Editorial Independence Policy

Statement of independence

Editorial decisions at BORJSS — to review, to revise, to accept, to reject, to correct or to retract — rest with the Editor-in-Chief and the handling editors, and are made on the scholarly merit of the work and its fit with the journal’s aims and scope.

No other party may direct those decisions. That includes the publisher, the journal’s owners, funders, advertisers, institutions, government bodies and the editors’ own employers. The Editor-in-Chief has full authority over the content of the journal.

The publisher’s role

The publisher is responsible for the infrastructure that lets the journal operate, and for maintaining the published record. It is not responsible for what gets published.

Appointment and removal of the Editor-in-Chief is the publisher’s decision, and is the one lever it holds. It may not be used in response to a specific editorial decision. Where an Editor-in-Chief is removed, the journal states that the change has occurred; decisions already taken stand, and manuscripts in progress continue under the same terms.

Fees and decisions

The person handling a manuscript has no information about, and no interest in, whether a fee will be paid on it. Article processing charges are administered by the editorial office after a decision to accept has been taken and communicated.

• Ability to pay plays no part in any editorial decision, at any stage;
• A waiver request is handled by the editorial office and is not visible to the handling editor or to reviewers;
• A waiver, once granted, is not reconsidered on the basis of the decision reached;
• The journal does not offer paid fast-track review, paid placement, or any service that alters how a manuscript is assessed.

Charges and the waiver policy are published in full on the article processing charges page.

Institutional influence

The journal publishes research about institutions, including institutions connected to its own editors, its publisher and its authors. Such work is assessed on the same terms as any other.

An editor whose institution is the subject of a manuscript, or who has any relationship with the organisation the work evaluates, transfers it to another editor under the conflict of interest policy. A request from an institution to withdraw, delay or soften an article is refused, and the fact that the request was made is recorded.

Political and ideological pressure

Social science research touches on questions that are politically contested. The journal assesses such work on its method and evidence, not on whether its conclusions are welcome.

Manuscripts are not rejected because their findings are inconvenient to a government, a donor, an institution or a prevailing view, and they are not accepted because their findings are congenial. Where a published article attracts pressure to remove it, the journal removes an article only where the retraction and correction policy is satisfied on scholarly grounds, or where it is compelled by law — and in the latter case it says that this is what happened.

The one limit is legal rather than editorial: the journal will not publish material that is unlawful in the jurisdiction in which it operates.

Advertising and sponsorship

The journal carries no advertising and accepts no sponsored content, supplements or sponsored special issues. There is accordingly no advertiser whose interests could bear on a decision.

Should this change, advertising would be separated from editorial content, clearly labelled, never targeted to the content of an individual article, and never linked to any editorial decision — and this policy would be updated before any such arrangement began.

The editorial team’s own work

Editors and board members may publish in the journal. Their submissions are handled by an editor with no reporting relationship to them, the author is excluded from every part of the record, and the published article states both the affiliation and the exclusion. The safeguards are set out in the conflict of interest policy.

The journal monitors the share of published articles authored by its own editorial team and reports it annually. A journal that publishes largely its own editors is not independent, whatever its procedures say.

Who decides what

The people currently holding these roles are listed on the editorial board page.

Transparency reporting

Independence is a claim that should be checkable. The journal publishes an annual editorial statement reporting the number of submissions received and articles published, the acceptance rate, median time to first decision, the share of articles authored by editorial team members, the number of waivers granted, and the number of corrections and retractions issued.

The first such statement follows the completion of the journal’s first full volume; figures published to date appear on the journal information page.

Reporting pressure

Any author, reviewer or editor who believes an editorial decision has been influenced by commercial, institutional or political pressure should report it to the editorial office at ceoborjss@gmail.com, marked for the attention of the Editor-in-Chief. Where the concern involves the Editor-in-Chief, it is directed to the editorial board, which considers it without them.

Such reports are handled under the complaints and appeals policy, and the person raising the concern is not disadvantaged for having raised it.