Conflict of Interest Policy

Everyone involved in publishing in SSIJ must declare any interest that could influence, or appear to influence, their work. Declaring an interest is not misconduct; hiding one is.

What counts as a conflict of interest

  • Financial: research funding, employment, consultancy, honoraria, shares or other payments connected to the work.
  • Non-financial: personal relationships, academic rivalry, or strong political, religious or ideological commitments related to the topic.
  • Institutional: working for, or being funded by, the organization that is the subject of the study (for example, a government agency studying its own programme).

Authors

Authors declare all funding and competing interests in a Conflict of Interest statement in the manuscript and in the submission form. If there are none, they write: "The authors declare no conflict of interest."

Reviewers

Reviewers decline an invitation if they:

  • work at the same institution as any author, or did so in the past three years;
  • have co-authored or collaborated with any author in the past three years;
  • supervise, or were supervised by, any author; or
  • have a personal relationship or competing interest related to the manuscript.

If a reviewer recognises the authors despite double-blind review and has a conflict, they inform the editor and decline.

Editors

Editors do not handle manuscripts from their own institution, their recent co-authors or their students. Such manuscripts are reassigned to another editor.

Manuscripts written by members of the editorial team

Members of the editorial board, including the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor, may submit to SSIJ under these rules:

  1. The manuscript is handled by another editor who has no conflict. The author-editor has no access to the manuscript's review record in the editorial system.
  2. It goes through the same double-blind review by at least two external reviewers who are not from the author's institution.
  3. If the Editor-in-Chief is an author, the decision is made by [name of senior editor].
  4. Articles with at least one author from the editorial team make up no more than 10% of the articles in any volume.
  5. The published article carries a note: "[Name] is a member of the SSIJ editorial board and was not involved in the editorial handling of this article."

The same rules apply to reviewers listed on the journal website who submit their own manuscripts.

Undisclosed conflicts

A conflict discovered after submission or publication is handled under the Publication Ethics statement. It may lead to rejection, a correction or a retraction.