Publication Ethics

PUBLICATION ETHICS & RESEARCH INTEGRITY POLICY

1. Authorship, Contributorship, and Labor Equity

  • 1.1. Ethical Authorship Criteria: JMI strictly follows the ICMJE guidelines. Authorship must be limited to individuals who have made substantial contributions to the study's design, data collection, or analysis; participated in drafting or critically revising the manuscript; approved the final Version of Record (VoR); and agreed to be fully accountable for the integrity of the work.
  • 1.2. Human Accountability & AI Prohibition: Generative AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Claude) cannot be listed or cited as authors due to their lack of legal and ethical accountability. Human authors remain fully liable for any AI-assisted outputs, ensuring that all content is original, accurate, and free of plagiarism.
  • 1.3. CRediT Taxonomy & Contributorship: Contributors who do not meet all four authorship criteria must be acknowledged. JMI mandates the CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) to transparently assign specific roles to human researchers who validated or directed the research outputs.
  • SDG Alignment (SDG 8: Decent Work & Economic Growth & SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities): Standardizing authorship and employing the CRediT framework protects the professional labor rights of researchers. It prevents exploitative academic practices, such as the exclusion of junior scholars or coercive guest-authorship, fostering an equitable and inclusive research workforce worldwide.

2. Research Misconduct & Scientific Validity

  • 2.1. Plagiarism & Text Recycling: JMI enforces a zero-tolerance policy for plagiarism. All submissions are screened using iThenticate or Crossref Similarity Check. Text recycling (self-plagiarism) must be avoided, and previously published material by the authors must be transparently cited and contextualized.
  • 2.2. Data Fabrication and Falsification:
    • Fabrication: The intentional invention or misrepresentation of data or findings.
    • Falsification: The deliberate manipulation of research equipment, processes, or selective omission of data to distort the truth.
  • 2.3. Digital Image Integrity: Adjusting images to misrepresent original research data is strictly prohibited. Grouping images from separate sources, selective color/contrast enhancements, or removing features to obscure data are subject to automated integrity screenings.
  • SDG Alignment (SDG 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure & SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production): Trustworthy, non-fabricated data is vital for industrial and strategic management. By enforcing rigorous data integrity checks, JMI ensures that the strategic management frameworks, corporate supply chain designs, and production methodologies published are replicable and scientifically sound, preventing wasted corporate resources and false innovations.

3. Conflict of Interest, Funding, and Financial Independence

  • 3.1. Complete Disclosure Requirements: All authors, reviewers, and handling editors must disclose any personal, professional, or financial relationships (including grants, stock ownership, or consultancies) that could bias their objectivity. Any financial conflict exceeding $5,000 USD per year requires the handling editor or reviewer to immediately recuse themselves from the workflow.
  • 3.2. Funder Disclosure: Authors must explicitly declare the role of the research funder in the study design, data collection, analysis, and the decision to publish.
  • SDG Alignment (SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions): Financial transparency and strict recusal rules eliminate corporate or regional bias. This builds public and institutional trust in published management insights, ensuring research remains a reliable instrument for evidence-based policymaking and clean institutional governance.

4. Ethical Oversight: Human Subjects & Organizational Research

  • 4.1. Human Subject Protections: All research involving human participants (e.g., surveys, clinical trials, or interviews) must be conducted according to the Declaration of Helsinki. Authors must provide statement of approval from an Institutional Review Board (IRB) or Ethics Committee and confirm that written informed consent was obtained.
  • 4.2. Business and Organizational Ethics (Corporate Data Privacy): When studying specific organizations, authors must obtain formal, documented corporate/organizational consent before utilizing proprietary databases or survey data. All data collection methodologies must comply with modern data privacy frameworks, including the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ensuring absolute anonymity for employees and customers.
  • SDG Alignment (SDG 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth & SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions): Integrating corporate GDPR compliance and organizational consent ensures that workplace studies do not exploit or compromise the privacy rights of employees. This promotes ethical, safe, and respectful workplaces globally.

5. Artificial Intelligence (AI) Ethics Protocol

  • 5.1. Mandatory Submission Disclosure: Authors must disclose any generative AI assistance in their Methods or Acknowledgments sections. This must include:
    1. The tool name, version, and manufacturer.
    2. The date of use and exact prompt/query syntax used.
    3. A formal confirmation that human authors have manually verified all AI outputs.
  • 5.2. Visual Material Prohibition: Manuscripts must not contain images, diagrams, or data visualizations generated directly by generative AI due to copyright ambiguities and accuracy concerns. Standard data-derived plots from verified statistical software (e.g., Python, R) are exempt.
  • 5.3. Peer Review Upload Ban: Peer reviewers and editors are strictly prohibited from uploading submitted manuscripts, figures, or metadata into public AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini). This protects the author's proprietary findings and copyright.
  • SDG Alignment (SDG 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure): Digital transparency in AI prevents "hallucinated" data from contaminating the management science literature. Protecting intellectual property during peer review ensures that early-stage research is safeguarded, encouraging researchers to share pioneering strategic innovations without fear of intellectual theft.

6. Editorial and Peer Review Integrity

  • 6.1. Editorial Independence Firewall: Editorial decisions are made strictly on academic merit, originality, and quality. JMI enforces an absolute firewall: Article Processing Charge (APC) payment details are never shared with academic editors or reviewers to prevent financial bias.
  • 6.2. Strict Confidentiality: All submissions are treated as privileged documents. Reviewers and editors must not disclose details of the manuscript or use its findings for personal, professional, or competitive advantage.
  • 6.3. Anti-Citation Manipulation: Editors and reviewers are prohibited from demanding that authors add references to their own or the journal’s published works simply to artificially inflate citation scores. Any suggested reference must carry clear, independent academic justification.
  • SDG Alignment (SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities & SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions): The APC firewall protects scholars from low- and middle-income nations from geographic or wealth-based discrimination during peer review. This ensures that global management science remains merit-based and universally accessible.

7. Sanctions and Correcting the Record

  • 7.1. COPE-Guided Misconduct Investigations: JMI will systematically investigate all allegations of misconduct or whistleblowing in strict accordance with COPE guidelines. This process involves contacting the author’s institutional ethics board when primary data access is required.
  • 7.2. Correcting the Scholarly Record: When errors or ethical breaches occur, JMI proactively amends the record via:
    • Corrections: For minor, non-invalidating errors.
    • Expressions of Concern: While an active, complex investigation is ongoing.
    • Retractions: For severe misconduct or fundamental errors that invalidate the findings. Retractions are clearly watermarked on the PDF, state who is retracting and why, and remain permanently linked to the Version of Record (VoR) to avoid silent deletion.
  • 7.3. Publisher Sanctions: If misconduct is proven, JMI reserves the right to impose bans on future submissions or restrict researchers from serving as reviewers or editors.
  • SDG Alignment (SDG 16: Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions): Enforcing transparent, permanent correction mechanisms ensures that the historical scientific record remains completely honest and self-correcting. This institutional transparency represents the peak of ethical accountability in global publishing.