Colloquia Theologica Ottoniana

Colloquia Theologica Ottoniana is an Open Access journal, which means that all content is available free to users and their institutions. Users are permitted to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts or use them for any other lawful purpose without prior consent from the publishers or authors. This is compliant with the BOAI’s definition of open access. (See source: https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/boai-10-recommendations)

Colloquia Theologica Ottoniana is licensed under Creative Commons-Attribution and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-SA).

Users are free to engage in any of the following actions:

• share, copy, and redistribute the material in any medium or format
• adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially

Under the following terms, users of CTO are permitted these allowances:

• attribution: You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. This may be done in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
• ShareAlike: If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
• no additional restrictions: You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

(See source: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

Detailed license terms and conditions are located here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode

The journal applies the following identifiers: Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for electronic documents and Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) for authors and contributors.

The final decision concerning the text’s publication in CTO is made by the editor-in-chief whose particular obligation is to care for equal treatment of all authors regardless of their sex, race, citizenship, sexual orientation, religious, or philosophical beliefs. The editor-in-chief’s decision is exclusively based on scientific grounds. 

The editor-in-chief and the editorial team do not disclose any information concerning the submitted manuscripts to any party except the author, reviewers, potential reviews, publisher, and other editorial advisors. Intellectual property presented in the submitted manuscript is not used by the editor or editorial team for their own research purposes unless it is agreed upon by the author.

The editors make every effort to select expert reviewers on the subject related to the proposed manuscript. Any parties appointed as reviewers who consider themselves incompetent in a given field, or who know that they are not able to meet the task of preparing a review within a given time, should promptly notify the editors.

All texts submitted for review should be treated as confidential by the reviewers. They must be neither disclosed nor discussed with any other parties.

The main task of the reviewer is to verify whether the reviewed work is a scientific text and that it does not contain substantive errors. The review may also contain polemical elements, but they should be decisive for the conclusion of the review only if the polemic reveals the inconsistency of the author.

Reviews should be objective, substantive, and cultural. Any criticism related to the author’s scientific view, philosophical or religious beliefs, which could be loosely interpreted when reading the text, is inappropriate. The criticism should be based on factual arguments only.

Authors are requested to exclusively submit original texts of scientific nature (references, bibliography, proper style, etc.). In general, papers describing the same research should not be published in more than one journal. Submission of the same manuscript to more than one journal is deemed as incompliant with the policy adopted by CTO and unacceptable.

In the event of publication, the authors consent to the publication of their works under the CC-BY-SA license. This license allows other parties to copy, distribute, and transmit the work as well as to adapt the work and to make commercial use of it.

All parties, who significantly contributed to the manuscript, should be mentioned as their co-authors. Authors in contact with the editors shall undertake to ensure that any and all co-authors accept the final version of the manuscript and consent to its publication.

The CTO editors particularly oppose dishonest practices known as ghostwriting (failure to disclose a person who significantly contributed to a publication) and guest authorship (adding a person who hardly contributed to the manuscript as a co-author). Such practices are deemed by the CTO as shameful signs of scientific misconduct. 

To avoid such occurrences, the editors have implemented the following procedure:

1. Upon the manuscript’s submission, authors declare the contribution of individual parties in the manuscript’s preparation by stating their affiliation and contribution (i.e., information about the author of the concept, assumptions, method, protocol, etc.); however, the party submitting the manuscript is mainly responsible for the accuracy of the provided information. 
2. It is highly recommended to provide the source of the research financing (e.g., research grant, scientific scholarship, etc.). 
3. Upon the occurrence of ghostwriting or guest authorship, the editors shall disclose the information to the offender’s employer as well as relevant institutions.
4. The editors document and disclose other cases of scientific misconduct (i.e., data fabrication and/or falsification, plagiarism, etc.).

1. The author of scientific text may be only a human being. AI tools (including chatbots such as ChatGPT) cannot be recognized as authors or co-authors, nor cited as authors, because they do not meet the essential criteria resulting from the definition of authorship; in particular, they cannot bear responsibility for the reliability, integrity, and originality of the work. These tools have no legal capacity, cannot manage copyright, and are not able to determine the existence or absence of a conflict of interest. AI tools may support the author in editing, translation, data analysis, or the preparation of graphics, provided that they do not replace the author’s independent and creative scholarly contribution.
2. Authors who use AI tools in writing texts, collecting and analyzing data, or creating graphical elements of the work are obliged to disclose honestly and fully transparently which AI tool was used, in what exact way and to what extent it was used, and what influence it had on the given work.
3. AI may be used for linguistic correction and improving the readability of the text; however, it may not replace key creative processes such as formulating scientific conclusions, developing insights, or generating research results.
4. Authors bear full responsibility for the content of the submitted manuscript, including all fragments that were created using AI tools, and therefore they bear responsibility for any violations of publication ethics. Particular attention should be paid to limitations characteristic of tools such as ChatGPT, including: hallucination, that is, generating false information that nevertheless appears credible and linguistically correct; plagiarism, meaning direct quotation or appropriation of ideas without attribution; generating false bibliographic descriptions or even entire bibliographies.
5. Every use of AI tools should be disclosed in the publication (for example, in a footnote, abstract, "Methods" section, or "Acknowledgements"), with the following information:
   · the name of the tool used and its version/model,
   · the scope of its use (for example, language editing, generating an illustration sketch, data analysis), together with the prompts used or a short description of how the tool was applied (for example, the type of query/instruction).
6. Additionally, each author is required to submit to the editorial office of the journal a relevant DECLARATION concerning the use of AI-assisted tools in the preparation of the work, including chatbots, large language models (LLMs), or image generators, together with a detailed description of the purpose, scope, and manner of their use.
7. In the past, the creation of images and videos by generative AI has resulted in violations of copyright and scientific integrity. In compliance with applicable copyright law and best practices in publishing ethics, the Scientific Publishing House of the University of Szczecin does not allow the use of such materials in publications unless they are the subject of the research itself. Such cases must each time be justified at the moment of manuscript submission and will be subject to individual assessment by editors and reviewers. The use of AI tools to prepare auxiliary illustrations or data visualizations is permitted, provided that:
   · the data sources are reliable and documented,
   · the graphics do not violate copyrights or licenses,
   · the materials are marked as "generated using an AI tool" (if applicable),
   · they comply with the principles of data transparency (FAIR Data Principles) if they have a scientific character.
8. All materials submitted to the journal’s editorial office are subject to verification by an anti-plagiarism system that also detects the use of AI tools.
9. Guidelines for reviewers and editors regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI):
   · since reviewers and editors bear full responsibility for the reliability, accuracy, and integrity of the review and editorial process, they must ensure that no part of the work has been processed by AI without the author’s consent and without disclosure,
   · transparency regarding the use of AI, protection of confidentiality, and responsibility for the content of works are key principles that must be observed at every stage of the publishing process,
   · the confidentiality of manuscripts is a fundamental issue at every stage of the publishing process; all manuscripts and correspondence concerning publication are treated as confidential documents, and transferring them to AI tools without the author’s consent is prohibited,
   · reviewers, editors, and the journal’s editorial team may not use AI tools to assess submitted works or to generate the content of reviews; the evaluation of scientific work requires critical thinking and in-depth analysis, which exceed the capabilities of artificial intelligence and can be performed only by a human being.
   

University of Szczecin Press operates in accordance with the RECOMMENDATIONS of the Association of Higher Education Publishers, of which it is a member.

In accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) policy, the retraction of publications serves as a mechanism for correcting the literature and alerting readers to articles that contain such seriously flawed or erroneous content or data that their results and conclusions cannot be deemed credible. Unreliable content or data may arise from honest error, naive mistake, or improper research conduct. The primary goal of retraction is to correct the literature and ensure its integrity, rather than to punish the authors. Retraction may be considered as a warning to readers about instances of duplicate publication, plagiarism, manipulation of the review process, unauthorized reuse of material or data, copyright infringement, or other legal issues (e.g., defamation, privacy, illegality), unethical research, or undisclosed significant conflicts of interest.

The Editorial Board of CTO envisages the application of the retraction procedure in the following instances:

• there is clear evidence that the findings presented in the paper are unreliable, either as a result of a significant error (e.g., miscalculation or experimental error) or through fabrication (e.g., of data) or falsification (e.g., image manipulation),
• the paper contains elements of plagiarism,
• the paper has been published elsewhere previously and this fact was not disclosed to the Editor-in-Chief,
• the paper includes material or data used without authorization,
• copyright law has been violated or another serious legal issue exists (e.g., defamation, privacy interference),
• the paper involves unethical research,
• the paper was published solely on the basis of a compromised or manipulated review process,
• the author failed to disclose a significant conflict of interest which, in the editor's opinion, could have an undue influence on the work's interpretation or the editors' or reviewers' recommendations.

In line with best practices and COPE guidelines, the following procedures are applied in the event of the need to retract an article:

1. A suitable note informing of the text's retraction is published in the subsequent printed and electronic issue of the journal.
2. The faulty article in the online version is marked with information about its retraction.
3. The original article remains unchanged, except for a watermark in the PDF file indicating on each page that the work has been retracted ("RETRACTED ARTICLE", "This article was retracted", etc.).
4. In exceptional cases, it may be necessary to remove a faulty article published online, especially when the article is clearly defamatory, violates someone's privacy, is subject to a court order, or could pose a serious threat to public health. In these circumstances, the metadata (title and authors) will be preserved, and the notification of retraction will clearly specify why the full article was removed.

In cases of serious ethical violations, the editorial board, in agreement with the publisher, will consider informing the author's employer or the person responsible for oversight of the research at their institution about the allegations against the author.

As COPE notes, authors sometimes request the retraction of articles when a dispute over authorship arises post-publication. If there is no reason to doubt the validity of the research findings or the reliability of the data, it is not appropriate to retract a publication solely on the basis of a dispute over authorship. In such cases, the Editor-in-Chief will inform those involved in the dispute that it cannot adjudicate in such matters, but will gladly publish a correction to the list of authors/contributors if the authors/contributors (or their institutions) provide sufficient evidence that such a change is justified.

If unequivocal evidence indicating the unreliability of a publication cannot be obtained, or if such evidence is not obtained over a prolonged period, then retracting the article would be inappropriate. In this situation, the Editor-in-Chief will consider publishing expressions of concern regarding the text.

In all contentious matters that may result in the retraction of a text, the CTO Editorial Board adheres to COPE's recommendations, which can be found at https://publicationethics.org/retraction-guidelines.

The above principles have been designed to follow the recommendations made by the COPE Committee on Publication Ethics contained in the Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors, the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers as well as the "Good practices in scientific reviewing procedures".

What we do if we suspect redundant (duplicate) publication:

COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)