Publication Ethics

Duties and Responsibilities

The authors' duties and responsibilities are as follows: (i) Reporting standards, (ii) Data Access and Retention, (iii) Originality and Plagiarism, (iv) Multiple, Redundant or Concurrent Publication, (v) Acknowledgement of Sources, (vi) Authorship of the Paper, (vii) Hazards and Human or Animal Subjects, (viii) Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest, and (ix) Fundamental errors in published works.
The reviewers' duties and responsibilities are as follows: (i) Contribution to Editorial Decision, (ii) Promptness, (iii) Confidentiality, (iv) Standards of Objectivity, (v) Acknowledgement of Source, (vi) Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest, and (vii) Identification and prevention from the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred.
The editors' duties and responsibilities are as follows: (i) Publication decision, (ii) Fair play, (iii) Confidentiality, (iv) Disclosure and Conflicts of interest, (v) Involvement and cooperation in investigations, and (vi) Identification and prevention from the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred.
The editors' duties and responsibilities are as follows: (i) Publication of the issues, (ii) Advertisement, (iii) Indexing of the issues, and (iv) Willingness to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed.

Competing Interests

The authors must disclose and clearly state any financial or any other conflicts of interest that might have influenced the results presented or their interpretations thereof in their paper. This could be disclosed in the Acknowledgement section of the manuscript.

What Represents a Competing Interest? (i) A competing interest is anything that interferes with or could reasonably be perceived as interfering with the full and objective presentation, peer review, editorial decision-making and/or publication of research or non-research articles submitted to JEBE, (ii) Competing interests can be financial or non-financial, professional or personal. Competing interests can arise in relation to an organisation or another person, and (iii) Declaring all potential competing interests is a requirement at JEBE and is integral to the transparent reporting of research.

Failure to declare competing interests can result in the immediate rejection of a manuscript. If an undisclosed competing interest comes to light after publication, JEBE will take action following COPE guidelines and issue a public notification to the community.

Financial competing interests: Financial competing interests include but are not limited to: (i) Ownership of stocks or shares, (ii) Paid employment or consultancy, (iii) Board membership, (iv) Patent applications (pending or actual) including individual applications or those belonging to the institution to which the authors are affiliated and from which the authors may benefit, (v) Research grants (from any source, restricted or unrestricted), (vi) Travel grants and honoraria for speaking or participation at meetings, and (vii) Gifts.
Non-financial competing interests: Non-financial competing interests include but are not limited to: (i) Acting as an expert witness, (ii) Membership in a government or other advisory board, (iii) Relationship (paid or unpaid) with organisations and funding bodies, including non-governmental organisations, research institutions, or charities, (iv) Membership of lobbying or advocacy organisations, (v) Writing or consulting for an educational company, (vi) Personal relationships (i.e. friend, spouse, family member, current or previous mentor, adversary) with individuals involved in the submission or evaluation of a paper, such as authors, reviewers, editors, or members of the editorial board of a JEBE journal, (vii) Personal convictions (political, religious, ideological, or other) related to a paper's topic that might interfere with an unbiased publication process (at the stage of authorship, peer review, editorial decision-making, or publication.

Ethical publishing

Dealing with unethical behaviour

Anyone may inform the Editor-in-Chief / Editorial Board at any time of suspected unethical behaviour or any type of misconduct by giving the necessary credible information/evidence to start an investigation. Editor-in-Chief decides the initiation of an investigation. Any evidence should be treated as confidential during an investigation and only made available to those strictly involved in the process. The accused will always be given a chance to respond to any charges against them. If it is judged at the end of the investigation that misconduct has occurred, we will classify the case as either minor or major.

Minor misconduct: Minor misconduct (with no influence on the integrity of the paper and the journal, for example, when it comes to misunderstanding or wrong application of publishing standards) will be dealt directly with authors and reviewers without involving any other parties. Outcomes include: (i) Sending a warning letter to authors and/or reviewers, (ii) Publishing correction of a paper, e.g. when sources correctly quoted in the text are omitted from the reference list, (iii) Publishing an erratum, e.g. if the error was made by editorial staff.
Major misconduct: In the case of major misconduct the Editor-in-Chief / Editorial Board may adopt different measures: (i) Publication of a formal announcement or editorial describing the misconduct, (ii) Informing officially the author’s/reviewer’s affiliating institution, (iii) The formal, announced retraction of publications from the journal in accordance with the Retraction Policy, (iv) A ban on submissions from an individual for a defined period, (v) Referring a case to a professional organization or legal authority for further investigation and action.

The above actions may be taken separately or jointly. If necessary, in the process of resolving the case relevant expert organizations, bodies, or individuals may be consulted. When dealing with unethical behaviour, the Editorial Board will rely on the guidelines and recommendations provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).