Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement Integers: Electronic Journal of Combinatorial Number Theory is dedicated to the following best practices, which are largely based on the guidelines and standards developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). All authors, editors, and reviewers for Integers should adhere to the standards described below.

Duties of Editors

• Articles submitted to Integers will be evaluated exclusively on the basis of their mathematical interest and importance and their relevance to the scope of the journal.
• Any information that is submitted to the journal will not be disclosed to anyone other than those involved in the evaluation process and in the administration of the journal.
• Editors may submit papers to the journal, but if they do so, then all information about the processing of those papers will be hidden from their view and they will have no part in the decision process.
• Editors who have a significant conflict of interest connected with a paper will declare it to the other editors and will avoid participating in the decision process.
• Submitted manuscripts will undergo the following process.
  1. All articles will be handled by the Managing Editor. A quick initial screening will be done by the Editors-in-Chief. If the Editors-in-Chief feel that the article is inappropriate for the journal for a reason that can be quickly ascertained, such as the subject matter being too far from the scope of the journal, the authors will normally be informed within 1-2 weeks of submission. If the article is thought to be potentially suitable for Integers, then it will be sent to a referee for a full evaluation.
  2. Once a referee's report is obtained, the final decision concerning a paper is made by the Editors-in-Chief. If they deem it necessary in order to render a final decision, they may seek the opinion of a second referee.
  3. After receiving all relevant reports, authors will normally be informed of the decision within two weeks. If the recommendation is for publication of the article, then the editors will make final recommendations to the authors regarding proper formatting and corrections of other minor errors (for example, grammatical errors not mentioned in the referee report) that may have been discovered by the editors.

Duties of Referees

• Referees should notify the editors when they have a potential conflict of interest in performing the review.
• Any invited referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or who believes that it will not be possible to submit a timely report should immediately notify the managing editor so that alternative reviewers can be contacted.
• Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential. They must not be shown to, or discussed with, others unless authorized by the editors.
• Referees should conduct the review objectively and express their views clearly with supporting arguments. Personal criticism of the author is not appropriate.
• Referees should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors. Any statement that an observation, derivation, or argument had been previously reported should be accompanied by the relevant citation. A reviewer should also call to the editor's attention any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other publication of which they have personal knowledge.

Duties of Authors

• Authors should submit original work only (unless this is clearly not the intention of the article -- as might be the case, for example, with a survey paper). Any results that are not due to the authors should be clearly cited. Copying or paraphrasing substantial parts of another paper without attribution is unacceptable, as is any other form of plagiarism.
• No paper should be submitted to Integers that is already published or is being considered for publication elsewhere.
• Those named as authors of a paper should have made a substantial contribution to the paper and anyone who has made such a contribution should be offered authorship.
• Authors who discover important errors in their articles, whether already published or under consideration for publication, should notify the journal promptly.
• All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed.

All articles submitted to Integers are peer-reviewed. We use a blind peer-review process in which the names of the authors of the manuscript are known to the referee, but the authors do not know the identity of the referees.

Integers is owned by its Editors, which is comprised of the Editors-in-Chief, the Managing and Assistant Managing Editors, the Game Section Editor, and the Technical and Assistant Technical Editors. The ownership structure ensures that the journal remains under the stewardship of its academic contributors, maintaining its commitment to the field of combinatorial number theory. Ownership rights cannot be transferred to any third party by the Editors individually or collectively.

Editors who have a significant conflict of interest connected with a paper will inform the other editors and will avoid participating in the decision process. Potential referees, when invited to referee a paper, should inform the Managing Editor of any conflict of interest they may have with the paper.

The Author agrees that by publishing in Integers s/he has created an original work which shall not be published in the same, or substantially the same, form in any other journal without acknowledging prior publication in Integers.

By publishing a Work in Integers, the Author grants Integers a perpetual, royalty-free license to publish the aforementioned Work in any collection of Integers works in any form. The Author shall own the copyright of the aforementioned Work.

Author warrants that s/he has the full power and authority to enter willingly into this agreement.

An author's Work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License so that all content is freely available without charge to the users or their institutions. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.

Integers is an open-access journal that does not levy any charges or fees for the submission of articles, nor for the processing of articles. Subscriptions to Integers are free. The journal publishes articles on a rolling basis and is indexed in prominent databases including MathSciNet, zbMATH Open, SCOPUS, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and the Free Journal Network (FJN).