Editorial policies

01Scope and purpose

Kutadgu is an independent publishing system established for the open access publication of original scholarly work. It is not confined to any single discipline; submissions are accepted from every field, from the social sciences to engineering, from health sciences to the humanities. The criterion is not the field itself but the methodological soundness of the work, the traceability of its argument and the verifiability of its sources.

The system operates two separate publication tracks. The first is for work that undergoes open peer review; the second is for pieces published without review. Work on both tracks resides in the same archive but is labelled explicitly on every page so that the two are never conflated.

Accepted types of work

• Original research article
• Review article and literature survey
• Theoretical discussion paper
• Methods note and data description
• Field note, field observation and case report
• Book review and translation

02Author criteria

For a work to be published, the first author and all co authors must hold at least a doctoral degree. This condition is required of every person on the author list individually, not of one author alone; second, third and subsequent authors must also meet it.

Identifier numbers

A valid ORCID identifier and a Scopus author identifier must be supplied for every author. The ORCID number is validated by the system for format and check digit; invalid numbers are not accepted. The purpose of this requirement is to distinguish researchers who share a name and to bind the publication permanently to its author.

Responsibility for authorship

Everyone named on the author list is expected to have made an actual contribution to the work. Adding people who did not contribute, or omitting people who did, is contrary to publication ethics. The order of authors and the division of credit are matters to be settled among the authors; the system does not take sides.

03Content principles

Kutadgu is a scholarly venue; it is not an instrument for shaping public opinion, spreading conviction or promotion. The following content is not accepted even when cast in scholarly form, and is retracted if identified after publication.

• Writing that expresses a political position, or that supports or targets a political movement, party or administration.
• Content with a promotional purpose that advertises a particular product, service, institution or person.
• Accounts that praise or condemn a particular community, ethnic group, faith group, gender or profession, or that ascribe superiority or inferiority to them.
• Texts that single out named institutions or individuals, damage reputation, or carry personal animosity.
• Texts that present claims without scientific basis as established fact, and that may cause harm to health or safety.

Analyses conducted without naming institutions or individuals may, by contrast, be published. Work that measures the outcomes of a public policy, tests the effect of a practice or examines the structure of a sector has a place in this system, provided its findings rest on data and it does not cast any party as superior or culpable.

• Analyses that measure the outcomes of a policy or practice with data, without naming the institution.
• Studies describing trends, distributions and structural problems in a field.
• Criticism directed at an established theory or method, supported by referenced grounds.

Where it is disputable whether a text complies with these principles, the decision is taken by the editorial board and its grounds are communicated to the author in writing.

04Evaluation process

Desk check

Every submission first undergoes a check of form and principle. Whether the author criteria are met, whether the identifiers are valid, whether the similarity report exceeds the thresholds and whether the content complies with the editorial policies are all examined at this stage. Submissions that do not pass are returned to the author with reasons.

Open peer review

Work on the reviewed track is sent to at least two reviewers. Blind review is not practised here: the reviewer knows who the author is, the author knows who the reviewer is, and the report is published on the work's page together with the reviewer's name. The assessment thereby becomes a verifiable document in its own right.

Reviewers issue one of four decisions: accept, minor revision, major revision, reject. Where revision is requested the author uploads the corrected text and the same reviewer assesses it again. A work receiving two rejections is not deleted from the system; it remains open as a non reviewed piece together with the reports it received. The reason is that a negative assessment is also part of the scholarly record.

Publication without review

An author may prefer not to enter the review process. In that case the text is published with a "non reviewed" label once it has passed the desk check. The label remains visible in listings, on the work's page and in sharing links. The author may later ask for the same text to enter the review process.

05Reviewer obligations

Reviewing is a voluntary duty and is not remunerated. Reviewers are expected to hold at least a doctoral degree and to have published work in the subject they assess. That the report will be published under their name should be a reason to justify an opinion, not to soften it.

• The report should address the argument, the method and the use of sources separately.
• Each criticism should be made concrete by pointing to its place in the text.
• No assessment is made of the author's person, institution or past.
• A reviewer may not impose references with a view to securing citations to their own work.
• A reviewer with a conflict of interest declines the task and reports the situation.
• The text is not shared with third parties during the review period.

The reviewer pool is new and growing. Researchers working in a field may apply to serve as reviewers; applications are assessed on the basis of published work.

06Publication ethics and similarity

Every submission must be accompanied by a report from a recognised similarity detection service. The report should be prepared with the bibliography excluded and should also show overlap with the author's own earlier work.

Remaining below the thresholds is not sufficient on its own: a single paragraph carried over without attribution is enough for rejection whatever the ratio. The similarity ratio is displayed openly on the work's page once published; the detection report itself is kept confidential.

Conduct that is not accepted

• Using another person's text, data or figures without attribution.
• Submitting the same work simultaneously to another publication venue.
• Splitting one study to multiply it artificially.
• Steering the result by selecting, adjusting or fabricating data.
• Conducting work requiring ethics committee approval without it, or concealing the approval.

For work involving human or animal subjects, the date and number of the ethics committee approval must be stated in the methods section. A submission lacking this information does not pass the desk check.

07Use of artificial intelligence

The use of artificial intelligence tools is not prohibited, but it must be declared. At submission the author is asked to state which tool was used, at which stage and for what purpose. This declaration is published on the work's page.

• AI tools cannot be listed as authors; authorship entails responsibility.
• Use for language editing, formatting and translation is regarded as ordinary.
• Use in producing or interpreting findings must be explained in detail.
• The author must verify that references produced by the tool actually exist.

Where undeclared use is identified the work is retracted and the grounds for retraction remain permanently on its page.

08Copyright and licence

On submitting, the author declares that copyright in the work is transferred to the publishing system and undertakes that all co authors accept this condition. The transfer exists so that the work can be kept in open access and archived without interruption.

Together with the transfer the work is published under CC BY 4.0. This permits anyone to copy, distribute, translate and build upon the work provided attribution is given. The author too may continue to use their work anywhere on the same terms.

Licence text: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

09Tamga identifier

Every published work receives an identifier that is unique to it and cannot be transferred. This identifier is called the Tamga; the word denotes the mark that Turkic clans used to sign what belonged to them. The identifier remains the same even if the title or address of the work changes.

behic.net/tamga/bc.000001

Addresses in the older form continue to work; no link shared previously is broken. behic.net/10.00001/bc.000001

10Correction and retraction

The text of a published work is never altered silently. When an error is reported the action taken takes one of three forms according to the gravity of the error.

Minor correction

Typographical errors, broken links and formatting faults are corrected directly; since they do not affect the results of the work, no separate record is kept.

Correction notice

Where an error affecting findings, figures or interpretation is corrected, a dated correction notice is added to the work's page stating what changed and why.

Retraction

Where plagiarism, data fabrication, undeclared use of artificial intelligence, duplicate publication or content contrary to the editorial policies is identified, the work is retracted. A retracted work is not deleted from the system: its page remains accessible bearing a "retracted" stamp, with the grounds set out there. The principle is that the scholarly record is preserved and corrected rather than erased.

11Data, privacy and access

The system keeps access records so that the extent to which works are read can be observed. The information recorded is which work was opened, the time spent on the page and the visitor's location at country or city level. The visitor address is stored in a summarised form from which the identity cannot be recovered; repeated opening by the same reader counts as a single read.

• Access data is not shared with third parties and is not sold.
• The system contains no advertising and no tracking scripts.
• An author can view the access data for their own work from the author panel.
• Contact details relating to the reviewer pool are not displayed on any page.

Accessibility

All pages are operable by keyboard, compatible with screen readers and offer a dark theme. The layout does not break when text is enlarged in the browser. No membership, subscription or sign in is required to reach the works.