Journal of Competitiveness - Ethics Policy

Editors’ and the editing team’ duties and responsibilities

All team members:

• must use CrossCheck to screen for an unoriginal material before the peer-review process and at any point during the peer-review process;
• keep and promote ethical policies of the journal;
• ensure the confidentiality of the review process for both sides involved;
• do not disclose any information regarding a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding Author, Reviewers, potential Reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the Publisher, when appropriate;
• make a decision on publication or rejecting the paper according to the scientific importance/quality, interest to readers, Reviewers’ comments and the related legal requirements (i.e. plagiarism, breach of copyright, etc.);
• communicate politely with the authors about their paper;
• preserve anonymity of reviewers;
• remove an identification of the authorship before the manuscripts are submitted for a critical review process;
• reserve the right to make minor amendments to the text or return it back to the author for further revision;
• reserve the right to refuse the manuscript without the review process due to inappropriate quality of the manuscript, a different focus or violation of legal requirements (i.e. plagiarism, breach of copyright, etc.).

Reviewers' duties and responsibilities

Reviewers are obligated:

• to maintain the confidentiality of the review process;
• to have the objective judgement about any paper suggested for their review;
• to have no conflict of interest with respect to the research, authors, and/or research funders;
• to alert immediately the journal editor about any real or potential competing interest that could affect the independence of the review itself;
• not to use any part of the material obtained for blind review in their own publications or unpublished research studies without proper citing;
• to have no attempts to look for or contact the potential authors of the papers suggested for review.

Authors' duties and responsibilities

Authors should ensure that:

• the paper is original and written by them;
• the paper has not been published in any other journal and has been submitted for consideration to this journal only;
• the data has been obtained by the authors directly or they have all legal permissions to use the data obtained from private businesses or other independent sources;
• the data is original and not manipulated;
• all sources used in the paper are clearly cited;
• the paper does not break any copyrights of others;
• the paper includes funding acknowledgment; in case the paper was supported by an institution or grant;
• there is no conflict of interest between the co-authors or with third parties;
• addition, deletion, or order rearrangement of the authors’ names in the authorship list are approved in advance by the whole team;
• they contact the Editor to correct any errors upon their discovery immediately, no later than the text is published online;
• authorship of the paper is accurately stated, all authors must sign the statement as their agreement to publication of the paper in this particular journal;
• they are obliged to participate in the peer-review process, responding timely and politely to all comments of the reviewers; if the authors agree to make changes – they must provide the corrections in a timely manner; if the authors do not agree with reviewers’ recommendations or other remarks – objections with a detailed explanation must be provided;
• they agree with minor corrections of the contents, including the title, phrasing, style, etc.;
• they accept the publishing rights to use the paper transferred to the publisher (according to CC BY 4.0).

The Editorial Board, office and reviewers’ team are doing their best to duly follow the guidance of COPE in all editorial proceedings. We strongly recommend to all our current and potential authors, prior to submitting the text for blind review, to visit this site and get acquainted with the internationally acknowledged rules and best practices: www.publicationethics.org

The Editorial Board of “Journal of Competitiveness” follows the rules on academic writing and academic ethics, according to the work by Miguel Roig (2003, 2006): Avoiding plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and other questionable writing practices: A guide to ethical writing, available online at https://ori.hhs.gov