The journal adheres to the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Plagiarism Policy

Please, fill the following PLAGIARISM DECLARATION and attach the file in the system when submitting your manuscript.

The Journal reserves the right to conduct plagiarism checks. In case of similarity, the journal follows COPE policies and the authors are blacklisted for publication in the journal for 1 year or 2 journal issues. When plagiarism is rediscovered, the author(s) will be permanently blacklisted by the journal.

Copyrights and Ownership

The journal is with an Open Access and the authors retain full ownership to their content published in the Journal.

The Open Access content is published in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Conflict of interest

Authors
All authors and co-authors are required to disclose any potential conflict of interest when submitting their article.

Editors
Editors do not make any editorial decisions or participate in the editorial process if they have any conflict of interest (monetary or otherwise) in relation to a submitted manuscript.

When editors submit their own research work to their journal, a colleague from the editorial office should manage the manuscript, and the editor/author recuses him/herself from discussing and making decisions about it.

Reviewers
Due to the peculiarity of double-blind peer review, if a reviewer has a conflict of interest, he/she should notify the editor, describing the conflict of interest in specific terms.

Responsibilities

Responsibilities of Authors

An author is expected to be accountable for the presented data and information in their respective article along with taking the responsibility of the significance. The authors are expected to present genuine original outcome of their research, and an appropriate and relevant citation should be considered while representing the data and documenting the discussion.

An author should not repeat any previous research data from themselves or anyone else while submitting an original manuscript for a primary publication in the journal. The reported scope of work should be based on proper citation from the other publications influencing. Before submitting any article, authors should check the scope of the journal and in case of any query they should contact the Editorial office.

Authors should strictly adhere to the authorship criteria. All listed authors must have made a significant contribution to the research presented in the manuscript and approved all its claims. Any person to be considered as an author of an original research article must have contributed in any of the following ways: designed the study, executed the study or conducted the experiments, have taken part in analyzing the data, supported in documenting the article and drawing the conclusion, spearheaded the project as a principal investigator. It is mandatory to include everyone who made a significant contribution towards the completion of the research work.

Any financial or personal interest that governs the findings or research in the manuscript along with the details of financial support and its sources should be revealed. Through the submission of an article the respective authors agrees that the article neither is under consideration nor published in any other journal.

Responsibilities of Reviewers

Confidentiality: Reviewers should not share any information from an assigned manuscript with outsiders without the prior permission from the Editor or preserve the data from an assigned manuscript.
Competence: Reviewer with fair expertise should complete the review. Assigned Reviewer with inadequate expertise should feel responsible and may decline the review as it is presumed that reviewer will be an expert in the respective field.
Constructive assessment: Reviewer comments should appreciate positive aspects of the work, identify negative aspects constructively, and indicate the enhancement needed. A reviewer should explain and support his or her judgment clearly enough that Editors and Authors can understand the basis of the comments. The reviewer should ensure that an observation or argument that has been previously reported be accompanied by a relevant citation and should immediately alert the Editor when he or she becomes aware of duplicate publication. A reviewer should not use any kind of abusive language while commenting on an article. Judgment of each article should be done without any bias and personal interest by the assigned reviewer.
Disclosure of conflict of interest: To the extent feasible, the reviewer should minimize the conflict of interest. In such situation, reviewer should notify the editor describing the conflict of interest.
Timeliness and responsiveness: Reviewers should morally abide to provide the review comments within the stipulated time and be active enough in responding to the queries raised by the editor if any.

Responsibilities of Editor and Editorial Board

Editors have a responsibility to maintain the integrity of the published literature, if required,by publishing errata or corrections identifying anything of significance, retractions, and expressions of concern as quickly as possible. Editor must comply with the policy guidelines provided by the publisher and fulfill the responsibilities bestowed upon with integrity. Editors should preserve the anonymity of Reviewers.
Review process: Editors are responsible for monitoring and ensuring the fairness, timeliness, thoroughness, and civility of the peer-review editorial process.
Timely suggestion to the respective journals for covering relevant and significant topic by the Editor is essential for the growth of the journal.

The review process is described in detail in the section of the Journal’s website and the Editors ensure that it is followed.

Towards Readers and Scientific Community

The Editorial team will work for:

• To ensure that the content or the author information present in the manuscript is legible.
• To evaluate all manuscripts such that they fall within the scope of the journal.
• Maintain the journals internal integrity by suggesting the corrections, dealing with retraction, supplemental data etc.
• Working with the publisher to attract the best manuscripts and research that will be of interest to readers.
• Ensure that all involved in the publication process understand that it is inappropriate to manipulate citations.

Journal Role

• Decision-Making: The Editor-in-Chief is entitled to carry out decision-making in consultation with reviewers or members of the editorial board.
• Impartiality: An Editor should evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content without any bias towards race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors.
• Confidentiality: The Editor or any Editorial staff must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate depending on the need and stage of processing.

Publisher Role

The Journal published by Nationals Sports Academy “Vassil Levski” follow timely rigorous peer review process to bring the recent and novel scientific information at its best possible mode. As a publisher the following policies are being considered:

• Supporting fair and timely Peer review process with the valuable inputs and from the responsible Reviewers.
• The publisher adheres to the guidelines and procedure designed to ensure the fair and best practice followed by the industry.
• Making constructive recommendations for improving the overall process along with better production support and global dissemination of the information published in the journals.
• The publisher ensures the smooth functioning of the web development, web management, social media management for journals and articles with the help of the staff members.
• With the vision to make scientific valuable researched information “Open Access”, National Sports Academy “Vassil Levski” is striving towards designing and launching innovative ways to showcase

Guidelines for Retracting Articles

The Journal of Applied Sport Sciences takes the responsibility to maintain the integrity and completeness of the scholarly record of the content for all end users very seriously. The journal place great importance on the authority of articles after they have been published and our policy is based on the best practice followed in the academic publishing community.

It is a general principle of scholarly communication that the Editor of a learned journal is solely and independently responsible for deciding which article(s) shall be published out of the submitted articles in a particular time. In making this decision, the Editor is guided by the policies of the journal’s Editorial board and constrained by such legal requirements in force regarding copyright infringement and plagiarism. Articles that have been published shall remain extant, exact and unaltered as far as possible. However, occasionally unavoidable circumstances may arise where after publication the article requires retraction or even removal from a particular journal. Such actions must not be undertaken lightly and can only occur under exceptional circumstances, such as:

Article withdrawal: This is only possible while the article is being reviewed and has not yet been published. If an article is at the pre-publication stage, and in any way, violates professional codes of ethics, such as multiple submissions, false claims of authorship, plagiarism, data fraud, or the like, the article may be withdrawn with Editor’s decision. In this regard, Editor’s decision must be considered as final, as the following has been made on deep assessment and analysis of the situations, on a case by case basis.

Article retraction: Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, sham claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data and similar claims will lead to the retraction of an article. Occasionally, a retraction may be considered to correct errors in submission or publication.
Article removal and replacement: Identification of false or inaccurate data representation which may pose a serious health risk and involves any means of scientific data tampering or other fraud hindering fair practice of science should be treated with highest possible strictness.

Human and animal rights

The protection of children, patients, and other vulnerable populations, as well as privacy and data protection, are typically among the most prevalent ethical issues.

We support the publication of research findings from studies in which a comprehensive information on the potential effects of the research intervention is provided.

In accordance with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 and 2008, all authors should consider the following:

Manuscripts describing procedures involving humans or animals must include an explicit and easily identifiable statement pointing out that the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation  (institutional and national)  and with the  Helsinki  Declaration.  If any doubt exists as to whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must, in primis, explain the rationale for their approach, and then demonstrate that the institutional ethical committee explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study.  If the authors report experiments in which animals were included, authors must indicate that the institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed.

If the authors report experiments in which children (under 18 years old) were included, authors must indicate in the methodology of the research the full research protocol and information about signed informed consent from a parent or legal representative. If the study is approved by a scientific board, or strict protocol guidelines are followed, the information needs to be described in the text.

The journal will not accept advertising for products or services known to be harmful to health (e.g. tobacco and alcohol products).