Ethics & Compliance

Ethics: The reputation of the WAIMM Journal is built and sustained on the foundations, pillars, and structures of academic, research and publication integrity. The WAIMM Journal depends largely on its editors and reviewers (to a greater extent) and authors (to a lesser extent) for its reputation. Editors, reviewers, and authors must avoid the pitfalls of plagiarism, cheating, sabotage, misrepresentation, stealing, falsification, and any other forms of academic, research and publication dishonesty. Editors and reviewers must carefully consider the following articles in executing their duties and responsibilities.

  • Editors and reviewers must execute their duties and responsibilities with distinction, care, and competency, and with efficient management to avoid unnecessary delays, losses of manuscripts and unresponsiveness to authors. Editors must always consider authors as customers that must be treated with respect, honor, and care to develop lasting relationships that will pay dividends.
  • Editors must recruit qualified reviewers with expertise in the specialty areas of publications for reviewing manuscripts. Reviewers must be familiar with the subject matter and understand the content of the manuscript to be qualified to contribute towards publication decisions.
  • All manuscripts must be checked for plagiarized materials. Publications with plagiarized materials must be sent back to authors for appropriate citations, deletions, and corrections. Publishing plagiarized materials will ultimately harm the reputation of the journal and efforts must be made to avoid that completely.
  • Manuscripts that have substantial components already published must be examined carefully to prevent multiple publications of similar work in multiple journals. The task of preventing this situation calls for well-informed and highly dedicated teams of reviewers that take the job of reviewing very seriously. It will also depend ultimately on responsible editorship.
  • Under no circumstance should editors/reviewers co-opt the ideas from authors’ work as their own for publication bearing their names. There have been reported cases of editors/reviewers rejecting authors work through the review process only to steal the ideas from the rejected works for advancing their own work. This is highly unethical.
  • As much as possible, editors must ensure consistent review process and feedback to retain the confidence of authors in the journal. Consistency in the review process and timely feedback to authors are required for maintaining the reputation of any refereed journal and the editors must work hard to maintain that.
  • Editors and reviewers must work hard to avoid inequities, biases, and unfair treatment of authors. Editors must never accept a manuscript because the author is a friend, reject a manuscript because they dislike the author or make decisions based on anything else except on the standards of quality required by the WAIMM Journal.
  • An author’s appeal for reconsideration of a rejected manuscript or to challenge editorial/reviewer’s decision must be handled with professionalism. Editors must carefully explain the decision to reject or accept previously rejected manuscript and/or modify previous decisions with substantive facts. Under no condition should an editor or reviewer be pressured to change previous decisions. In all these deliberations, the decisions by Editors will be final and binding.
  • Post-publication errors must be dealt with forthrightly, appropriately and with transparency. Whenever, the attention of an editor is drawn to errors, mistakes or flaws in a previously published manuscript, the editor will inform the Editorial Board of the error, mistake, or flaw with a strategy to correct that. That strategy will include informing the author(s) and working with them to make the appropriate correction(s), which must be published in an immediate future journal release. Under no circumstance should an error be left unaddressed or covered up without public disclosure.
  • Any editor or reviewer found to be discharging their duties and responsibilities unethically would be relieved of their assignments as editor or reviewer.

Compliance: All articles for publication must meet the review standards and instructions to authors and adhere to the operating philosophy of the WAIMM Journal. These review standards and authors’ instructions will form the basis for accepting or rejecting manuscripts. Editors and reviewers must ensure that all manuscripts are compliant for publication consideration in the review process.