Conflict of Interest Policy

Journal of Accounting and Management (JAM)  |  e-ISSN 3048-345X

1. Purpose and Scope

This policy protects the independence, objectivity, credibility, and transparency of JAM’s research and editorial record. It applies from research planning and manuscript preparation through submission, peer review, editorial decision, production, publication, and post-publication assessment.

The policy covers all manuscript types and all persons or organizations capable of influencing the content or editorial process, including authors, contributors, reviewers, editors, editorial board members, guest editors, staff, contractors, sponsors, advertisers, partners, and the publisher.

2. Definition

A conflict of interest—also called a competing interest—exists when a secondary financial or non-financial interest could influence, or could reasonably be perceived as influencing, a person’s research, interpretation, review, recommendation, or editorial decision. A conflict may be actual, potential, or perceived.

3. Interests That Must Be Disclosed

Relevant interests may be direct or indirect and may involve the person, their close family, employer, institution, business, or an organization with which they have a material relationship.

4. Responsibilities of Authors

• Each author must disclose all relevant financial and non-financial relationships and activities at initial submission.
• The corresponding author must collect the declarations of every author, enter accurate information in OJS, and include a consolidated Conflict of Interest Statement in the manuscript.
• Funding and sponsor involvement must be reported in the separate Funding Statement. Funding disclosure does not replace conflict-of-interest disclosure.
• Authors must describe any sponsor’s role in study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, manuscript preparation, submission, or publication decisions. If the sponsor had no role, this must be stated.
• Authors must update their declaration whenever circumstances change during review, revision, production, or after publication.
• A declaration of “no conflict” may be used only after every author has considered the requirements of this policy.

5. Responsibilities of Reviewers

Before accepting an invitation, reviewers must examine the manuscript topic, authorship information available to the editorial office, their own relationships, and their capacity to provide an independent assessment.

• A reviewer must promptly disclose any relationship that could affect or appear to affect impartiality.
• A reviewer must decline when a conflict cannot be managed, including a close personal relationship, direct rivalry, recent or current collaboration, supervisory relationship, financial interest, or active involvement in substantially similar work.
• Working in the same broad discipline or disagreeing academically with an author does not automatically disqualify a reviewer, but a relevant circumstance must be disclosed to the editor.
• Reviewers must not use confidential manuscript information for personal, academic, institutional, or commercial advantage.
• If a conflict becomes apparent after review begins, the reviewer must stop and notify the editor. The editor will decide whether the report may be retained.

6. Responsibilities of Editors and Editorial Staff

Editors and editorial staff must disclose relevant interests and must not handle a manuscript when their impartiality could reasonably be questioned. Recusal means no access to reviewer selection, confidential reports, discussion, recommendation, or decision beyond what is operationally necessary to transfer the manuscript.

• A conflicted editor must immediately transfer the manuscript to an independent editor with suitable expertise.
• An editor must not make decisions on their own manuscript, a close colleague’s or family member’s manuscript, a recent collaborator’s manuscript, or work in which the editor has a direct financial, professional, personal, or institutional interest.
• Editorial board members may submit to JAM, but they receive no preferential treatment and must have no involvement in selecting the handling editor or reviewers, viewing confidential materials, or making the decision.
• Submissions from the Editor-in-Chief must be assigned by the publisher or another independent senior editor. The identity and independence of the handling editor must be documented internally.
• Guest-edited collections and special issues must use the same disclosure, recusal, review, and decision standards as regular issues.
• Editorial decisions must be based on academic merit, methodological quality, ethics, originality, and relevance—not payment status, institutional affiliation, sponsorship, advertising, partnership, or personal relationships.

7. Publisher, Sponsors, Advertisers, and Partners

The publisher safeguards editorial independence. Ownership, institutional management, sponsorship, advertising, service partnerships, article processing charges, waiver decisions, and other commercial or administrative relationships must not determine reviewer selection, peer-review recommendations, or acceptance decisions.

Sponsors and partners must not restrict access to relevant data, suppress findings, require a favorable conclusion, prevent publication, or control editorial decisions. Any permitted sponsor role must be transparent to the editor and readers.

8. Editorial Assessment and Management

The handling editor will assess a disclosed interest according to its relevance, recency, proximity, magnitude, duration, and reasonable appearance of influence. The journal may apply one or more of the following measures:

A disclosed interest will not automatically lead to rejection. The response must be proportionate to the risk and documented in the editorial record.

9. Publication and Reader Transparency

The final article must display the author conflict-of-interest statement. Relevant funding and sponsor roles must be shown separately. When an editor, editorial board member, or other person associated with JAM is an author, the journal may publish an editorial note confirming that the person had no role in peer review or the decision.

10. Undisclosed or Inaccurate Interests

If a relevant interest is omitted, incomplete, misleading, or discovered after a decision or publication, JAM will assess whether the omission was inadvertent, negligent, or deliberate and whether it affected the review, decision, interpretation, or reliability of the article.

Possible actions include requesting an explanation, revising the disclosure, repeating part of the review with independent participants, issuing a correction, publishing an expression of concern, rejecting or retracting the article where justified, referring suspected misconduct to an institution, or applying proportionate editorial restrictions. Post-publication action will follow the journal’s dedicated correction, expression-of-concern, and retraction policies; the published record will not be silently changed.

11. Confidentiality, Records, and Appeals

Conflict disclosures and related evidence are handled as confidential editorial records and shared only with persons who need the information to assess or manage the matter. Relevant information may be published with the article or disclosed to an institution or competent authority when required for fair investigation, research integrity, safety, privacy, or law.

A person affected by a conflict-management decision may submit a reasoned procedural appeal or complaint under JAM’s Appeals and Complaints Policy. An appeal does not suspend necessary safeguards unless the independent handler decides otherwise.

12. Relationship with Other JAM Policies

This page exclusively governs identification, disclosure, assessment, management, and publication of competing interests. The following subjects remain governed by their dedicated pages so that the policies do not overlap: