Publication Ethics

Generalities

The EuroGNC conference is organised every two years by the Technical Committee on “Guidance, Navigation, and Control” from CEAS (Council of European Aerospace Societies), or CEAS GNC TC.

CEAS and CEAS GNC TC engage in knowledge transfer and dissemination through different channels (journals and technical conferences). The EuroGNC conference has never been pursuing and will not pursue the goal of generating profit, but only to cover the costs involved in the organisation. The CEAS GNC TC is constituted by volunteers who invest time and effort to review full-paper contributions to ensure high academic and ethics standards for the articles published and presented at the conference.

CEAS and the CEAS GNC TC are committed to meeting and upholding the standards of ethical behaviour at all stages of the publication process. They follow the recommendations and guidelines of leading and recognised organisation on publication ethics, such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

For all enquiries related to publication ethics and regardless of the publication date, the current CEAS GNC TC chair (cf. orga_and_committees) is always ultimately responsible for managing any new inquiry or to ensure that it is managed in accordance with the principles listed below and the recognised guidance from COPE. The CEAS GNC TC chair contact information can be found on the contact page (contact). The CEAS GNC TC chair can delegate this role to the committee’s publication ethics chair, when this position is filled and indicated below and on the TC member list. The publication ethics chair is necessarily a member of the CEAS GNC TC.

Current publication ethics chair: Nicolas Fezans – nicolas.fezans@dlr.de

 

Ensuring Independence of Editorial Decisions, Conflict of Interest

The selection of the articles for the EuroGNC conference is based on independent evaluations which should rely only on the scientific quality and integrity of the submitted manuscripts. Publication choices should never be swayed by corporate, financial, or ideological interests. This includes that conference sponsors cannot influence editorial decisions in any way. Publication choices should also not be swayed by external governmental policies, unless compliance with applicable laws is at stake.

All actors (authors, reviewers, conference editorial team, etc.) must follow strict independence rules and immediately declare any potential real or perceived conflict of interest. Conflict of interest are not limited to financial gains, but include anything which could be viewed as exerting unethical influence on the work, its presentation, its selection, its review, or in any other way.

The submitted manuscripts to the EuroGNC conference are screened by the conference chair team which makes a first assessment of the fit with the conference scope and looks for signs of unethical practices. If these manuscripts pass this first step, they are sent to at least two competent and independent reviewers who assess its scientific quality. Further reviews from other independent reviewers may be requested, for example in case of diverging opinions of the initial reviewers, in case of conflict of interest of one reviewer, or in case of doubt on the integrity or quality of the reviews. Eventually, the final acceptance or rejection decision is taken by the conference chair team, which may have to weigh in also practical constraints (e.g. maximum number of slots at the conference). These constraints can only force to reject or put on a standby list the weakest yet otherwise acceptable contributions, not to accept contributions that fail the quality or integrity standard in scholarly publishing.

Peer Review

Peer review is a standard procedure for proceedings publication at the CEAS EuroGNC conference in the different submissions categories, but invited papers and keynotes follow a different process.

Prior to starting the review phase for the EuroGNC conference, the conference chair team and the reviewers are introduced to the EuroGNC guidelines for reviewers as well as the recommendations of COPE and incited to contact our ethics team in case of doubt or if they need guidance. Our ethics team supports them also in investigating any suspected case of publication ethics violation and in taking the appropriate decisions/actions.

A state-of-the-art platform is made available to the conference chair and reviewers to support the management of all manuscripts and their reviews. The conference chair selects two reviewers for each manuscript, who are independent and competent in the specific topics of the manuscript. Both reviewers should, as much as possible, not be working for the same organisation or group and should not communicate with each other. The involvement of third-party (e.g. colleague) in the review can be allowed upon request, if it adds value to the review and if it is declared and documented (traceability).

The reviewers are mostly members of the CEAS GNC technical committee, however, on specific topics and with the aim of improving the quality of the peer-review of the submitted manuscripts, external experts, i.e. who are otherwise not part of the CEAS GNC TC, are also invited to review manuscripts in their area of expertise. This option can be used when the required competencies for these specific manuscripts are not available, not in sufficient numbers for the number of submissions for which the reviews require this expertise, or if a potential conflict of interest forces to not consider the CEAS GNC TC members with this expertise for these reviews.

All reviews are made in a single-blind reviews as a double-blind review can hardly be implemented in our area (use of facilities with often unique characteristics and easily recognisable for an experienced reviewer). The reviewers are forbidden from revealing their identity to the authors and should avoid any comment or reference which would allow recognising them or their research group. Prior to sending the reviewer evaluations to the authors, the conference chair team checks the presence of such comments/references and may ask the reviewers to rephrase them to better conceal their identity.

The selection of invited/special sessions is made directly by the conference chair team and the organiser of the sessions acts as editor and sole reviewer for the invited papers/presentations of the sessions. The selection of keynotes is made directly by the conference chair team.

Plagiarism and Self/Auto-Plagiarism

Plagiarism is defined as “submitting as one’s own work, irrespective of intent to deceive, that which derives in part or in its entirety from the work of others without due acknowledgement. It is both poor scholarship and a breach of academic integrity.”

As per listed by the Oxford University (https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/skills/plagiarism) plagiarism can take various forms, such as:

  • Verbatim (word for word) quotation without clear acknowledgement
  • Cutting and pasting from the Internet without clear acknowledgement
  • Paraphrasing the work of others
  • Inaccurate citation
  • Failure to acknowledge assistance
  • Self/auto-plagiarism.

The authors, reviewers, and conference chair team are encouraged to read carefully the definition and forms of plagiarisms and the guidance materials from COPE and other sources:

and should report any suspected form of plagiarism to the current CEAS GNC TC chair.

Plagiarism is not tolerated in any of the EuroGNC and other CEAS GNC publications. The CEAS GNC TC reserve the right to check all suspect submissions through appropriate plagiarism checking tools. Submissions containing suspected plagiarism, in whole or part, will be rejected. If plagiarism is discovered post-publication, a retraction policy is implemented, in line with COPE’s Retraction Guidelines (doi: 10.24318/cope.2019.1.4).

Authorship

Authorship is one of the common sources of academic dispute. The exact rules and practices tend to vary between scientific disciplines and countries (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_authorship).

Authorship should be limited to those who have made a genuine, verifiable, and substantial scientific contribution to the work. A genuine and verifiable contribution exists when the person contributed from a scientific perspective to:

  • developing and designing the research activity,
  • preparing, acquiring, provisioning of the data, software, sources,
  • analysing, assessing, interpreting the data or sources, and drawing conclusions from them, or
  • writing the manuscript.

There are two main problems with authorship, that should be avoided:

  • Gift authorship: i.e. putting down names of people who took little or no part in the research
  • Ghost authorship: i.e. leaving out names of people who did a significant contribution based on the definition above.

When genuine and verifiable contributions are insufficient to be considered substantial, these contributions should be acknowledged in the “Acknowledgements” section at the end of the article.

COPE provides guidelines on authorship and dealing with authorship disputes, cf. for example 10.24318/cope.2019.3.3 and related pages (some pages may require the creation of a free guest account). Anyone involved in the writing of the EuroGNC papers and in the editorial decisions is encouraged to familiarise themselves with these guidelines.

Redundant/Duplicate Publication and Text Recycling

A redundant/duplicate publication may be suspected when a substantial overlap exists with another work, either previously published or submitted about at the same time. The respective languages used for the possibly overlapping publications are not relevant for assessing the overlap.

The CEAS GNC TC does not welcome redundant/duplicate publications, but some exceptions may be tolerated, if the original source is properly cited and acknowledged and if it is felt that with this contribution a positive contribution to the scientific discussion of these ideas or results will be made. The positive contribution may for example include a critical discussion of these ideas/results, a different interpretation, or discuss ways of teaching them. Additionally, an approval of the original publication is required and possible copyright violations should be ruled out.

The process to report and assess possible redundant/duplicate publication for EuroGNC conferences follows the COPE guideline (cf. 10.24318/cope.2019.2.12), with the “editorial team” being the “conference chair team”.

A separate issue, not to be confused with redundant/duplicate publication, is text recycling. Text recycling occurs when sections of the same text appear (usually un-attributed) in more than one of an author’s own publications. The term ‘text recycling’ has been chosen to differentiate from ‘true’ plagiarism (i.e. when another author’s words or ideas have been used, usually without attribution). With the increasing use of plagiarism detection software, the awareness about text recycling has increased. Opinions on the acceptability of text recycling vary greatly and the conference chair team will assess any instance of text recycling in accordance to the guidelines proposed by BioMed Central and distributed on the COPE website (cf. https://publicationethics.org/guidance/endorsed-guidance/text-recycling-guidelines-editors).

Appeals, Complaints, Allegations of Misconduct

If there are grounds for assuming that the selection of the articles or any other editorial decisions did not fully comply with our guidelines for independence, fairness, or otherwise established publication ethics guidelines (e.g. from COPE), an appeal of the editor decision is possible. Appeals for any other reason will not be considered.

Allegations of misconduct by whichever party are taken seriously and will be investigated in the shortest delay possible. Misconducts can take a variety of forms and we follow the guidance of COPE, whenever applicable (https://publicationethics.org/misconduct). Misconducts should be reported as soon as they are identified but can be reported at any time, including after the publication.

Post-publication discussions & corrections

EuroGNC supports post-publication discussions and corrections in accordance to COPE’s Core Practice #10 (cf. https://publicationethics.org/news-opinion/post-publication-discussions-and-corrections).

These discussions and corrections will be published directly alongside the original publication in the EuroGNC online library.

Archiving

CEAS is a federation of European national aerospace societies and its statutes (Article 16) foresee “the transfer to an internation non-profit institution having similar objectives or alternatively to an internation institutions dedicated to scientific research as may be designated by the General Assembly” in case of dissolution of CEAS. Due to the deep relationships of CEAS with its member societies the risk of failure to fulfil the conditions of article 16 are deemed extremely remote.

In the very unlikely event that a dissolution of CEAS takes places and that no satisfying solution is found immediately, the last CEAS GNC TC chair should create a not-for-profit association and find sponsors to guarantee continuation until a satisfying solution is found. To ensure the implementation of this process even in the event of an abrupt end to CEAS, regular backups of the entire CEAS GNC TC and EuroGNC data, website, and paper archive are being made and stored on non-CEAS computers. Presently, these backups are handled by the DLR Institute of Flight Systems.

The DOI repository used for EuroGNC on DataCite will also be transferred such that the DOI redirections will be corrected and point to the new respective locations of the EuroGNC publications. This shall ensure a transparent transition for any user of these DOI numbers.

Adherence to the FAIR Guiding Principles

EuroGNC supports the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship (cf. https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/): Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets.

To this aim, the CEAS GNC TC makes sure that the EuroGNC papers are as visible as possible (online, no paywall, open-access model, excellent indexation on search engines). Additionally, authors can submit supplementary materials (datasets, source code, etc.) and they are accessible aside the PDF file of the corresponding papers. We encourage authors to consider providing small test examples demonstrating their methods or the data that they used for or produced during the work presented.

Acceptable and responsible use of AI

The CEAS GNC TC has a clear AI policy stated in the instructions to authors and which regulates also the potential uses/misuses by other parties involved in the editorial process (e.g. reviewers). As AI technologies evolve at a tremendous pace, please always refer to the latest version of this policy. Currently, it can be found in section 6 of the guideline for preparation of EuroGNC manuscripts (https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/ceas-eurognc-2026-official-template/ckhkcpfrpkbg.pdf).

Note that starting with the 2026 edition of the conference, it became mandatory to include a section called “Declaration of Use of Artificial Intelligence”, even if AI was not used. Prior to 2026, no use of AI was allowed, hence the lack of declaration.

Code of Conduct for EuroGNC Conferences

No harassment or discrimination in any form is tolerated at CEAS EuroGNC conferences. We fully embrace the guidelines from COPE (cf. https://publicationethics.org/policies/cope-code-conduct-events-and-discussions) with this regard and apply them also to all stage of the editorial process as well as to post-publication discussions.