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Publication Ethics

Peer Academics publishes on the understanding that what appears under its name can be trusted: that the work is the authors' own, that it reports what was actually done, that the people credited did the work, and that funding and competing interests have been disclosed. This page states the standards the journal applies to everyone involved in a submission, and what it does when they are not met. It governs the policies linked from it, and prevails over them in any conflict.

The standards this policy follows

These policies are written in line with the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) on the conduct and reporting of scholarly work, and the criteria for transparent publishing set out by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Peer Academics is not a member of, listed by, or endorsed by any of these organizations, and does not claim to be. The journal follows their published principles because they represent the accepted standard of practice, and applies them under Romanian law and Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR).

The Publisher

The Publisher is Asociația Societatea Studenților din Uniunea Europeană (EUSS), a Romanian non-profit association. The Publisher meets the journal's costs, appoints the Editor-in-Chief, and may remove the Editor-in-Chief for cause. It has no authority over any individual manuscript: it does not see submissions, does not instruct editors, and cannot cause an article to be accepted, rejected, delayed, or altered. The one exception is legal: where a court order or another legal obligation requires an article to be withdrawn from public view, the Publisher may require that, and a notice stating the grounds remains in place. The journal charges authors and readers nothing, carries no advertising, and sells nothing, so no commercial relationship exists that could bear on a decision.

Editors

Peer Academics is being established and its editorial board is not yet complete. Until it is, the functions this page assigns to editors and to the Editor-in-Chief are carried out by the acting editorial management appointed by the Publisher, under these same rules. No person is listed as an editor of the journal until they have accepted the role in writing; see the Editorial Board.

Editors decide on scholarly merit and on nothing else. They judge work on its argument and evidence, not on the identity, seniority, nationality, or institution of its authors; keep submissions confidential; do not use unpublished material for their own purposes; declare and stand aside from conflicts of interest; take decisions traceable in the journal's records; and act on credible concerns rather than ignoring them. An editor who submits to Peer Academics is excluded from handling that manuscript and from any access to its reviewers.

Reviewers

Reviewers give the editor an honest, reasoned assessment within the agreed period, treat the manuscript as confidential, declare conflicts and decline where one exists, do not enter the manuscript into any generative artificial intelligence service, criticize the work rather than the author, do not demand citations to their own work, and report to the editor any suspicion of misconduct rather than investigating it themselves. See the Reviewer Guidelines.

Authors

By submitting, you confirm that the work is original and yours; that it is not under consideration elsewhere and has not been published before, other than as a disclosed preprint or thesis; that data, sources, and results are reported truthfully and none are invented, altered, or selectively withheld; that everyone listed meets the journal's authorship criteria and everyone who meets them is listed; that the required ethics approvals and consents were obtained; and that funding, competing interests, and the use of generative artificial intelligence are declared. You must cooperate with any inquiry the journal opens, and tell the journal promptly if you find a significant error in your own work, under review or published.

What counts as misconduct

  • Fabrication — inventing data, results, sources, participants, or references.
  • Falsification — manipulating data, images, or the record so that it no longer represents what was found.
  • Plagiarism and undisclosed text recycling — see Plagiarism and Text Recycling.
  • Duplicate or concurrent submission — submitting the same work here and elsewhere at once, or republishing it as new.
  • Improper authorship — ghost, gift, or guest authorship, or omitting someone who qualifies.
  • Undeclared conflicts of interest or funding.
  • Ethics breaches — research on people or animals without the required approval or consent.
  • Citation manipulation — citations added to inflate a metric rather than to support the text, including citations demanded by a reviewer or editor.
  • Peer review manipulation — supplying false reviewer identities or contact details, or arranging reviews of your own work.
  • Misrepresenting the journal — claiming acceptance, publication, or indexing that has not occurred.

How the journal handles an allegation

  1. Concerns go to [email protected] with the evidence. Anonymous allegations are accepted, but the journal acts on evidence, not assertion.
  2. An editor with no involvement in the manuscript makes a preliminary assessment. Manuscripts under review are paused; published articles remain available while the matter is examined.
  3. If there is a case to answer, the corresponding author is told what is alleged, shown the evidence, and given normally four weeks to respond on behalf of all authors.
  4. The Editor-in-Chief decides on the evidence and the response. Where the question is one of research conduct rather than publication, the journal refers it to the authors' institution or research integrity body, which is competent to investigate, and acts on the finding.
  5. The person who raised the concern is told the outcome in general terms; their identity is not disclosed to the authors unless they agree or the law requires it. The file is kept confidential in the journal's records.

Corrections, retractions, and expressions of concern

The published version is the version of record and is never edited silently. Where something must change, the journal publishes a separate notice, permanently linked to the article, and the original article stays available on the journal's site and is marked there so that no reader can reach it without meeting the notice. Copies already downloaded or reposted elsewhere are outside the journal's control.

  • Correction — where an error affects the record but not the conclusions. Corrections are published regardless of whether the error was the authors' or the journal's.
  • Retraction — where the findings are unreliable, whether through misconduct or honest error, or where the work was published in breach of authorship, consent, ethics, or copyright requirements. The notice states who retracted the article and why, and distinguishes honest error from misconduct.
  • Expression of concern — where a serious question is unresolved, an institutional inquiry is pending, or the journal cannot obtain the evidence it needs. It is replaced by a correction or retraction once the matter is settled.
  • Removal — only where the law requires it, for example a court order or a serious risk to an identified person. A notice stating that the article has been removed, and on what grounds, remains in place.

Sanctions

Depending on what is established, the journal may reject the manuscript; withdraw an acceptance; correct, retract, or flag a published article; inform the authors' institution, funder, or another journal; and decline submissions from the authors concerned for a stated period. Sanctions are proportionate and are decided by the Editor-in-Chief.

Complaints and post-publication discussion

Complaints about a decision follow the appeals route in the Peer Review Policy. Complaints about the conduct of an editor, a reviewer, or the journal go to [email protected] and are handled by the Editor-in-Chief; a complaint about the Editor-in-Chief goes to the Publisher, which considers the conduct of the office without reopening the scholarly decision. Substantiated criticism of a published article is put to the authors for reply and may be published alongside it. Data protection requests go to [email protected].