Policy on the Submission and Evaluation of Manuscripts by Editorial Team Members
The journal Contabilidad y Negocios accepts the submission of manuscripts by members of its editorial team. In order to ensure an independent and rigorous evaluation process, a specific procedure has been established that prevents their authors from taking any part in the review.
This policy complements the journal's Ethical Standards, in particular the duty of editorial team members to disclose their conflicts of interest, and is framed within the position of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) on editors submitting articles to their own journal. Accordingly, the journal establishes the following:
- Scope. For the purposes of this policy, members of the editorial team are the Director and the Deputy Editor of the journal, the associate editors, the members of the Editorial Committee and the Scientific Committee, the editorial management staff, and the guest editors of special issues. The policy applies when at least one of the authors of a manuscript is a member of the editorial team. It does not cover editorials or issue introductions, which are not peer-reviewed articles.
- Same conditions and disclosure upon submission. Manuscripts by editorial team members are submitted through the journal's platform and are subject to the author guidelines, the preliminary review and the similarity check, under the same timelines and without preferential treatment. Upon submission, the author discloses their status as a member of the editorial team in the Author Declaration form, as well as in the submission checklist. The Author Declaration form is the single file that accompanies every submission and brings together the authors' details, the declaration of membership in the editorial team and the declaration of AI tool use.
- Independent handling. An editorial team member who is an author refrains from any participation in the handling, discussion and decision regarding their manuscript, does not intervene in its file on the platform and has no access to the identity of the reviewers. Editorial handling and the decision rest with a member who has no conflict of interest: the Deputy Editor, when the author is a committee member, an associate or guest editor, or part of the editorial management staff; the Director, when the author is the Deputy Editor; the Deputy Editor together with an external member of the Editorial Committee, when the author is the Director; and a guest editor external to the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, when both the Director and the Deputy Editor are co-authors.
- External peer review and record of the process. Every manuscript authored by editorial team members is evaluated through double-blind peer review by at least two reviewers who do not belong to the institution of any of the authors and have no co-authorship or recent collaboration ties with them. No research article or essay is published without external peer review, including invited contributions. The receipt of the manuscript, the assignment of reviewers, the review reports and the decision are recorded on the journal's platform, and the dates published in the article correspond to those in that record.
- Publication limit. Each annual volume of the journal, including its special issues, may include no more than one article with at least one author who is a member of the editorial team.
- Statement in the published article. In articles authored by editorial team members, the following sentence is added to the conflict of interest statement to inform readers of the author's status and of their abstention from the editorial process:
[Author's name] is a member of the journal's [Scientific Committee / Editorial Committee / editorial team] and did not take part in the editorial handling of or the decision on this article, which was evaluated by external reviewers.
- Articles published without the established process. If an article is found to have been published without the independent handling or the external peer review established in this policy, the journal will act in accordance with the COPE flowcharts, in particular the one on undisclosed conflicts of interest in published articles. Depending on the case, it may submit the article to post-publication evaluation by external reviewers, publish a note adding the corresponding statement, issue an expression of concern or retract the article.
- Non-compliance. Non-compliance with this policy by a member of the editorial team constitutes an ethical violation under the standards for editorial team members and will be addressed in accordance with Procedures and Measures.
