Research and Publication Ethics
Enacted December 1, 2017
Conflict of Interests
Any potential conflicts of interest should be disclosed in the cover letter even when the authors are confident that their judgments have not been influenced in preparing the manuscript. Examples of conflicts are financial support from or connections to commercial preferences, political pressure from interest groups, or academically related issues. In particular, all sources of funding applicable to the study should be explicitly stated. The Editor will decide whether the information on the conflict should be included in the published paper.
Statement of Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent
Any investigations involving humans and animals should be approved by the Institutional Review Board and Animal Care Committee, respectively, of the institution where the study took place. Business Communication Research and Practice (BCRP) will not consider any studies involving humans or animals without the appropriate approval. Informed consent should be obtained, unless waived by the Institutional Review Board, from subjects who participated in clinical investigations. Human subjects should not be identifiable, such that subjects’ names, address, telephone number, email address, date of birth or other protected personal information should not be disclosed.
Distribution of gender and age of all subjects should be provided in the main text. If experiments involve animals, the research should be based on national or institutional guidelines for animal care and use. Species, strain, sex, and age of laboratory animals should be provided in the main text. Original articles submitted to BCRP that address any investigation involving humans and animals should include a description about whether the study was conducted under an approval by the Institutional Review Board (with or without subject informed consent) and Animal Care Committee, respectively, of the institution where the study was conducted. BCRP can request an approval by the Institutional Review Board or Animal Care Committee for other types of articles when necessary.
Authorship
The BCRP recommends that authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:
- Substantial contributors to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data for the work; AND
- Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
- Final approval of the version to be published; AND
- Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Only one first author and one corresponding author are recommended. In particular, the corresponding author is the only one individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process, and typically ensures that all the journal’s administrative requirement.
If the researcher and co-author are under the age of 19 or have a special relationship, such as a family member, it is mandatory to clearly report this information when submitting a paper to BCRP. It is important to provide the names and the nature of the special relationship for each author involved in the Acknowledgment section.
Originality, Duplicate, Preprint, and Secondary Publication
All submitted manuscripts should be original and have not been published previously and are not being considered for publication by other journals. Any or all parts of the accepted manuscript should not be duplicated in any other journal without the permission of the Editorial Board. Original raw data must be available for review by the Editorial Board if required. Secondary publication may be justifiable only if the Instruction to Authors manuscript satisfies the six acceptable conditions of the ICMJE recommendations. If duplicate or secondary publication related to the papers of this journal is detected, the authors will be announced in the journal and their institutes will be informed, and there will also be penalties for the authors. Manuscripts that have been previously posted on any preprint server may be submitted for consideration for publication. When the manuscript is submitted, authors must provide information about the preprint in the cover letter along with a link to it and a description of whether the submitted manuscript differs from the preprint in any way.
Plagiarism Detection
BCRP uses the CrossCheck powered by iThenticate to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. BCRP checks all submitted manuscripts before peer review. CrossCheck is a plagiarism screening service that verifies the originality of content submitted before publication. CrossCheck checks submissions against millions of published research papers, and billions of web content.
Process to Manage Research and Publication Misconduct
When the Journal faces suspected cases of research and publication misconduct, such as redundant (duplicate) publication, plagiarism, fraudulent or fabricated data, changes in authorship, undisclosed conflict of interest, an ethical problem with a submitted manuscript, a reviewer who has appropriated an author’s idea or data, complaints against editors, etc., the resolution process will followed the flowchart provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). Discussions and decisions regarding suspected cases are carried out by the Committee of Publication Ethics of BCRP.
Process for handling cases requiring corrections, retractions, and editorial expressions of concern
Cases that require editorial expressions of concern or retractions shall follow the COPE flowcharts available at http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts. If corrections are needed, the ICMJE Recommendations for Corrections, Retractions, Republications and Version Control should be consulted. They are available at : http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorial-issues/corrections-and-version-control.html.
Honest errors are a part of science and publishing and require publication of a correction when they are detected. The minimum measures needed to be taken are as follows: First, the journal will promptly publish a correction citing the electronic and printed page numbers of the original publication and detailing revisions of it in order to ensure proper indexing. Second, a new version of the article shall be posted with details of the changes from the original version and the date(s) on which the changes were made through CrossMark. Third, all prior versions of the article are archived and directly accessible to readers. Previous electronic versions shall prominently notice that there are more recent versions of the article via CrossMark. (For articles published before 2021, the most recent article is posted and all prior versions are linked to each article.)
Editorial Responsibilities
The editorial board will continuously work towards monitoring/safeguarding publication ethics in the following respects: providing guidelines for retracting articles; maintaining of the integrity of the academic record; precluding business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standard; publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed; and avoiding plagiarism, and fraudulent data. Editors’ responsibilities shall include: responsibility and authority to reject/accept articles; avoiding conflicts of interest with respect to articles they reject/accept; accepting papers when reasonably certain; promoting the publication of corrections or retractions when errors are found; and preserving the anonymity of reviewers.