From: Kowsar Publishing Legal Department
To: All Editor in Chiefs of Journals under Kowsar Publishing Services.
Subject: Updates Authorship Changes Rules and Check for Plagiarisms in 2 steps

Dear Editors in Chief and the Editorial Boards and Scientific Contacts,

Following the recent investigations in the legal department and publication ethics committee of Kowsar Publishing Co., we found that several hazardous actions had been taken place regarding the authors’ requests due to authorship claims post-submission and post-acceptance.

We would like to inform you about the outputs of the mentioned meeting in below items:

1. Plagiarism and similarity checks will be checked in two different phases by Publisher staffs as well as the reviewers and editorial boards involved in the review process: pre-review (after submission before entering the review process) and pre-publish (after acceptance before entering the In Press publishing process). If any of these phases, we found any suspicious case, it must be reported to the editor in chiefs and ethics committee of the publisher via legal@kowsarpub.com. 
2. We also recommend you to check the similarity rate and plagiarism possibilities in the middle of review process, especially for the articles which take a long time (more than two months) in the review process.
3. Please take a close look and close considerations for ghost, guest or gift authorship (© by COPE) in any phases of submission, review, publishing and post publishing phases.
4. No authorship changes, neither in the order of authors nor in add/removing of the authors might be accepted after acceptance of the article.
5. If an article needs revision by authors, they might change authors’ list. Please look closely for any changes in authors’ names, count, and order.

Due to the mentioned outcomes of our common meeting with legal department and publication ethics committee and due to rules and regulations mentioned by COPE, the mentioned regulations will be in act from February 1st, 2016. If you have any notes, comments, idea, or supplementary information in this regard, please inform us by legal@kowsarpub.com.

Thank you for your cooperation.
Dr. SM Miri
CEO
Kowsar Publishing Company