Publisher policies.

Responsibilities of the publisher.

i) Upholding complaints of misconduct.

The publisher, the OLH, is ultimately responsible for dealing swiftly and ethically with allegations of editorial misconduct, plagiarism, or any other complaints related to the fraudulent publication of an article. This may, for example, result in following the corrections, retractions and removals policy (see the ‘Publication Ethics’ section above) in close contact with the journal’s editors to ensure that problems are resolved. The publisher will not tolerate misconduct by journal editors or authors when publishing research (here defined as a breach of the points set out in ‘Responsibilities of the Editors’ and ‘Responsibilities of the Author(s)’ below) and will not knowingly allow for such misconduct to persist once identified. The publisher has robust internal policies in place to deal with any instances of misconduct and malpractice and reviews these policies regularly.

Responsibilities of the editors.

i) Independence and disclosure of competing interests.

An editor’s judgement must not be influenced by any organisation, agency, institution or government that is external to the journal and seeks to manipulate an editorial decision.

Editors must always withdraw from overseeing editorial processes for an article for which they have any potential conflicts of interest. These may be competitive or financial in nature, or concern relationships with or connections to the author(s) that would make their editorial position inappropriate. If any instance of competing interests compromises an editor’s position, the journal must assign editorial responsibility for the article to another editor.

ii) Neutrality and fairness.

Editors must assess research without undue bias. They must base their decisions on the academic rigour of the research, the fit of an article with the journal’s scope, and the overall contribution of an article to its field. Editors must never discriminate against an author’s personal background, ethnicity, disability, religion, citizenship, political alignment, sexuality, gender or otherwise; such behaviour will not be tolerated by the journal or the publisher.

iii) Confidentiality and theft of intellectual property.

Editors must never plagiarise the unpublished or published work of authors who have submitted to the journal. The author’s intellectual property, such as their argument, ideas, and text, must be considered privileged, confidential information and should not be used by an editor elsewhere for personal gain. An author’s personal information and data must remain confidential to the editorial team, including any submitted articles and accompanying notes.

The Open Library of Humanities uses the CC BY 4.0 Attribution License as the default license for all articles. This license has been developed by the Creative Commons as a public copyright license that is legally enforceable and maintains open access to licensed materials. CC BY 4.0 lets others distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon an author’s work, even commercially, as long as they credit the author for the original creation.

iv) Editorial decisions.

Editors are responsible for ensuring that the established editorial policies of the journal are enacted at all parts of the workflow. If a problematic article falls outside the remit of established journal policy, editors should confer with one another to resolve the situation where possible. There must be transparency within the editorial team over the editorial decisions taken. For transparency, all actioned editorial decisions for an article must be logged on the OLH’s in-house Janeway journal publishing system. Janeway is under active development to ensure that editorial decisions, notes and other workflow actions are available for other editors to see at any point in the article’s passage through the journal’s workflow. The publisher maintains oversight of all editorial decisions within the workflow.

v) Compliance with investigations.

If a problematic situation arises and an editor is to be investigated for their involvement in any alleged misconduct, they must be compliant with the due process undertaken by the journal and/or publisher. If an editor is found to have breached their responsibilities, they should be removed from the journal’s editorial board.

Editors should lead investigations into allegations of plagiarism, inaccurate academic content, or ethical concerns in published and unpublished manuscripts. Many investigative procedures into misconduct can be found in COPE Flowcharts, and editors must investigate every allegation of malpractice raised. If such allegations, once investigated, are proven to be correct, then adequate and robust action must be taken by the journal editors and/or publisher to remedy the problem immediately. More information can be found on the journal’s complaints and appeals process in the ‘Publication Ethics’ section above.

vi) Citation manipulation, coercive citation manipulation and data falsification.

Editors should exercise their discretion as to whether an excessive amount of self-citation by the author or citation of an individual or journal has been used upon the submission of an article. If it is clear the author has done so, then this is grounds for the rejection of their article. If citation manipulation is found to have occurred post-publication, then the editorial team should conduct a full investigation, which may lead to the correction, retraction or removal of the article from the journal.

Editors should not engage whatsoever in coercive citation manipulation, such as pressuring an author to cite a particular person’s work or the editor’s own work unnecessarily through article revisions. Such activity is considered editorial malpractice and will result in a thorough investigation and potentially the editor’s removal from the editorial team should they be found to have engaged in coercive behaviour.

Editors must be mindful of the practice of coercive citation manipulation in peer-review reports. If a reviewer submits a peer review report exhibiting such malpractice, editors must immediately seek another peer reviewer and prevent the problematic review report from being seen by the author. Editors should also avoid asking the reviewer to provide a peer review for the journal in the future.

Data falsification (manipulation of data to suit an author’s argument) form of malpractice of which editors should be aware when assessing manuscripts. Complaints regarding data falsification should be taken seriously by the journal’s editorial team and the publisher, and should be investigated thoroughly. For published articles, this may lead to a correction, retraction or the removal of an article from the journal.

Responsibilities of reviewers.

i) Academic best practice.

Peer review is a vital part of the academic publishing process. As such, peer reviewers should be reminded that the highest academic rigour must be applied to any manuscript under review. A peer reviewer’s expertise is a precious resource, and those researchers publishing in academic journals should consider reviewing the work of others where possible for the shared health of academic discourse.

ii) Disclosure of competing interests.

If a prospective reviewer has any reason to believe that they recognise and/or have any connection to the title, abstract, or content of the manuscript they have been asked to review, they must immediately raise this with the journal’s editors. While the OLH realises that in smaller or intersecting subfields it can be difficult to maintain anonymous review, we encourage all journals operating double-anonymous peer review to assess peer reviewer concerns about anonymity and to make a judgement on the appropriateness of the peer reviewer following the journal’s own peer-review policies.

iii) Confidentiality and theft of intellectual property.

Reviewers must keep all details of the manuscript they are reviewing confidential. In the case of anonymous review, they must also ensure that potentially identifying details, such as name and publications, are not given in the review they provide.

The ideas, arguments and written content of the manuscript must not be used by the reviewer for any purpose that constitutes personal gain, such as passing it off as their own research. This extends to reviewers who have declined to review but have seen part of the research, such as the abstract or manuscript title.

iv) Conducting reviews.

Peer reviewers should let editors know as soon as possible if they require extra time to complete a review. If this is not acceptable, the editor may withdraw the invitation to review and seek another peer reviewer. Completed reviews should be returned promptly, at least within the deadline specified by the editor.

Peer-review reports should be structured clearly, with full explanations given for areas of the manuscript that need work. Personal and unduly harsh criticism of the author is inappropriate and should not be included in the review. If this occurs, the journal’s editors should seek another peer reviewer to undertake review of the article. In the case of anonymous review, peer reviewers should also not leave any identifying information in reports, such as their name, or indicating that their own publication(s) should be consulted. If such information is detected in anonymous peer-review reports, editors must edit the report to remove the identifying text before the author sees it.

Reviewers should conduct reviews with as much supporting evidence for their claims as possible, to avoid undue subjective bias. Any relevant sources that the author has failed to cite should be suggested where possible and an explanation of their relevance should be given. If a reviewer has concerns about the manuscript, such as plagiarism of or similarity to another’s work, they must contact the editors immediately with an explanation of their concerns.

v) Coercive citation manipulation.

Reviewers should not engage in coercive citation manipulation practices in which they suggest that an author should revise their manuscript to excessively cite or refer to, for example, the reviewer’s own work or the work of a journal or research group they are involved with. Should a peer-review report be returned by a reviewer that exhibits such behaviour, the peer-review report will not be used for editorial judgements or revisions by the author, and the reviewer will not be asked to provide further reviews for the journal.

Responsibilities of the author(s).

i) Academic standards.

Authors should adhere to the journal’s submission guidelines when submitting a manuscript for consideration. All articles should fall within the focus and scope of the journal and adhere to the author style guidelines if such guidance is given.

All research articles must contain adequate citations and references that support the arguments being made. This is to ensure that all research is of the required standard to be considered for publication. Authors should neither knowingly present inaccurate information or data, nor present arguments that are deliberately misleading.

ii) Original research and theft of intellectual property.

Authors have the responsibility to ensure that their research is genuinely original and not plagiarised or very similar to work that is either already published or known to them as being in the process of publication. Any work that is found to be plagiarised, or research that infringes upon another person’s intellectual property and has not been adequately credited should not be passed off as the author’s own work. If the work of others has informed the formation of the author’s research, this work must be properly credited through citation and referencing.

A research manuscript should not be submitted concurrently to multiple journals for consideration. Authors should wait for the result of submission to an OLH journal before submitting their article to another journal.

iii) Disclosure of competing interests.

Authors are responsible for disclosing any competing interests at the point of an article’s submission, which will then be listed on the final published article. Failure to disclose competing interests may result in the journal being unable to publish the article, even if it passes peer review.

iv) Manuscript revisions and editorial compliance.

Authors must endeavour to make all necessary revisions to their manuscripts following peer review feedback. If authors are not able to make the necessary changes to their article, this may result in the article’s rejection. If their article is accepted for publication, authors should be amenable to copyediting queries and further suggested changes prior to the article’s publication.

v) Allegations by a third party, investigations, and notification of errors.

Authors may be approached by the journal’s editors in the event that the editorial team receives information from a third party relating to the accuracy and integrity of an article. In the event of any alleged malpractice made by a third party, the journal’s editors must conduct an investigation in consultation with the publisher and, if the allegation is upheld as a result of this investigation, the author will be asked to respond. The author’s cooperation during this process is appreciated and the journal editors and publisher will make every effort to seek an adequate and amicable solution to resolve the situation and uphold the integrity of the journal’s research. The publisher and journal editors may need to take remedial steps to ensure that the author’s work is either corrected, retracted or removed from the journal (see the ‘Publication Ethics’ section above).

If the author realises that, post-publication, their work contains either fundamental or minor errors, the journal’s editor must be notified immediately so that the process for article correction/retraction/removal can begin, adhering to the publisher’s policy.

vi) Citation manipulation, coercive citation manipulation and data falsification.

Authors should not engage in excessive citation of their own work, or an over-reliance on the work of any single author when writing their original research and constructing their own argument. An example of this would be recycling many quotations of a pre-existing publication by the author in their newly submitted research, or citing another researcher’s original work throughout the manuscript to the extent that the author’s own argument is lacking. Authors should also not cite solely to raise the citation frequency of any journal, or of any individual.

If an author suspects that the journal’s editor is pressuring them to include citations or references to work that is the editor’s own, or by a journal that the editor has engagement with in a way that the author believes to be unnecessarily coercive, they should inform the journal’s Editor-in-Chief immediately, or the publisher, so that a full investigation can take place into the alleged misconduct.

Authors should not, where any data is given, knowingly amend or alter it to suit their own analyses or argument. Such falsification of data is serious and will result in a malpractice investigation which may lead to article rejection, correction, retraction or removal from the journal.

Authorship and contributorship.

Articles should list names of all those who contributed to the published work, to ensure transparency and the academic integrity of the research. Authors take collective responsibility for determining who should be listed as an author and the order in which they should appear. Individuals who have contributed to the article, but do not meet the full criteria for authorship, should be credited by name and affiliation in the ‘Acknowledgments’ section.

The OLH strongly encourages all authors to register for an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) prior to submitting their work. ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that authors own and control (an ORCID), which distinguishes them from every other researcher. ORCIDs will be displayed on published articles when they are provided by the author.

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following criteria for authorship:

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
• Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
• Final approval of the version to be published; AND
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Where an article has multiple authors, there should be one primary author contact responsible for dealing with all editorial and publishing queries prior to and after the article’s publication. They must consult with their co-editors and contributors about editorial and publishing queries where appropriate, in order to facilitate an article’s publication. Post-publication, co-authors may wish to include their corresponding email address so that it is visible on the article.

All authors must give their approval before being attributed to the submitted article. The primary author must ensure that other co-authors have consulted the above sections; in particular, ‘Responsibilities of the Author(s)’.

The ‘Acknowledgements’ section of an article must include the involvement of research groups or organisations and any funding sources. All named figures and sources must give their permission to be acknowledged by the author(s) as this can be construed as an association with, and endorsement of, the research.

Authors cannot be added or removed at any point prior to publication unless an adequate reason is given to editors for why this is necessary. Unjustified addition or removal of authors will be considered a case of malpractice and will not be tolerated by the journal and publisher should an investigation prove this to be true.

Where editors wish to incorporate the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) system to acknowledge different models of contribution, this is permitted on a case-by-case basis.

As part of the open-access and open-source movements, the OLH works with multiple publishing and technology partners to generate and maintain non-proprietary knowledge and digital infrastructure. We would like to acknowledge that some text used on our journal websites has been used or adapted from the Public Knowledge Project resources, for which we are grateful.