Editorial Policy
Editorial Policy and Guidelines
Editorial decisions are based on scholarly merit, methodological soundness, ethical compliance, originality, relevance, and the quality of evidence. Author fees, commercial considerations, identity, affiliation, geography, or institutional status must not determine editorial outcomes. This policy is designed for use across journals and should be read together with the applicable Author Guidelines, Reviewer Guidelines, Plagiarism Policy, Article Processing Charge Policy, Copyright/Licensing Policy, and journal-specific Aims & Scope. |
Purpose and Scope
This Editorial Policy and Guidelines establishes the principles, responsibilities, decision-making standards, and ethical procedures governing the editorial management of scholarly journals. It applies to editors, associate editors, editorial board members, guest editors, editorial staff, and any person involved in manuscript evaluation or publication decisions.
The policy is intended to support transparent, fair, independent, timely, and accountable editorial practice across disciplines while allowing individual journals to maintain discipline-specific procedures where clearly stated. It is also intended to demonstrate compliance with the quality criteria applied by major abstracting and indexing services, including the Web of Science Core Collection editorial-selection process and the Scopus Content Selection & Advisory Board (CSAB) criteria.
Core Editorial Principles
Editorial decisions must be based on the scholarly merit, originality, validity, clarity, relevance, ethical integrity, and evidentiary strength of the work.
Decisions must not be influenced by an author’s nationality, ethnicity, gender, religion, political beliefs, institutional affiliation, geographic location, professional status, or ability to pay publication charges.
The editorial process must be independent from commercial, advertising, sponsorship, fundraising, subscription, sales, or revenue considerations.
Editors must apply journal policies consistently and avoid preferential treatment.
Editors are responsible for safeguarding the integrity of the scholarly record before and after publication.
All participants in editorial and peer-review processes must be treated professionally, respectfully, and confidentially.
Each journal publishes on its website a consolidated Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement (covering authorship, peer review, conflicts of interest, research integrity, corrections/retractions, and fees) that summarises this policy and is reviewed annually.
Editorial Independence
Editorial independence is fundamental. The Editor-in-Chief and delegated academic editors retain authority over editorial evaluation and publication decisions within the journal’s stated policies. The publisher or journal owner may establish broad policy and operational standards but must not interfere with individual manuscript decisions for commercial or non-scholarly reasons.
Article processing charges, waivers, discounts, institutional agreements, advertising, sponsorship, or other payments must not affect acceptance, rejection, peer review, or editorial priority.
Editors must not be required to accept a predetermined number of articles or meet revenue-driven acceptance targets.
Where a commercial, institutional, or personal relationship could reasonably be perceived to affect a decision, the manuscript must be reassigned to an independent editor.
Editorial Roles and Responsibilities
Editor-in-Chief
Has overall responsibility for the academic integrity, editorial quality, and scope of the journal.
Oversees editorial policies, peer-review standards, special issues, ethical investigations, and post-publication actions.
Ensures that decisions are made fairly and that conflicts of interest are appropriately managed.
Makes or authorizes final editorial decisions and may delegate handling to qualified editors while retaining overall accountability.
Ensures that complaints, appeals, corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions are handled according to established policy.
Is an active, recognised researcher in the journal’s field with a verifiable publication record (ORCID / Scopus Author ID / Web of Science ResearcherID) and holds no undisclosed commercial interest in the journal or publisher.
Associate/Section Editors
Conduct initial scholarly assessment of assigned manuscripts.
Select suitable independent reviewers and monitor the review process.
Assess reviewer reports critically rather than relying only on numerical recommendations.
Make evidence-based recommendations or decisions within delegated authority.
Declare conflicts and recuse themselves whenever impartiality may reasonably be questioned.
Editorial Board Members
Provide subject expertise, policy advice, and strategic academic guidance.
Support peer review where appropriate without bypassing the journal’s conflict-of-interest rules.
Promote ethical standards and help maintain the journal’s academic relevance.
Keep affiliation and profile information current and notify the journal of material changes.
Agree explicitly to serve and fulfil reasonable editorial responsibilities.
Initial Editorial Screening
Before external peer review, submissions may undergo an editorial screening to determine whether they are suitable to enter the review process. Screening may include:
alignment with the journal’s Aims & Scope;
basic scholarly quality, novelty, relevance, and completeness;
compliance with manuscript preparation and reporting requirements;
plagiarism/text-similarity screening and duplicate-publication checks;
authorship, funding, competing-interest, ethics, consent, and data-availability declarations;
appropriate study design and reporting guideline use where applicable;
language and presentation sufficient for meaningful peer review;
possible ethical, legal, image-integrity, data-integrity, or citation concerns.
presence of English-language title, abstract and keywords, Roman-script references, complete author affiliations and ORCID iDs;
disclosure of any use of generative-AI tools in accordance with the Author Guidelines;
submission of an anonymised manuscript and separate title page suitable for double-blind review.
A manuscript may be declined without external review if it is clearly outside scope, seriously deficient, ethically unacceptable, substantially duplicative, or unlikely to meet the journal’s scholarly threshold. Such decisions should be based on academic and policy grounds, not commercial considerations.
Double-Blind Peer-Review Policy
The journals follow a double-blind peer-review model for research articles unless a clearly identified article category is governed by a different review process. Under double-blind review, authors do not know the identities of reviewers, and reviewers are not provided with author identities.
Identity Masking
Author names, affiliations, acknowledgements, direct identifiers, and other obvious identity cues should be removed from the review version where feasible.
Reviewer identities must not be disclosed to authors unless the journal has a separately stated policy permitting signed review and the reviewer has explicitly agreed.
Reviewers must not attempt to identify authors through unnecessary searching, metadata inspection, or other de-anonymization efforts.
If a reviewer believes they have identified an author and this creates a potential conflict of interest, they must inform the editor promptly.
Number and Independence of Reviewers
Research articles should normally be evaluated by at least two independent reviewers with appropriate subject expertise. Reviewers should not be part of the manuscript’s author group, and editorial staff should avoid reviewer selections that create actual or perceived conflicts of interest. At least one reviewer should be external to the journal’s editorial board, and reviewers should not be affiliated with the same institution as the authors.
Reviewer Selection
relevant expertise demonstrated by research, professional experience, publications, or equivalent scholarly competence;
independence from the authors and the work under review;
absence of significant financial, personal, academic, supervisory, competitive, or collaborative conflicts;
ability to provide a constructive and timely assessment;
appropriate diversity of expertise and perspective where feasible.
international and geographic diversity of the reviewer pool, consistent with the journal’s international scope;
verification of reviewer identity (institutional e-mail, ORCID or publication record) before invitation. Author-suggested reviewers must be independently verified, and reviewer accounts with non-institutional e-mail addresses that cannot be verified are not used.
Editorial Decision-Making
Reviewer recommendations are advisory. Editors must evaluate the manuscript, reviewer reasoning, ethical considerations, methodological strength, and consistency with journal standards before making a decision.
Decision |
Meaning |
Accept |
Suitable for publication subject to final technical checks. |
Minor Revision |
Requires limited changes that do not substantially alter the study or core conclusions. |
Major Revision |
Requires substantial clarification, analysis, methodological explanation, restructuring, or additional evidence before a new decision can be made. |
Reject |
Does not meet the journal’s scientific, ethical, methodological, originality, scope, or reporting standards, or concerns cannot reasonably be resolved through revision. |
Where reviewer reports conflict, the editor may seek an additional review, consult an independent subject editor, or make a reasoned decision based on the available evidence. The final decision must not be determined by simple reviewer vote-counting.
The journal retains reviewer reports, reviewer invitations, editor decisions and decision letters for every published article for a minimum of five years. On request, anonymised evidence of peer review may be provided to abstracting and indexing services, funders or institutions conducting a legitimate assessment of the journal.
Conflicts of Interest and Editorial Recusal
Editors must disclose and manage any circumstance that could reasonably be perceived as affecting impartiality. Conflicts may be financial, personal, professional, academic, competitive, institutional, supervisory, or related to intellectual property.
An editor must not handle a manuscript when there is a significant conflict with an author, institution, sponsor, or subject of the work.
Manuscripts involving an editor, editorial board member, publisher employee, or close collaborator must be assigned to an independent editor with no relevant conflict.
Editors must not use unpublished information obtained through manuscript handling for personal, academic, financial, or competitive advantage.
Potential conflicts identified after publication must be assessed and corrected or disclosed when necessary.
Submissions from Editors, Board Members, or Staff
Editors, editorial board members, and journal staff may submit scholarly work, but such submissions must not receive preferential treatment. The author-editor must have no access to reviewer identities, reviewer selection, editorial correspondence beyond that available to ordinary authors, or the decision-making process for their manuscript. An independent editor must manage the entire review and decision process.
Special Issues and Guest Editors
Special issues must meet the same standards of scope, peer review, ethics, editorial oversight, and publication quality as regular issues.
The Editor-in-Chief remains accountable for the content and integrity of all special issues.
Guest editors must be selected for relevant expertise and must disclose competing interests.
Special issue manuscripts must undergo the journal’s standard double-blind peer-review process unless an explicitly stated exception applies.
Guest editors must not make decisions on their own manuscripts or on manuscripts where they have conflicts.
The journal must retain authority to reject unsuitable manuscripts, replace reviewers, investigate concerns, and overrule recommendations where required to protect editorial integrity.
Special issue invitations, fees, timelines, or promotional activities must never imply guaranteed acceptance.
Special-issue proposals must be approved in advance by the Editor-in-Chief; guest editors’ identities, affiliations and publication records are verified; no guest editor may author or co-author more than one article in the issue; and special issues are clearly labelled as such on the website and in article metadata.
The number and proportion of special-issue articles are monitored so that special issues do not dominate the journal’s output.
Authorship and Contributorship Oversight
Editors should ensure that authorship and contributorship declarations are provided in accordance with the journal’s Author Guidelines.
Changes in authorship after submission require a clear explanation and, where appropriate, written agreement from all affected authors.
Suspected ghost, guest, gift, purchased, or otherwise inappropriate authorship must be investigated before publication.
Editors should not arbitrate authorship disputes that require institutional investigation; unresolved disputes may be referred to the relevant institution or competent authority.
Research Integrity and Misconduct
Editors must take reasonable steps to identify and respond to suspected research or publication misconduct. Concerns may arise before or after publication and may involve authors, reviewers, editors, or third parties.
plagiarism or substantial unattributed text reuse;
duplicate or redundant publication;
data fabrication, falsification, or inappropriate manipulation;
image manipulation or misrepresentation;
citation manipulation or coercive citation;
peer-review manipulation or fabricated reviewer identities;
paper-mill activity, purchased authorship, or fraudulent submissions;
undeclared conflicts of interest;
ethical approval, consent, or participant-protection concerns;
breaches of confidentiality or intellectual property rights.
Allegations should be assessed fairly, confidentially, and proportionately. Authors should normally be given an opportunity to respond. Where an institutional or regulatory investigation is needed, editors may contact the relevant body and may pause editorial processing while concerns are assessed.
Plagiarism and Text Similarity
Text-similarity software is a screening tool, not a substitute for editorial judgement. Similarity percentages must not be treated automatically as proof of plagiarism or as guaranteed acceptance/rejection thresholds. Editors should assess the nature, extent, location, attribution, and scholarly significance of any overlap in accordance with the applicable Plagiarism Policy.
Research Ethics and Ethical Oversight
Research involving human participants must include appropriate ethics approval or exemption where required, together with informed-consent information when applicable.
Research involving animals must comply with applicable institutional, national, and discipline-specific welfare requirements.
Editors may request ethics documentation, protocol details, consent evidence, trial registration, or other supporting records when necessary.
For sensitive, vulnerable, indigenous, community-based, security-related, or privacy-sensitive research, editors should consider additional ethical safeguards appropriate to the field.
Reporting Guidelines and Methodological Transparency
Editors should encourage or require authors to follow recognized reporting guidelines appropriate to the study design and discipline. Examples may include CONSORT, PRISMA, STROBE, STARD, CARE, ARRIVE, COREQ, SRQR, TRIPOD, or other relevant standards.
Reporting checklists or flow diagrams may be requested when relevant.
Registration details should be provided for study types that require prospective registration.
Methods, statistical analyses, software, datasets, code, and materials should be described sufficiently to permit critical assessment and, where appropriate, reproducibility.
Data, Images, and Supporting Evidence
Editors may request underlying data, raw images, code, protocols, statistical outputs, ethics approvals, or other supporting information when needed to verify claims.
Authors should provide an appropriate Data Availability Statement in accordance with journal policy.
Where data cannot be shared for legitimate ethical, legal, privacy, security, or contractual reasons, those restrictions should be explained.
Suspicious image or data patterns should be investigated before publication and may require institutional referral.
Use of Artificial Intelligence and Automated Tools
Editorial use of generative AI or other external automated tools must respect confidentiality, data protection, intellectual property, and human accountability.
Editors and reviewers must not upload confidential manuscripts, supplementary files, reviewer reports, or unpublished data into public or third-party AI systems unless the journal has explicitly approved the tool and appropriate safeguards are in place.
AI tools must not make autonomous editorial decisions. A qualified human editor remains responsible for all decisions and communications.
AI-assisted administrative support, language checking, or screening may be used only where consistent with journal policy, confidentiality obligations, and applicable law.
Any material use of AI in editorial assessment should be transparent where disclosure is warranted by journal policy.
Editors ensure that authors have disclosed generative-AI use as required by the Author Guidelines, that AI tools are not credited as authors, and that AI-generated images are not accepted unless part of the research design and disclosed. Suspected undisclosed AI-generated content is handled as a potential integrity concern.
Confidentiality and Data Protection
Manuscripts, reviewer reports, editorial correspondence, and unpublished data are confidential.
Access should be limited to persons who require it for legitimate editorial or technical purposes.
Editors must not disclose reviewer identities in a double-blind process.
Confidential information must not be used for personal research, competitive advantage, investment, commercial gain, or other unauthorized purposes.
Records should be retained securely in accordance with legal, operational, and publishing requirements.
Citation Practices
Editors must not require authors to add citations solely to increase citations to the journal, editor, reviewer, or publisher. Requests for additional references must be academically justified and directly relevant to the manuscript. Evidence of citation manipulation may result in rejection, reviewer removal, editorial recusal, or other corrective action. The journal monitors its own self-citation rate and citation exchanges with other journals; anomalous patterns (citation stacking, coercive self-citation, reciprocal citation arrangements) are investigated and corrected.
Complaints and Appeals
Complaints
Complaints concerning editorial conduct, delays, conflicts of interest, peer-review integrity, published content, or policy application should be handled respectfully, documented, and reviewed by a person who was not the subject of the complaint whenever feasible.
Appeals of Editorial Decisions
Authors may appeal a decision when they believe there has been a material factual error, procedural irregularity, unmanaged conflict of interest, or serious misunderstanding affecting the outcome. An appeal should identify the manuscript, the decision being appealed, specific grounds, and supporting evidence. Mere disagreement with a reviewer or rejection decision is not, by itself, sufficient grounds for appeal.
Appeals should be evaluated by an editor who was not solely responsible for the original decision wherever practicable. The outcome of the formal appeal constitutes the journal’s final editorial decision unless a serious ethical or procedural issue subsequently emerges.
Corrections, Retractions, and Expressions of Concern
The journal must maintain the integrity of the published record and take proportionate post-publication action when significant errors or ethical concerns are established.
Correction/Erratum/Corrigendum: for errors that do not invalidate the central findings but require formal amendment of the record.
Expression of Concern: where serious concerns exist but available evidence is inconclusive or an external investigation is pending.
Retraction: where findings are unreliable because of major error or misconduct, publication is redundant, research is unethical, or other serious grounds warrant removal from the reliable literature.
Retraction notices and correction notices should be linked to the affected article, clearly identified, and explain the reason sufficiently to protect the scholarly record.
Retracted articles remain online with a prominent “RETRACTED” watermark; the retraction notice is free to read, and the article’s Crossref metadata is updated (Crossmark) so that the status is visible wherever the article is indexed.
Post-publication actions follow the COPE Retraction Guidelines and the NISO Recommended Practice on corrections, retractions and removals (CREC).
Post-Publication Discussion
Substantive concerns raised after publication should be assessed on their merits regardless of the status or identity of the complainant. Where appropriate, authors may be invited to respond and the journal may publish a correction, commentary, response, expression of concern, or retraction. Personal criticism, harassment, or unsubstantiated allegations should not substitute for evidence-based scholarly discussion.
Publication Charges and Editorial Decisions
Editorial decisions are independent of Article Processing Charges (APCs), waiver or discount requests, subscription status, institutional membership, sponsorship, or any other financial consideration. Where possible, editors making acceptance decisions should not be involved in determining an individual author’s eligibility for financial waivers or discounts.
Intellectual Property, Copyright, and Licensing
Editors should ensure that published content complies with the journal’s copyright and licensing policy and that third-party material is appropriately attributed and, where necessary, reproduced with permission. Disputes concerning ownership, copyright, permissions, or licensing should be referred to the publisher or appropriate legal/administrative authority when required.
Editorial Board Governance
Editorial board members should have qualifications and expertise relevant to the journal’s scope.
Names and affiliations should be kept accurate and current on the journal website.
Board members should agree to serve before being listed.
Board composition should be reviewed periodically for relevance, participation, expertise, independence, and appropriate diversity.
Inactive, unresponsive, conflicted, or repeatedly non-compliant members may be rotated or removed according to journal governance procedures.
The editorial board should reflect the international scope of the journal: members should be drawn from a range of countries and institutions, and no single institution or country should dominate the board.
The public board listing must show, for each member, full name, institutional affiliation, country and (where available) ORCID iD, and must identify the Editor-in-Chief and the editorial-office contact address. The listing is verified against members’ written consent at least annually.
Board members are expected to contribute actively (e.g., handling manuscripts, reviewing, advising) and their contribution is reviewed as part of periodic board evaluation.
Equity, Diversity, and Non-Discrimination
Editorial decisions must be based on scholarly merit. Editors should promote fair participation and avoid discrimination on the basis of protected or irrelevant personal characteristics. Where feasible, journals should work toward diversity of expertise, geography, career stage, and perspective across editorial boards and reviewer pools without compromising scholarly competence or independence. The journal also monitors the geographic and institutional distribution of authors; a journal whose content is drawn predominantly from a single institution or from the editorial board itself should broaden its author base rather than lower its standards.
Editorial Timeliness and Communication
Editors should make reasonable efforts to process manuscripts without unnecessary delay.
Published review timelines should be realistic and should not imply guaranteed acceptance or guaranteed publication by a fixed date.
Authors should be informed when significant delays occur and, where appropriate, given the opportunity to withdraw.
Editorial communications should be clear, professional, and sufficiently reasoned to allow authors to understand the basis of decisions.
Publication Regularity and Timeliness
Each journal declares its publication frequency (e.g., quarterly) and issue schedule on its website and adheres to it; issues or continuous-publication articles are released on time, and any unavoidable delay is announced on the website.
Each published article displays the dates received, revised, accepted and published online, together with its DOI, volume/issue and page or article number.
The journal publishes a sufficient and steady volume of research content to demonstrate an active scholarly community; sudden, unexplained increases in output are avoided.
Time-to-first-decision and time-to-publication are tracked and reported to the Editor-in-Chief at least annually; typical timelines are published for authors.
Journal Identity, Website, Metadata and Preservation
Each journal holds a registered ISSN (print and/or online) and uses its title, ISSN, publisher name and frequency consistently across the website, policy pages, article PDFs and metadata.
The journal website is in English, is fully functional, and displays on its homepage: aims and scope, editorial board, peer-review policy, publication ethics statement, author guidelines, fees, copyright/licensing, open-access policy, archiving policy, and editorial-office contact details.
All articles include an English title, English abstract and keywords, complete author affiliations, ORCID iDs where provided, funding statement, competing-interest statement, data-availability statement and Roman-script references.
Every article is assigned a Crossref DOI at publication and full article-level metadata (including references, funding and licence) is deposited with Crossref; the journal participates in Crossref Similarity Check and Crossmark.
Full-text content is deposited with a long-term digital-preservation service (e.g., Portico, CLOCKSS or the PKP Preservation Network) and the archiving arrangement is stated on the website.
Article-level and journal-level metrics displayed on the website must be genuine, attributed to their source, and must not include unofficial or misleading "impact factor" claims.
Marketing, Solicitation and Advertising
Marketing of the journal, including calls for papers and reviewer or board invitations, must be accurate, targeted and professional. The journal does not send mass unsolicited e-mail campaigns, does not promise rapid acceptance or publication, and does not misrepresent indexing status, metrics or affiliations.
Indexing claims are limited to databases in which the journal is actually listed and are linked to the verifiable record.
Advertising, sponsorship and reprint revenue are handled independently of editorial decisions, and advertisements are clearly distinguishable from editorial content.
Editorial Records and Audit Trail
The journal should maintain appropriate records of submissions, reviewer invitations, reviewer reports, editorial decisions, conflict disclosures, ethical concerns, author responses, appeals, and post-publication actions. Access to records must be restricted and handled in accordance with confidentiality, privacy, and data-retention requirements.
Exceptions to Standard Peer Review
If certain content types, such as editorials, invited commentaries, book reviews, corrections, obituaries, news items, or other non-research material, do not undergo the standard double-blind external peer-review process, the applicable review method should be stated clearly. Any exception must not be presented as having undergone the standard peer-review process if it did not.
Editorial Quality Checklist
☐ Scope and article type confirmed.
☐ Double-blind identity masking checked.
☐ Plagiarism/text-similarity screening reviewed substantively.
☐ Authorship, funding, conflicts, ethics, consent, and data statements checked.
☐ At least two independent reviewers obtained for research articles, unless a documented exception applies.
☐ Reviewer conflicts and expertise assessed.
☐ Reviewer reports evaluated critically; decision not based only on vote count.
☐ Reporting guideline and methodological transparency assessed where applicable.
☐ Any ethical or integrity concern resolved or appropriately escalated.
☐ APC/financial considerations kept separate from editorial decision.
☐ Decision letter provides a clear, professional rationale.
☐ Post-acceptance changes do not alter the scientific record without editorial review.
☐ English title/abstract/keywords, Roman-script references, affiliations and ORCID iDs verified.
☐ Generative-AI disclosure checked.
☐ Received/revised/accepted/published dates recorded; DOI assigned; metadata deposited with Crossref.
☐ Reviewer reports and decision correspondence archived for audit.
Policy Review and Updates
This policy should be reviewed periodically and updated when necessary to reflect changes in scholarly publishing standards, ethical guidance, technology, legal requirements, and journal operations. Material policy changes should be communicated transparently and applied consistently.
Reference Framework
This policy is informed by widely recognized scholarly publishing principles and ethical guidance, including the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing developed collaboratively by COPE, DOAJ, OASPA, and WAME; DOAJ quality-control criteria; and COPE guidance for editors and publishers. Journal-specific procedures may add discipline-specific requirements but should not weaken these core standards.
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): Transparency & Best Practice; Guide to Applying / Quality Control Process.
Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): Core Practices, guidance for editors, and editorial-office ethics resources.
Applicable discipline-specific reporting, ethics, data, and research-integrity standards.
Clarivate, Web of Science Core Collection Journal Evaluation Process and Selection Criteria (24 quality criteria and 4 impact criteria).
Elsevier/Scopus Content Policy and Selection: Content Selection & Advisory Board (CSAB) minimum criteria and selection criteria.
International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.
COPE guidance on guest-edited collections, paper mills, and authorship and AI tools; COPE Retraction Guidelines; NISO CREC Recommended Practice.
Editorial Policy and Guidelines | Common Framework • 12
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