1. Editorial independence
Editorial decisions are based on scope, originality, contribution, methodological soundness, ethical compliance, clarity, and the reliability of the evidence. Decisions must not be influenced by nationality, ethnicity, gender, religion, political position, institutional affiliation, seniority, personal relationships, sponsorship, or ability to pay.
2. Editorial roles and authority
| Role | Core responsibility |
|---|---|
| Editor-in-Chief | Accountable for editorial standards, policy implementation, conflicts, final decisions, corrections, retractions, and board performance. |
| Managing Editor | Coordinates technical screening, workflow, correspondence, metadata, schedules, and policy compliance without overriding scholarly decisions. |
| Section/Handling Editor | Assesses scope and quality, selects reviewers, manages revisions and conflicts, and makes or recommends evidence-based decisions. |
| Editorial Board | Provides subject expertise, strategic advice, active manuscript handling or review, policy oversight, and international outreach. |
| Publisher | Protects editorial independence, supplies infrastructure and resources, and does not interfere with individual scholarly decisions. |
3. Editor and board selection
- appointments are based on relevant expertise, publication record, ethical standing, and willingness to perform defined duties;
- affiliation, country, scholarly identifiers, expertise, and role are displayed publicly;
- the board should demonstrate meaningful institutional, disciplinary, gender, and geographic diversity;
- membership is reviewed periodically; inactive, undisclosed-conflict, or misconduct-involved members may be removed;
- board membership is not honorary permission to use a name without active consent and contribution.
4. Editorial decisions
- Desk rejection: for out-of-scope, technically deficient, methodologically unsound, ethically incomplete, insufficiently original, or unreadable submissions.
- External review: when a submission meets the initial threshold and requires independent expert evaluation.
- Revision: when identified problems are potentially remediable; authors receive clear requests and must respond point by point.
- Acceptance: only after scholarly, ethical, metadata, and production requirements are satisfied.
- Rejection: when contribution, evidence, methods, ethics, integrity, or revision response remains inadequate.
Reviewers advise; the responsible editor decides. The Editor-in-Chief may require further review or checks but must document the reason.
5. Quality assurance and integrity
- technical, scope, ethics, authorship, metadata, reference, and similarity checks before or during review;
- methodological or statistical review where the design requires specialist assessment;
- language editing does not substitute for scientific review;
- post-publication concerns are assessed even when they involve editors or high-profile authors;
- journal metrics must not be manipulated through coercive citation, excessive self-citation, or selective editorial practices.
6. Confidential records and accountability
Editorial correspondence, reviewer reports, decisions, conflict declarations, and supporting ethics records are retained securely for a period appropriate to legal, contractual, and operational requirements. Access is limited to authorised persons.
The journal periodically audits turnaround, reviewer performance, decision consistency, corrections, complaints, geographic diversity, and publication regularity. Aggregate statistics may be published when reliable and meaningful.