PUBLICATION ETHICS AND PUBLICATION MALPRACTICE STATEMENT
The journal is committed to promoting the highest ethical standards in publication, ensuring adherence to ethical, legal, and professional norms in scientific research and academic writing. It is dedicated to academic transparency and integrity, maintaining zero tolerance for publication malpractice in order to remain a transparent and inclusive platform for authors, reviewers, readers, and the broader scientific community. The journal enforces its publication ethics through retraction procedures in accordance with COPE guidelines, a rigorous review process, and the clearly defined responsibilities of the Editorial Board, authors, and reviewers.

RETRACTION PROCEDURE
The Journal reserves the right to retract works pursuant to COPE retraction guidelines. The Editorial Board will retract a work if
– There is clear evidence of major errors or fabrication in the findings or results;
– It constitutes plagiarism, including the use of AI tools;
– It involves unethical research;
– It breaches copyright;
– It has previously been published in part elsewhere without proper cross-referencing, permission or justification (redundant publication; self-plaigarism);
– It has previously been published in full elsewhere (dual publication). The authors should be aware that the journal does not accept or publish works previously published elsewhere. 
The Editorial Board will inform the author(s) about the retraction procedure. A retraction notice, clearly identifying the retracted article, its author(s), and the reason(s) for retraction, will be published in the next online and printed issue.
The Editorial Board also reserves the right to retract the work during the review procedure if the author fails to address most of the reviewers’ comments. In that case, a retraction notice will be sent to the author.

REVIEW PROCEDURE
All submitted works are initially evaluated by the Editor-In-Chief and at least two Editorial Board members to determine whether they align with the journal’s scope, guidelines, and style sheet. The journal accepts only unpublished research papers, review papers and book reviews. If the Editorial Board members provide positive evaluation and deem the work suitable for the journal’s profile, the work is sent to two external reviewers. If both reviewers give a positive review, the work is accepted for publication provided the author addresses most of their comments. If one review is negative, the work is sent to the third reviewer. Double-blind peer review procedure lasts three weeks.

RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS
The Board is responsible for all content published in the journal. It ensures that all papers are reviewed by qualified reviewers and that the peer-review process is fair, unbiased, and timely.
The Board’s responsibilities are as follows:
– Initial evaluation. Assessing submitted works for originality, adherence to the journal’s style sheet, and conducting plagiarism and AI tool checks. To prevent conflicts of interest, any Board Member who knows or is affiliated with the author is exempt from this stage and replaced by another member.
– Confidentiality. Ensuring that all information related to submitted works remains confidential and that the anonymity of authors and reviewers is maintained throughout the process.
– Unbiased evaluation and review. Evaluating and reviewing submissions based solely on intellectual content, without regard to the author’s sex, gender, race, religion, nationality, or other personal attributes.
– Expert review process. Assigning reviewers with appropriate expertise and ensuring no conflicts of interest exist between the reviewer and the author. The review process should not exceed three weeks for two external reviewers or five weeks if a third reviewer is required.
– Disclosure and conflict of interest. Editorial Board members may not use unpublished material from submitted works for their own research without the author’s prior written consent.
– Publishing corrections and retractions when necessary.

RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE AUTHOR
By submitting a work, the author agrees to the following:
– Originality.The submitted work is their own original creation, for which they accept full scientific and ethical responsibility.
– Academic integrity. The submitted work does not involve plagiarism (including AI-generated content), data fabrication, authorship misconduct, or any other form of academic or research malpractice.
– Compliance with the journal’s style-sheet. The work adheres to the journal’s style sheet.
– Exclusive Submission. The work has not been published or submitted for publication elsewhere.
– Citation of sources. All sources, including in-text citations, footnotes, self-citations, and works cited, are duly acknowledged.
– Review process. The author must address most of the reviewers’ comments. If they fail to do so, the Editorial Board reserves the right to retract the work. Authors are given two to three weeks to revise their submission after the review process.
– Error reporting. If the author identifies a fundamental error or inaccuracy in their submitted or published work, they must immediately inform the Editorial Board.

RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE REVIEWER
– Confidentiality. The reviewer must respect the confidentiality of the peer review procedure and not disclose any details of the work or their review during or after the procedure.
– Expertise. The reviewer should accept only works within their area of expertise and assess them in a timely manner. If they lack the necessary expertise or cannot meet the deadline, they must inform the Editorial Board immediately.
– Conflict of interest. The reviewer must have no conflicts of interest related to the research, authors, or funding sources of the submitted work.
– Objectivity. The reviewer should provide clear, reasoned evaluations of the topic’s relevance, structure, argument quality, research methodology, source use, and in-text citations. 
– Disclosure and conflict of interest. The reviewer must not use information obtained during peer review for their own or others’ advantage or to discredit any individual or organization.
– Ethical concerns. The review should immediately notify the journal if they detect ethical issues, suspect misconduct, or notice substantial similarity between the manuscript and another submission or published article.

COPYRIGHT AND PUBLISHING RIGHTS
The journal retains copyright and publishing rights for all published contributions. However, authors may republish their work in another publication they author (e.g., as a book chapter). Papers or excerpts published in The Art of Words may be used free of charge for all purposes, provided that the publisher and author rights are respected and properly credited. Published papers will be legally available for use without requiring author permission or fees. This license permits free, non-commercial use of any paper with appropriate citation of the author(s) and the original source of publication. These terms align with the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License).

OPEN ACCESS
The journal provides immediate open access to its content in .PDF format available at Past issues and at Hrčak portal. Open access is defined pursuant to the BOAI definition of open access for noncommercial purposes, which runs as follows: “By ‘open access’ to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”