The ethical policy of AFBR is based on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines and complies with the International Committee of AFBR Editorial Board codes of conduct. Readers, authors, reviewers, and editors should follow these ethical policies once working with AFBR. The ethical policy of AFBR is liable to determine which of the typical research papers or articles submitted to the journal should be published in the concerned issue. For information on this matter in publishing and ethical guidelines please visit http://publicationethics.org

Principles of Transparency and Publication Ethics

(https://publicationethics.org/files/Principles_of_Transparency_and_Best_Practice_in_Scholarly_Publishingv3_0.pdf)

Peer review process: AFBR uses double-blind external peer review, which means that the reviewers of the paper won’t get to know the identity of the author(s), and the author(s) won’t get to know the identity of the reviewer. The idea is that everyone should get a similar and unbiased review. This process, as well as any policies related to the journal’s peer review procedures, is clearly described on the journal’s Web site (https://www.cribfb.com/journal/index.php/afbr/PRP).

Governing Body:  AFBR has a very strong editorial board whose members are recognized experts in the subject areas included within the journal’s scope. The full names and affiliations of the journal’s editors are provided on the journal’s Web site (https://www.cribfb.com/journal/index.php/afbr/about/editorialTeam).

Founder and Publisher relations: The Publisher and the Founder are the same organizations; the relations do not need regulation.

Ownership and Management: This Journal is patronized and published by Australian Finance & Banking Society [Affiliated Societies]

Identification of and dealing with allegations of research misconduct: Editors take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication, among others.

Website: A journal’s Website (https://www.cribfb.com/journal/index.php/afbr) contains that care has been taken to ensure high ethical and professional standards.

Contact information: Journal is provided the contact information for the editorial office of AFBR (https://www.cribfb.com/journal/index.php/afbr/about/contact).

Name of journal: The Journal name of Australian Finance & Banking Review (AFBR) has unique and not be one that is easily confused with another journal.

Conflicts of interest: Authors are requested to evident whether impending conflicts do or do not exist while submitting their articles to AFBR through Conflict-of-Interest Disclosure (https://publicationethics.org/competinginterests).

Declaration of Competing Interests: The editor must not be involved in decisions about papers which she/he has written him/herself or have been written by family members or colleagues or which relate to products or services in which the editor has an interest. Further, any such submission must be subject to all of the journal’s usual procedures, peer review must be handled independently of the relevant author/editor and their research groups, and there must be a clear statement to this effect on any such paper that is published (https://publicationethics.org/competinginterests).

Acknowledgements: All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an ‘Acknowledgements’ section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help or writing assistance or a department chair who provided only general support.

Disclosure of Funding Sources: AFBR authors must declare what support they received to carry out their research. Declaring funding sources acknowledges funders’ contributions, fulfills funding requirements and promotes greater transparency in the research process.

* Note: AFBR will not consider for publication manuscripts in which any research costs or authors' salaries have been funded, in whole or in part, by a tobacco company.

Duties and Responsibilities of Editors and Sections Editors

(http://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors_Mar11.pdf)

• The Editors of the journal should have the full authority to reject/accept a manuscript.
• The Editors of the journal should maintain the confidentiality of submitted manuscripts under review or until they are published.
• The Editors should take a decision on submitted manuscripts, whether to be published or not with other editors and reviewers
• The Editors of the journal should preserve the anonymity of reviewers.
• The Editors of the journal should disclose and try to avoid any conflict of interest.
• The Editors of the journal should maintain academic integrity and strive to meet the needs of readers and authors.
• The Editors of the journal should be willing to investigate plagiarism and fraudulent data issues and willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed.
• The Editors of the journal should limit themselves only to the intellectual content.
• The Editors of the journal must not disclose any information about submitted manuscripts to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.
• Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted paper will not be used by the editor or the members of the editorial board for their own research purposes without the author's explicit written consent.
• Section Editors (SEs) handle the peer review process on manuscripts assigned to them by the Editors. SEs play a key role in peer-reviewed publishing, supporting journal editors as subject experts on various topics. SEs oversee assigned manuscripts, moving these papers through review and revision. SEs are responsible for assessing manuscript quality, obtaining peer reviews, requesting revisions where appropriate, and making recommendations to the journal editors about the acceptance or rejection of a manuscript.

Duties and Responsibilities of Reviewers

(http://publicationethics.org/files/u7140/Peer%20review%20guidelines.pdf)

• Reviewing manuscript critically but constructively and preparing detailed comments about the manuscript to help authors improve their research;
• Reviewing multiple versions of a manuscript as necessary;
• Providing all required information within established deadlines;
• Making recommendations to the editors regarding the suitability of the manuscript for publication in the journal;
• Declaring to the editor any potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authors or the content of a manuscript they are asked to review;
• Reporting possible research misconducts;
• Suggesting alternative reviewers in case they cannot review the manuscript for any reasons;
• Treating the manuscript as a confidential document;
• Not making any use of the work described in the manuscript;
• Not communicating directly with authors, if somehow they identify the authors;
• Not identifying themselves as authors;
• Not passing on the assigned manuscript to another reviewer;
• Ensuring that the manuscript is of high quality and original research;
• Informing the section editors if he/she finds the assigned manuscript is under consideration in any other publication to his/her knowledge;
• Writing a review report in English only;
• Authoring a commentary for publication related to the reviewed manuscript.

Authors of AFBR must confirm the following:

• Submitted manuscripts must be the original work of the author(s),
• The submitting corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that all the other coauthors have approved the manuscript article's publication.
• Only unpublished manuscripts should be submitted,
• All authors have agreed to allow the corresponding author to serve as the correspondent with the editorial office, to review the edited manuscript and proof,
• Acknowledge the sources of data used in the development of the manuscript,
• All listed authors must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript and approved all its claims,
• All errors discovered in the manuscript after submission must be swiftly communicated to the editor,
• All authors must know that the submitted manuscripts under review or published with AFBR are subject to screening using Plagiarism Prevention Software. Plagiarism is a serious violation of publication ethics.

Ethical Guidelines

Ethical Oversight

According to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), ethical oversight should include but is not limited to policies on consent to publication, publication on vulnerable populations, ethical conduct of research using animals, ethical conduct of research using human subjects, handling confidential data and ethical business/marketing practices. AFBR is committed to considering appeals concerning our authors' non-observance of ethical principles.

Research Involving Human Subjects

When reporting studies that involve human participants, authors should include a statement that the studies have been approved by the appropriate institutional and/or national research ethics committee and have been performed in accordance with the ethical standards as laid down in the 1975 Declaration of Helsinki (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/), revised in 2013, and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Suppose doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the 1975 Helsinki Declaration or comparable standards. In that case, the authors must explain the reasons for their approach and demonstrate that the independent ethics committee or institutional review board explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. At a minimum, a statement including the project identification code, date of approval, and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board should be stated in Section ‘Ethical Approval’ of the article.

An example of an ethical statement: "All subjects gave their informed consent for inclusion before participating in the study. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of XXX (Project identification code)."

Errata and Corrigenda

Changes/additions to accepted articles

All content of published articles is subject to the editorial review process, organized by and under the auspices of the editor. Should the authors wish to add to their article after acceptance, they must submit a request to the editor, and the new content will be reviewed.

• If the new material is added to the accepted article, it must be submitted for peer review as a new manuscript, referring back to the original;
• If the new material should replace the original content of the accepted article, the editor may consider the publication of an erratum or a corrigendum.

Erratum

An erratum refers to a correction of errors introduced to the article by the publisher.

All publisher-introduced changes are highlighted to the author at the proof stage, and any errors are ideally identified by the author and corrected by the publisher before final publication.

Corrigendum

A corrigendum refers to a change to the article that the author wishes to publish at any time after acceptance. Authors should contact the journal editor, who will determine the impact of the change and decide on the appropriate course of action.

Allegations of Misconduct

Plagiarism

Plagiarism includes, but is not limited to:

• Directly copying text from other sources without attribution
• Copying ideas, images, or data from other sources without attribution
• Reusing text from your own previous publications without attribution or agreement of the editor
• Exception: Reusing text from the Methods section in the author’s previous publications, with attribution to the source, is acceptable.
• Using an idea from another source with slightly modified language without attribution.

If plagiarism is detected during the peer review process, the manuscript may be rejected. If plagiarism is detected after publication, we may issue a correction or retract the paper, as appropriate.

All manuscripts under review or published with the AFBR are subject to screening using "Turnitin " software.

Data fabrication 

This concerns the making up of research findings

• Suspected fabricated data in a submitted manuscript: (https://publicationethics.org/sites/default/files/fabricated-data-submitted-manuscript-cope-flowchart.pdf)

• Suspected fabricated data in a published manuscript: (https://publicationethics.org/sites/default/files/fabricated-data-published-article-cope-flowchart.pdf)

Data falsification 

Manipulating research data with the intention of giving a false impression. This includes manipulating images (e.g. micrographs, gels, radiological images), removing outliers or “inconvenient” results, changing, adding or omitting data points, etc.

Duplicate submissions

Duplicate submission is a situation whereby an author submits the same or similar manuscripts to two different journals at the same time either within Academic Journals or any other publisher. This includes the submission of manuscripts derived from the same data in such a manner that there are no substantial differences in the manuscripts. Duplicate submission also includes the submission of the same/similar manuscript in different languages to different journals.

Authorship Issues

Clear policies (that allow for transparency around who contributed to the work and in what capacity) should be in place for requirements for authorship and contributorship as well as processes for managing potential disputes.

Here is some advice by COPE on how to spot potential authorship problems. AFBR strives to follow these guidelines.

Citation Manipulation

Citation Manipulation is including excessive citations, in the submitted manuscript, that do not contribute to the scholarly content of the article and have been included solely for the purpose of increasing citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal. This leads to misrepresenting the importance of the specific work and journal in which it appears and is thus a form of scientific misconduct.

Suspected Manipulation of Peer Review/Bias of Peer Reviews

AFBR selects the reviewers on any manuscript with due care so as to avoid any conflict of interest between the reviewers and the authors. AFBR's peer review policy is adequately explained here. Our policy is compliant with COPE Guidelines on peer review.

 

Publication Policies

Publishing Policy

The publishing policy of this journal is "publish-as-you-go" that is after completing the review process, an article is assigned a DOI and published online in the current issue. When the issue period ends, a new issue is activated and articles with DOI are added until the end of the issue period. So accepted articles are published without waiting for the issue period.

Copyright Notice

- Authors retain all copyrights. It is noticeable that authors will not be forced to sign any copyright transfer agreements.

- This work (including HTML and PDF Files) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Open-access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Everyone has a right to "download, reuse, re-print, modify, distribute and/or copy" the published papers.

Licensing 

All articles published are open-access articles distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license. The full guidance that applies to the CC-BY license can be found at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Submission Policy

Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, and that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the authorities responsible where the work was carried out. However, we accept submissions that have previously appeared on preprint servers (for example arXiv, bioRxiv, Nature Precedings, Philica, Social Science Research Network, and Vixra); have previously been presented at conferences, or have previously appeared in other “non-journal” venues (for example blogs or posters). Authors are responsible for updating the archived preprint with the journal reference (including DOI) and a link to the published articles on the appropriate journal website upon publication.

The publisher and journals have a zero-tolerance plagiarism policy. We check the issue using two methods: a plagiarism prevention tool (Turnitin) and a reviewer check. All submissions will be checked by Turnitin before being sent to reviewers.

We insist on a rigorous viewpoint on self-plagiarism. The self-plagiarism is plagiarism, as it fails to contribute to research and science.

Screening for Plagiarism Policy

The publisher and journal have a policy of “Zero Tolerance on Plagiarism”. We check the plagiarism issue through two methods: reviewer check and plagiarism prevention tool (https://www.turnitin.com).

All submissions will be checked by Turnitin before being sent to reviewers.

Keep a Similarity Index <20% and single-source matches are not <2%

Self-Citation Restriction Policy

Please remove any self-citations, if any corrections are required in your case. If the reference checker (software) finds that the author(s) breaks the rules, then the manuscript will be automatically rejected by the Editor without further review.

Deposit Policy / Archiving Policy

We follow the SHERPA/RoMEO green archiving policy. Both pre-print and post-print or publisher’s version/PDF can be archived, without restrictions. This journal utilizes the LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, and PKP Open Archives Harvester system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

AFBR permits Ursinus College Library to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

Marketing Communication Policy

This Journal utilizes social media platforms and other electronic media to disseminate our content and engage readers with our publications. We try to reach new readers through quick communication methods like emails, Twitter, and Facebook. Our Editorial Board and reviewers are familiar with social media policies and practices and plan their advertising and marketing activities by adhering to norms and standards of the concerned regulatory body such as the Advertising Standards Authority’s Guidance on the Marketing of Publications (or equivalent bodies applicable to our global offices). Such communication for the purpose of marketing and publicity of the journal content is not at the expense of the integrity of the content.

Advertising Policy

AFBR makes use of very specific, appropriate, and only most essential advertising on our online publications. The logos of indexing bodies like google scholar and others are shown to inform the readers of the indexing status of the journal. Such advertising is independent of what we publish and has no connection with the contents of the manuscripts or with the themes of special issues.

We follow the Research Publishing Ethics Guidelines on Good Publication Practice while we use the required and limited advertising. We also adhere to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) guidelines https://www.asa.org.uk/resource/publications.html for our data protection regulations, Marketing of Publications, and internal compliance procedures.

PR / Media Policy

The PR/ Media committee of AFBR comprises editorial board members as well as a few authors who promote the journal among their academic colleagues in universities and institutions. For this purpose, we follow the Code of Conduct of the concerned regulatory bodies including COPE Guidelines on Good Publication Practice. We strictly observe the norms and standards when we need to issue press releases or other media communications in seminars and conferences. If our PR/Media activities concern our authors, editors, or reviewers, we keep them informed about the media activity with their names mentioned. Our editors and peer reviewers who are involved in media or publicity-related activities are encouraged to familiarize themselves with and follow the International Public Relations Association’s (IPRA) Code of Conduct  https://www.ipra.org/member-services/code-of-conduct/.   

Metrics, Usage, and Reporting Policy

AFBR complies with the industry standards and the Code of Ethics while reporting metrics, statistics, and content usage (e.g. citations). We ensure that our reporting of metrics and statistics are correct, accurate and no malicious infringement has been committed and remains compliant with the industry standard and the COUNTER Code of Practice Release 5 https://www.projectcounter.org/code-of-practice-five-sections/abstract/.

We also share our metrics with third parties, including commercial services, who provide users and readers with metrics illustrating our impact factor, and other such metrics. We appreciate the support provided to us by third parties such as Crossref, and other indexing bodies (through the provision of data, access, or fees) that have actively facilitated our work of disseminating our metrics and data statistics. 

Complaints Policy

We aim to respond to and resolve all complaints quickly and constructively. The procedures to investigate and resolve complaints followed by Emerging Science Journal AFBR aim to be fair and balanced for those making complaints and for those being complained about. The complaint can be made by writing an email.

All complaints will be acknowledged within three working days.

Please email to: [email protected]