International standard for publishers

Responsible Research Publishing: International Standards for Editors

A position statement developed at the Second World Conference on Research Integrity, Singapore, July 22–24, 2010

Summary

Editors are responsible and must take ownership of everything they publish.
Editors must make fair and impartial decisions regardless of commercial considerations and ensure a fair and appropriate peer review process.
Editors must adopt editorial policies that promote maximum transparency.
Editors must protect the integrity of the published record by issuing corrections and retractions when necessary and by pursuing suspected or alleged research and publication misconduct.
Editors must prosecute reviewer and editorial misconduct.
Editors must assess the ethical conduct of studies involving humans and animals.
Reviewers and parent authors must be told what is expected of them.
Editors must have appropriate policies for handling editorial conflicts.

Introduction

As As guardians and administrators of the research record, editors should encourage authors to strive for and adhere to the highest standards of publishing ethics. Furthermore, editors are uniquely positioned to indirectly foster responsible research conduct through their policies and processes. To achieve maximum impact within the research community, ideally all editors should adhere to universal standards and best practices. While there are significant differences between fields, and not all areas covered are relevant to every research community, there are important common editing policies, processes, and principles that editors should follow to ensure the integrity of the research record.

These guidelines are a starting point and are addressed to journal editors in particular. While books and monographs are important and relevant research records in many fields, guidelines for book editors are outside the scope of these recommendations. It is hoped that such guidelines can be added to this document in due course.

Editors should consider themselves part of the broader professional publishing community, stay abreast of relevant policies and developments, and ensure their editorial staff are trained and kept informed of pertinent issues.

Being a good editor requires many more principles than are covered here. The suggested principles, policies, and processes are particularly aimed at fostering research and the integrity of the publication.

Editorial Principles 1. Accountability and Responsibility for Journal Content

Editors must take responsibility for everything they publish and should have procedures and policies in place to ensure the quality of the material they publish and maintain the integrity of the published record (see paragraphs 4–8).

2. Editorial Independence and Integrity

An important part of the responsibility to make fair and impartial decisions is upholding the principle of editorial independence and integrity.

2.1 Separating Decision-Making from Commercial Considerations

Editors should make decisions based solely on scholarly merit and take full responsibility for their decisions. Processes must be in place to separate commercial activities within a journal from editorial processes and decisions. Editors must actively engage with publisher pricing policies and strive for broad and affordable accessibility of the material they publish.

Sponsored supplements must undergo the same rigorous quality control and peer review as any other journal content. Decisions regarding such material must be made

in the same way as for any other journal content. Sponsorship and the sponsor's role must be clearly disclosed to readers.

Advertisements must be reviewed to ensure they adhere to journal guidelines, be clearly distinguishable from other content, and in no way be linked to scholarly content.

2.2 Editors' Relationship with the Journal Publisher or Owner

Editors should ideally have a written contract outlining the terms and conditions of their engagement with the journal publisher or owner. The principle of editorial independence must be clearly established in this contract. Journal publishers and owners must have no role in editorial decisions.