Plagiarism Policy

LC International Journal of STEM (LC-JSTEM) Editorial board recognizes that plagiarism is not acceptable and therefore establishes the following policy stating specific actions (penalties) upon identification of plagiarism/similarities in articles submitted for publication. LC-JSTEM will use Turnitin's originality checking software as the tool in detecting similarities of texts in article manuscripts and the final version articles ready for publication. A maximum of 18% of similarities is allowed for the submitted papers. Should we find more than 18% of the similarity index, the article will be returned to the author for correction and re-submission.

LC-JSTEM open access publishing will check plagiarism for all the articles before prior publication. If the plagiarism content is observed by editors, peer reviewers or by editorial staff members at any stage of publication process at the time of editing or proof reading will be informed to author to rewrite the manuscript. In any case if the submitted original manuscript is more than 18% plagiarized then the article will be rejected and the same will be notified to author.

Policy:
Papers must be original, unpublished, and not pending publication elsewhere. Any material taken verbatim from another source needs to be clearly identified as different from the present original text by:
(1) indentation,
(2) use of quotation marks and
(3) identification of the source.
Any text of an amount exceeding fair use standards (herein defined as more than two or three sentences or the equivalent thereof) or any graphic material reproduced from another source requires permission from the copyright holder and, if feasible, the original author(s) and also requires identification of the source; e.g., previous publication.

When plagiarism is identified, the Chief Editor/Managing Editor is responsible for the review of this paper and will agree on measures according to the extent of plagiarism detected in the paper in agreement with the following guidelines:

Level of Plagiarism

Minor Plagiarism
A small sentence or short paragraph of another manuscript is plagiarized without any significant data or ideas taken from the other papers or publications. Punishment: A warning is given to the authors and a request to change the manuscript and properly cite the original sources.

Intermediate Plagiarism
A significant data, paragraph, or sentence of an article is plagiarized without proper citation to the original source.
Punishment: The submitted article is automatically rejected.

Severe Plagiarism
A large portion of an article is plagiarized that involves many aspects such as reproducing original results (data, formulation, equation, law, statement, etc.), ideas, and methods presented in other publications.
Punishment: The paper is automatically rejected and the authors are forbidden to submit further articles to the journal.