Conflict of Interest
IJERT’s Conflict of Interest policy is based on the COPE’s definition and guidelines:
‘Conflicts of interest comprise those which may not be fully apparent and which may influence the judgment of author, reviewers, and editors. They have been described as those which, when revealed later, would make a reasonable reader feel misled or deceived. They may be personal, commercial, political, academic or financial.
“Financial” interests may include employment, research funding, stock or share ownership, payment for lectures or travel, consultancies and company support for staff.’
https://publicationethics.org/files/u7141/1999pdf13.pdf
Responsibilities of Participants
Authors
Authors are responsible for reporting any financial Conflict of Interest related to their research. In additional to financial COI other types of competing interests like personal relationships, academic commitments, institutional obligations etc., which might affect the outcome of their work
All authors should fill the declaration form completely and submit it along with the article.
Journals / Publisher action:
- The statement of conflict of interest should be mentioned after the acknowledgement section in each article
- If there are no conflicts, the Disclosures section should include the following statement: “The authors declare no conflicts of interest.”
Reviewers
Reviewers should declare all potential competing or conflicting interests. It includes personal, financial, intellectual, professional, political or religious in nature. It will also include employed in the same institution as any of the authors or have been recent (e.g., within the past 3 years), close collaborators or joint grant holders.
Journals / Publisher action
Reviewers should be asked if they have a COI with the content or authors of a manuscript. If they do, they should be removed from the review process.
Editors
Editors should not make any editorial decisions if they have or a close family member has a financial COI It will also include political/religious COI or personal COI with respect to the authors or their work COI also includes if the article is submitted from their own institution. For articles submitted by editors to same journal, it should be handled by another member of Editorial Board.
Journals / Publisher action:
Editors who make final decisions about manuscripts should recuse themselves from editorial decisions if they have conflicts of interest or relationships that pose potential conflicts related to articles under consideration