International Review of Public Policy is a peer-reviewed journal committed to following strict ethical rules and expects all submitting authors to uphold the high standard of publication ethics as set out by the Commission on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Editorial responsibilities

Publication Decisions: Editors are accountable for everything published in their journal and strive to meet the needs of readers and authors. Editors’ decisions to accept or reject a paper for publication are based on double-blind reviewer recommendations, the editorial board’s review and the editor’s assessment of the paper’s quality and importance.

Fair Review: Editors strive to ensure that peer review at their journal is fair, unbiased, and timely. The editor ensures that each manuscript received is evaluated on its intellectual content without regard to authors’ sex, gender, race, religion, citizenship, etc.

Confidentiality: The editor and any editorial staff do not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate. The editor ensures that information regarding manuscripts submitted by the authors is kept confidential.

Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest: Editors require reviewers to disclose any potential competing interests before agreeing to review a submission.

Author's responsibilities

International Review of Public Policy is a peer-reviewed journal, and authors are obliged to participate in our double-blind peer review process. Authors need to ensure that all the data in the submitted article is real and authentic. They must make sure that all authors have significantly contributed to the research submitted in the article, and that all and only the contributors to the article are listed as authors. It is their responsibility to ensure that no participants are harmed, physically or mentally, during the research which results in the article, and that personal details of the participants, where participants have not agreed for such details to be released or where the release of such details could endanger a participant, are fully anonymized. This applies both to textual citations and to images and any supplementary audio or visual material. Authors must ensure that all authors provide retractions or corrections of mistakes.

Proper acknowledgment of the work of others must always be given. Authors must cite publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work. Information obtained privately, as in conversation, correspondence, or discussion with third parties, must not be used or reported without explicit, written permission from the source. Information obtained in the course of confidential services, such as refereeing manuscripts or grant applications, must not be used without the explicit written permission of the author of the work involved in these services.

Publication and authorship

Authors need to ensure that the submitted article is the work of the submitting author(s) and is not plagiarized, wholly or in part. They must also make sure that the submitted article is original, is not wholly or in part a re-publication of the author's earlier work, and contains no fraudulent data.

It is also their responsibility to check that they have received permission to use and publish all copyrighted material within the article and that material for which the author does not personally hold the copyright is not reproduced without permission.

Finally, authors must ensure that the manuscript they submit is not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Peer review and reviewers' responsibilities

Both the referee and the author remain anonymous throughout the double-blind review process. Referees are selected according to their expertise in their particular fields. Submitted papers are reviewed by at least two independent referees and by our editorial board.

Referees have a responsibility to be objective in their judgments; to have no conflict of interest with respect to the research, with respect to the authors and/or with respect to the research funders; to point out relevant published work which is not yet cited by the author(s); and to treat the reviewed articles confidentially. Referees are asked to provide constructive anonymised comments for the author.

Referees judge each paper based on the following scale: Accepted with no revision, Conditionally accepted, Revise and resubmit, Flat rejection. The Editorial Board discusses the reports and a decision is sent to the Author(s) along with the recommendations made by the reviewer. The Editors are responsible for the final decisions to accept or reject the manuscript.

Publishing ethics issues

The Editorial Board is responsible for monitoring ethics and preventing publication malpractice. All editorial members, reviewers, and authors must confirm and obey the rules defined by COPE.

The editor and the Editorial Board must maintain the integrity of the academic record, preclude business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standards, and always be willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed.

Editors are receptive to the opinions expressed by authors, reviewers, and Editorial Board members about ways of improving any aspects of the journal, with particular regard to publishing ethics. Editors actively monitor the fair performance of reviewers.

Editors will retract a publication if:
– the manuscript contains plagiarized and/or fraudulent data and information
– the results have been published elsewhere without proper citation, permission, or justification

The corresponding author is the main owner of the article so she/he/they can withdraw the article when it is incomplete (before entering the review process or when a revision is asked for).

Authors cannot make major changes to the article after acceptance without a serious reason.

When authors discover significant errors or inaccuracies in their own published work, it is their obligation to promptly notify the journal’s editors or publisher and cooperate with them to either correct the paper in the form of an erratum or to retract the paper. If the editors or publisher learns from a third party that a published work contains a significant error or inaccuracy, then it is the authors’ obligation to promptly correct or retract the paper or provide evidence to the journal editors of the correctness of the paper

Any notes of plagiarism, fraudulent data, or any other kinds of fraud must be reported completely to COPE.

Authors must acknowledge and declare any sources of funding and potential conflicting interest, such as receiving funds or fees by or holding stocks and shares in, an organization that may profit or lose through the publication of your paper. Declaring a competing interest will not lead to automatic rejection of the paper, but we would like to be made aware of it.