, or discussions in the Editorial Board to anyone else not in this role. In order to obtain independent opinions about a submission, do not discuss the submission with other Editorial Board members before writing your review. Editorial Board members must not use unpublished information in their own research of which they learned in their role as board member.
Conflicts of Interest
You should not review a submission if you have a conflict of interest with at least one author of the submission. See here for detailed definition of conflict of interests.
Anonymity
Submissions to CiC are anonymous thus no author names appear on a submission. Naturally, you may be aware of the authors through other means; but you should not take any extra action just for discovering the authors of a submission.
Review Content
You should judge a submission foremost on its overall quality and merit as a scientific publication. You should give a clear justification for your recommendation and provide constructive feedback. You should not use rude, derogatory, or unhelpful language in the review.
Irregular Submissions
You should be aware of the CiC Policy on Irregular Submissions. If you believe that you have identified an irregular submission, contact the Editor-in-Chief of the CiC. Do not take any action on your own.
Duties for Editors-in-Chief and Area Chairs
Follow IACR policies
When making decisions (for accepting, rejecting, responding to malpractice), the Editors-in-Chief and Area Chairs have to act in accordance with general IACR policies.
Confidentiality and Anonymity
The Editors-in-Chief and Area Chairs must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone, with exception of the corresponding author, Editorial Board members, potential sub-reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher; in any case, the double-blind review process must be kept, thus editors must not break anonymity between authors and reviewers. The Editors-in-Chief may reveal the identity of a reviewer upon their request to the authors of a submission to enable giving credit for feedback that significantly impacted the final result of a paper. The Editors-in-Chief must not use unpublished information in their own research of which they only became aware in the review process.
Allegations of Misconduct
The Editors-in-Chief and Area Chairs must take allegations of misconduct seriously and take reasonably responsive measures when ethical complaints have been presented concerning a submitted manuscript or published paper.
Publication Principles
The above points aim to provide a transparent publication process for CiC and to follow an ethical publication practice. In particular, the CiC places importance on the following points, see also the COPE Core Principles:
Take allegations of misconduct seriously and provide a clear process to handle such allegations
If you found anything which objects the stated aims of ethical and quality publications please do not hesitate to contact us: we will investigate the issue and try to solve it as quick as possible. See also the CiC Policy on Irregular Submissions.
If the journal management is the target of your objection or you think we have any conflict of interest with your objection, you can instead contact the IACR board as an independent third party.
Provide a clear policy for the author- and contributorship
Authors of articles accepted for publication in CiC have to be natural persons and need to have contributed to the published work. Honorary authorship is considered as scientific misconduct.
Offer a clear process to handle complaints against the journal, our staff or the publisher
In case you want to complain about anything related to our journal, staff or the publisher, feel free to contact us, or in case of conflicts with your complaint contact the IACR board as an independent third party. We promise to take any complains seriously and to do the best to solve complaints as quickly as possible.
Clearly define and handle Conflict of Interests/Competing Interests
Authors, program committee members, and reviewers must follow the CiC Policy on Conflicts of Interest.
Data and Reproducibility statement
In order to allow reproducibility of results, we strongly encourage authors to share experimental data, implemented source code or otherwise important data. Failure to do so might result in the rejection of the submitted work.
Ethical Aspects
When applicable, we expect authors to follow a responsible disclosure process. Additionally, everyone involved in the journal has to follow the publication ethics.
Intellectual Property, Copyright and Publication licenses
Articles are published as Diamond Open Access, licensed under CC BY 4.0. The journal is free to both readers and authors.
Journal Management
The journal is operated without fees for authors or readers in order to support the open access initiative of the IACR and the non-profit goals of the IACR.
Peer Review Process
Submitted articles are double-blind peer-reviewed. If an Editorial Board member comes across problems during reviewing a submission the Editors-in-Chief must be consulted.
Post-Publication Discussion and Corrections
In case an error in a published article is found we encourage you to let us know by writing to the editorial staff. We will thoroughly examine any such information and if appropriate encourage the authors of the article in question to publish an errata for the corresponding issue.