Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement (October 22, 2018)
African Conflict & Peacebuilding Review is committed to standard scholarly best practices regarding all ethical matters, including the review process, errors, and retractions. Preventing publication malpractice is one of the important responsibilities of the editorial board. Any kind of unethical behavior is not acceptable.
The following ethics statement is based on common editorial practices as outlined in the COPE Code of Conduct for Journal Editors.
Duties of Editors
Review Process: The editors must review each manuscript individually for originality, intellectual merit, and broader interest to the scholarly or policy community. The editors may reject an article at this stage for failing to meet these criteria. Articles for further consideration must be sent out for blind peer review (at least two reviewers for research articles, and one reviewer for briefings), which the editors will use to determine whether to accept, reject, or request revisions.
Fair and Confidential Review: The editors must ensure that information regarding manuscripts submitted, including the identity of the authors, is kept confidential. The identity of reviewers must also be kept confidential. The editors must manage the review process without regard to the sex, gender, ethnicity, religion, citizenship, professional affiliation, or other status of the author or reviewers.
Conflict of Interest and Disclosure: The editors must not use unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript for their own scholarship without written consent of the author.
Duties of Authors
Reporting Standards: Authors should present an accurate account of their research and its significance.
Originality, Multiple Submissions, and Redundancy: Authors must ensure that they have written an entirely original work. Authors should not submit the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently. Authors must ensure that a submission does not substantially replicate the research, argument, and conclusions in his or her previously published work.
Acknowledgment of Sources: Authors must cite all data sources used in their research and all publications that have informed their manuscript, following standard scholarly convention (authors are referred to the journal’s style guide). Sources that are not relevant to the manuscript should not be included and self-citing should be used sparingly.
Duties of Reviewers
Confidentiality of Review Process: Reviewers must hold the review process in confidence, including the identity of the author if the reviewer is able to ascertain who it is.
Conflict of Interests and Objectivity: The review process must be carried out objectively. Reviewers should clearly support their comments on the manuscript and not let political, religious, or similar views affect their assessment of the manuscript. If a reviewer is unable to review a manuscript because of a conflict of interest, the reviewers must notify the editors immediately and withdraw from the process. Conflicts of interest include but are not limited to: being in the same department/program as the author; having a familial connection to the author (e.g. spouse, sibling); having collaborated with the author on an article, grant proposal, or other piece of scholarship in the preceding 24 months; having served on the author’s PhD or equivalent committee in the previous five years.
Promptness: In the event that a reviewer is unable to complete his/her review within the agreed upon time frame, he or she must notify the editor immediately so that the manuscript can be sent to another reviewer.