SBSR Policies on publishing ethics:

i) SBSR policies on authorship and contributorship:

It is the collective responsibility of all the individuals who have conducted the work to determine who should be listed as authors, and the order in which authors should be listed.

The SBSR editor will not decide on order of authorship and cannot arbitrate authorship disputes. Where unresolved disputes between the authors arise, the institution(s) where the work was performed will be asked to investigate.

Authors must be prepared to provide funding information to the SBSR office if requested. Failure to disclose funding information may, in some cases, be considered as misconduct and may result in corrective action to ensure the integrity of the scholarly record. Correction or retraction notices (as appropriate) may need to be issued on published articles where inaccuracies or key missing information in the funding statement are identified. There are no fees for submitting and publishing in the SBSR.

ii) How the SBSR will handle complaints and appeals:

The authors need to provide strong evidence or new data/information in response to the editor’s and reviewers’ comments.

The scholarly articles have an opinion nature an appeal is less likely to overturn an editor’s decision. These include viewpoints and commentaries where editorial judgment about readability and relevance weighs most heavily.

In any case, all opinion-led articles should be evidence-based and fully referenced. For opinion-led articles, you should always present your evidence and explain how it led you to form your opinion.

SBSR editors don’t expect frequent appeals and they rarely reverse their original decisions. Therefore, if you receive a decision to reject your manuscript, you are strongly advised to submit to another journal. The decision to reject a manuscript for publication will often involve the SBSR editor’s judgment of priority/importance. These are things which authors usually cannot address through an appeal. However, if you believe that there is a case to be made for a genuine appeal please follow the instructions below.

- Detail why you disagree with the decision. Please provide specific responses to any of the editor’s and/or reviewers’ comments that contributed to the reject decision.

- Provide any new information or data that you would like the SBSR to take into consideration.

- Provide evidence if you believe a reviewer has made technical errors in their assessment of your manuscript.

- Include evidence if you believe a reviewer may have a conflict of interest.

After receiving the appeal, SBSR editors may involve any associate editors who handled the peer review of the original submission. SBSR editors may confirm their decision to reject the manuscript, invite a revised manuscript, or seek additional peer for the original manuscript.

iii) SBSR policies on conflicts of interest / competing interests:

You and all your co-authors must declare any competing interests that are, or could reasonably be perceived as, relevant to the article.

A competing interest can occur where you (or your employer, sponsor or family/friends) have a financial, commercial, legal, or professional relationship with other organizations, or with the people working with them which could influence the research or interpretation of the results.

Competing interests can be financial or non-financial in nature. To ensure transparency, you must also declare any associations which can be perceived by others as a competing interest.

iv) SBSR policies on data sharing and reproducibility:

Authors are encouraged to share or make available any data and materials supporting the results or analyses presented in their manuscript.

Please note that data should only be shared if it is ethically correct to do so, where this does not violate the protection of human subjects, or other valid ethical, privacy, or security concerns.

Research should be communicated in a way that supports verification and reproducibility, and as such we encourage authors to provide comprehensive descriptions of their research rationale, protocol, methodology, and analysis.

To aid authors in this, a number of study-design specific consensus-based reporting guidelines have been developed, and we recommend you to use these as guidance prior to submitting your manuscript.

v) SBSR’s policy on ethical oversight:

Ethical research practices require that researchers are vigilant in ensuring that their work minimizes risk and avoids harm. Researchers also have an ethical obligation to be transparent about their research methods in such a way that editors, peer reviewers, and readers may fairly and adequately evaluate their work.

Note that for interdisciplinary and mixed-methods research, researchers should decide which guidelines are relevant based on the type of research they are conducting.

SBSR will not tolerate any kind of harassment of our authors, editors, reviewers, staff, or vendors.

SBSR expect to work in an environment of mutual respect and will work with the designated ethics team and legal team to deal with any cases of harassment.

Advice for researchers experiencing harassment: As a researcher, you should expect your work to be scrutinized by the public, policy makers, and campaigners. However, some researchers working on high-profile subjects that attract controversy have also found themselves targeted with online harassment.

vi) SBSR’s policy on intellectual property:

You must obtain the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in your article. These materials may include – but are not limited to – text, illustration, photographs, tables, data, audio, video, film stills, screenshots, or musical notation.

The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission. If you wish to include any material in your manuscript for which you do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, you will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission.

vii) SBSR’s options for post-publication discussions and corrections:

Any necessary changes after a manuscript has been published will be done after careful consideration by the SBSR and accompanied with a post-publication notice which will be permanently linked to the original article. This can be in the form of a Correction notice, an Expression of Concern, a Retraction and in rare circumstances a Removal. The purpose of this mechanism of making changes which are permanent and transparent is to ensure the integrity of the scholarly record.