Editorial and Peer Review Policy

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

1. Scope and Policy Boundary

This page is the sole authoritative source for JAM’s editorial evaluation and peer-review rules. It defines screening, reviewer selection, identity masking, conflicts, reports, decisions, revisions, and review records. The Editorial and Publishing Workflow describes only the sequence of OJS stages, while the Reviewer Guidelines provide a review form and evaluation prompts.

2. Editorial Principles

• Decisions are based on scholarly merit, originality, methodological quality, ethical compliance, clarity, and relevance to JAM’s Focus and Scope.
• Nationality, ethnicity, race, gender, disability, religion, political belief, institutional prestige, commercial status, and ability to pay do not influence academic decisions.
• Editors disclose conflicts and recuse themselves when impartial handling could reasonably be questioned.
• Fees, waivers, sponsorship, advertising, personal relationships, and citation interests remain separate from peer review.
• Submitted manuscripts and review records are confidential editorial documents.

3. Submission and Preliminary Screening

Manuscripts must be submitted through JAM’s OJS platform and comply with the Author Guidelines, official template, Focus and Scope, publication ethics requirements, and required declarations. Email may be used for correspondence but does not replace an OJS submission.

• The editorial office checks completeness, file format, anonymization, metadata, references, declarations, and scope.
• The editor assesses originality, contribution, study design, reporting quality, ethics documentation, and similarity-screening results.
• A manuscript may be desk rejected for being outside scope, substantially incomplete, methodologically untenable, unethical, duplicative, unlawfully submitted, or clearly below the journal’s scholarly threshold.
• No research article is accepted solely at preliminary screening; manuscripts that pass proceed to independent peer review.

4. Peer-Review Model

5. Reviewer Selection and Conflicts

• Reviewers are selected for subject expertise, methodological competence, independence, availability, and review quality.
• Author-suggested reviewers may be considered but are never guaranteed; opposed reviewers may be avoided when the reason is credible.
• Reviewers must disclose recent collaboration, institutional proximity, supervision, competition, personal relationships, financial interests, prior access, or other conflicts.
• Editors verify identity and institutional email or scholarly profile where practicable and guard against fabricated reviewers and manipulated peer review.
• A reviewer who is unqualified, conflicted, or unable to review promptly must decline without retaining or using manuscript content.

6. Review Criteria and Reviewer Conduct

• Originality, research gap, relevance, theoretical contribution, and consistency with JAM’s scope.
• Appropriateness and reproducibility of methods, sampling, measurement, analysis, and interpretation.
• Clarity and completeness of results, discussion, limitations, conclusions, and data-availability statements.
• Compliance with ethics approval, consent, privacy, authorship, competing-interest, funding, citation, and intellectual-property requirements.
• Accurate engagement with relevant literature without coercive or self-serving citation requests.
• Constructive, evidence-based, respectful comments. Personal criticism, discriminatory language, appropriation of ideas, and unauthorized sharing are prohibited.

7. Editorial Decisions and Revisions

Reviewers advise; the Editor-in-Chief or delegated unconflicted editor makes the final decision. An editor who is an author or has a conflict has no access to decision-making for that manuscript. Divergent reports are evaluated critically rather than counted as votes.

8. Timeframes and Communication

JAM aims to complete preliminary screening within 7–14 working days and to obtain initial external reports within approximately four weeks after reviewer acceptance. These are service targets, not guarantees. Complexity, reviewer availability, ethics inquiries, and revisions may extend the process. Authors are informed of material delays and may use the withdrawal procedure when appropriate.

9. Confidentiality, AI, and Records

• Manuscripts may not be uploaded to public generative-AI systems, public file-sharing sites, or unapproved services.
• Secure, publisher-approved tools may assist administration but never replace human editorial judgment.
• JAM retains the decision letter, reports, conflict declarations, revision history, and material correspondence as confidential editorial records.
• Suspected misconduct is handled under the relevant integrity policy; reviewers do not conduct their own investigation or contact authors directly.

10. Appeals and Related Policies

A reasoned appeal may challenge a factual error, overlooked evidence, unmanaged conflict, or material procedural departure; mere disagreement with academic judgment is insufficient. Appeals follow JAM’s dedicated policy.