Responsibility of Editors

These duties apply to the Editor-in-Chief and to every member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Integrated Law Review. They follow the Core Practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

1. Decisions on publication

The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for deciding which submitted manuscripts are published. The decision rests on the manuscript's scholarly merit, its originality, its argument and its fit with the journal's scope — and on nothing else. The decision is informed by the reviewers' reports and constrained by the journal's legal obligations on defamation, copyright and plagiarism.

2. Fairness

Manuscripts are evaluated on their intellectual content without regard to the author's race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnic origin, citizenship, disability, seniority, institution or political stance. A submission from an unknown research scholar receives the same treatment as one from a professor.

3. Confidentiality

Editors must not disclose anything about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, the reviewers, and the editorial office. A manuscript under consideration is confidential until it is published.

4. Conflict of interest

Unpublished material disclosed in a submission must not be used in an editor's own research without the author's written consent. An editor who has a competing interest — collaborative, financial, institutional or personal — with any author must withdraw from handling that manuscript and hand it to another editor.

Where a member of the editorial board submits their own work, they are excluded from every stage of its handling, and the manuscript goes through the same double-blind review as any other.

5. Acting on complaints

An editor who is presented with a convincing allegation about a submitted or published paper must act. That means putting the allegation to the author, giving them a genuine opportunity to respond, and, where the allegation holds, issuing a correction, a retraction or an expression of concern under the Publication Policy. An allegation is not dismissed because the paper is old or the complainant is anonymous.

6. Integrity of the record

Editors guard the published record. Errors are corrected promptly and visibly. Corrections are not made silently, and published files are not quietly replaced.

7. Reviewer management

Editors select reviewers with genuine subject expertise, monitor the quality of their reports, and stop using reviewers who are consistently late, careless or discourteous.

8. No commercial influence

Editorial decisions are not influenced by the article processing charge, by an author's ability to pay, or by any commercial consideration. The APC becomes payable only after acceptance, and the editorial decision is taken before payment is raised. Editors are not told whether a fee has been paid.

9. Declaring the board honestly

The Editorial Board lists only people who have agreed to serve and who are actually serving. Names are removed when a member steps down.