Ethics Statement

Central and Eastern European Migration Review is committed to keeping the highest standards in publication ethics. We base on the COPE Core Practices for journal editors elaborated by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the White Paper on Publication Ethics elaborated by the Council of Science Editors. Below we present the list of main responsibilities of editors, authors and reviewers, specifying the main types of conflicts of interest and ways of dealing with them, as well as the main examples of ethical misconduct and the procedure for dealing with them.        

Our responsibilities as Editors

  • Providing guidelines to authors for preparing and submitting manuscripts
  • Providing a clear statement of the Journal’s policies on authorship criteria
  • Treating all authors with fairness, courtesy, objectivity, honesty, and transparency
  • Establishing and defining policies on conflicts of interest for all involved in the publication process, including editors, authors, and reviewers
  • Protecting the confidentiality of every author’s work before (potential) publication
  • Establishing a system for effective peer review
  • Making editorial decisions with reasonable speed and communicating them in a clear and constructive manner
  • Being vigilant in avoiding the possibility of editors and/or referees not being impartial e.g. due to conflicts of interest or delaying processing a manuscript for suspect reasons
  • Describing, implementing, and regularly reviewing policies for handling ethical issues and allegations or findings of misconduct by authors and anyone involved in the peer-review process
  • Developing mechanisms to ensure timely publication of accepted manuscripts
  • Clearly communicating all other editorial policies and standards
  • Assigning papers for review appropriate to each reviewer’s area of interest and expertise
  • Establishing a process for reviewers to ensure that they treat the manuscript as a confidential document and complete the review promptly
  • Informing reviewers that they may not make any use of the work described in the manuscript or take advantage of the knowledge they gained by reviewing it before publication
  • Providing reviewers with written, explicit instructions on the journal’s expectations for the scope, content, quality, and timeliness of their reviews (included in the review form) to promote thoughtful, fair, constructive, and informative critique of the submitted work
  • Requesting that reviewers identify any potential conflicts of interest and asking that they recuse themselves if they cannot provide an unbiased review
  • Allowing reviewers appropriate time to complete their reviews
  • Requesting reviews at a reasonable frequency that does not overtax any one reviewer
  • Recognising the contribution of reviewers by publishing their names on the journal’s website.

Authors’ responsibilities

  • Ensuring that their articles are reliable, meet academic standards in terms of data collection, analysis and presentation           
  • Ensuring that research published in the article was carried out according to international and local ethical guidelines
  • Ensuring that no participant in a study presented in an article has suffered any physical, mental, reputational or legal harm during research; this is especially important in the case of vulnerable participants such as refugees or undocumented migrants
  • Ensuring that the personal data of participants who have not consented to their disclosure or where disclosure of the personal data might endanger the participant, are fully anonymised
  • Providing a statement attesting to the originality of the study they have submitted for consideration (submitted articles should not be simultaneously submitted to another journal or previously published in another journal)
  • Ensuring fair acknowledgement of the authorship of all authors who contributed to the article and not including as authors those who did not contribute to the article
  • Providing proper citations of the work of others when quoting or paraphrasing other sources, using tables, figures or other illustrations from other sources, referring to third parties’ data or data sets
  • Disclosing sources of funding and any potential conflicts of interest
  • Dasignating a specific contact for all communication about the manuscript throughout peer review and (if accepted) the pubication process
  • Not making communication between themselves and the journal public.
  • Responding promptly to any questions from the editorial board during the publication process
  • Notifying the journal if a serious error has been identified in the published article in order to publish an erratum or even to withdraw the article.

Reviewers’ responsibilities

  • Providing written, unbiased, constructive feedback in a timely manner on the scholarly merits and the scientific value of the work,
  • Indicating whether the writing is clear and relevant, and rating the work’s composition, scientific accuracy, originality, and interest to the journal’s readers
  • Avoiding personal comments or criticism
  • Maintaining the confidentiality of the review process: not sharing, discussing with third parties, or disclosing information from the reviewed papers
  • Notifying the editor immediately if unable to review on time and, if not able review at all, providing the names of alternative reviewers
  • Alerting the editor about any potential conflict of interest
  • Complying with the editor’s written instructions (included in the review form) on the journal’s expectations for the scope, content, and quality of the review
  • Providing a thoughtful, fair, constructive, and informative critique of the submitted work
  • Evaluating the scientific merit, originality, and quality of the work; indicating ways to improve it; and recommending acceptance or rejection of the manuscript
  • Noting any ethical concerns, such as any violation of accepted norms of ethical treatment of human subjects or substantial similarity between the reviewed manuscript and any published paper or any manuscript concurrently submitted to another journal that may be known to the reviewer.

Conflicts of interest 

Editors, reviewers and authors are required to disclose all potential conflicts of interest (also perceived by others) that may influence their decisions on the manuscript or objectivity of research presented in the manuscript. The reviewers are asked to inform the editorial board about any potential conflicts of interest before preparing a review, which will allow the editors to decide on this matter. The authors' declaration of potential conflicts of interest is published at the end of the article. Conflicts of interest may be of both financial and non-financial (e.g. personal, political, academic or religious) character.

Procedure in the cases of misconduct

Anyone anytime can report an allegation of misconduct by providing sufficient information and evidence. When there is suspicion of misconduct, the case is referred to the Editorial Board and investigated according to the COPE’s guidelines. The author is given the opportunity to respond to suspicions. In proven cases of misconduct, the following actions may be taken:

  • Informing the author about the failure to meet the relevant ethical standards
  • Rejecting a manuscript or withdrawing a published article
  • Publishing a correction in the journal
  • Refusing submission of articles in the future from an individual who committed misconduct
  • Notifying misconduct to relevant institutions (head of the author’s institution, ethical committee, etc.).

Allegations of misconduct are investigated in accordance with the COPE Core Practices both at the pre- and post-publication stage.

Examples of misconduct

Guest authorshipauthorship based solely on an expectation that inclusion of a particular name will improve the chances that the study will be published or increase the perceived status of the publication. The ‘guest’ author makes no discernible contribution to the study, so this person meets none of the criteria for authorship.

Honorary or gift authorshipauthorship based solely on a tenuous affiliation with a study. A salient example would be ‘authorship’ based on one’s position as the head of a department in which the study took place.

Ghost authorshipghost authors participate in the research, data analysis, and/or writing of a manuscript but are not named or disclosed in the author byline or Acknowledgments.

Plagiarismthe unauthorised use or close imitation of the material (figures, images or tables) and thoughts of others and their presentation as one’s own original work without the author’s permission or acknowledgement as well as the source of the materials. Plagiarism generally involves the use of materials from others, but can apply to researchers’ duplication of their own previously published texts without acknowledgement (which is sometimes called self-plagiarism or duplicate publication).

In the Publication Ethics, we use excerpts from the White Paper on Publication Ethics elaborated by the Council of Science Editors, which are in italics. They were sometimes shortened or modified due to the specificity of the journal.