The Editorial Board has full autonomy in carrying out the review process and the selection of materials for publication. The Publisher (including the Journal Advisory Council as a body) shall not be involved nor shall interfere in the review and selection of manuscripts.

The PeJARD is an open-access journal publishing articles under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY) license (for more information: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). All published articles are freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author/s.

The authors retain copyright ownership of their published articles but grants the Journal the right of first publication.

The Publisher owns the copyrights to the website design including the journal title and logo.

The publication is fully subsidized by the Publisher. No fees are charged to authors for the processing and publication of their manuscripts.

The Journal adopts a double blind review mechanism, with no less than two reviewers taking part in the assessment of any given manuscript.

Only the Editorial Board shall have full access to the manuscripts submitted. The manuscripts shall be given to reviewers, who shall in turn commit to observe measures to uphold the confidentiality of the privileged information contained in the manuscripts.

The Editor-in-Chief and the reviewers commit to be fair and objective in their treatment of the manuscripts, assessing these solely on the basis of their strength as scholarly works.

Guidelines are established to ensure that the peer-review process is not compromised (see Guidelines for Reviewers below).

Only those who have substantive contribution in the research and manuscript writing should be given credit for authorship. But as the rule for co-authorship varies across disciplines, the Journal sets a minimum criterion for determining co-authorship: active participation in at least two of the following key research processes (research conceptualization, implementation, data analysis, and writing of manuscript). Those who do not meet this should not be credited as authors; they should be included in the Acknowledgments instead.

In the same way, all those with substantive contribution (as spelled above) should not be denied of their co-authorship.

All authors identified in the manuscript are assumed to have given their consent for the submission of the manuscript to the Journal. Moreover, in the review process, the Corresponding Author is assumed to be passing on and discussing all matters raised by the Editor-in-Chief and the reviewers to all authors involved. Thus, when the manuscript is published, it is also assumed that all authors have agreed to its final form and content and will be equally accountable for it.

Any research misconduct discovered after the publication of articles (including plagiarism and falsification of data) will be investigated. If validated, the concerned articles may be retracted but only after the author/s would have been given the chance to explain their side. In cases of article retraction, the institutional affiliations of the authors shall also be notified.

As soon as an article gets published in the PeJARD, the authors can deposit the article (in PDF as published) in their personal websites, institutional repositories, or other databases. They can also disseminate the article without having to inform the Journal.

If an author discovers problems/mistakes in his/her work after this was published, it is his/her responsibility to have the problem addressed. Such corrections from authors shall be published by the Journal in the Erratum section. For this, requests for corrections shall be done in writing by the authors to the Editor.

Any party who detects errors in a published article may communicate this with the Editor. If warranted, these will be published in the section ‘Communications to the Editor.’

The original PDF files of all manuscripts submitted to the journal shall be archived in the journal repository, whether or not these are published by the journal. The archived manuscripts shall not be made public and will be kept only for purposes of filing.

The reviewers’ main responsibility is to help ensure the quality of articles published by the Journal, through the following measures:

• Assessing the overall suitability of the manuscripts for publication
• Reporting possible cases of misconduct, like plagiarism, data fabrication, and duplicate or overlapping publications
• Pointing out areas for correction and improvement
• Calling attention to vital references not cited by the author/s

In order to ensure the integrity of the review process, the reviewers shall commit to observe the following measures:

• Disclose to the Editor-in-Chief any possible conflict of interest s/he has in relation to manuscripts given to her/him for review (see below for details),
• Inform the Editor-in-Chief if s/he feels inadequate in reviewing particular manuscripts,
• Conduct impartial review, without regard to the provenance of the manuscripts, including political, religious, and gender/sexual views expressed therein,
• Uphold the confidentiality of manuscripts during and after the review process, limiting pertinent communications only with the Editor-in-Chief, and
• Refrain from using in her/his own research any idea or content explicitly from the manuscripts under review, up until the latter is published and can be referenced.

Conflicts of interest on the part of the reviewer may arise from his/her relationship with any of the author/s or institutions connected to the manuscript. In such a case, the reviewer should beg-off from reviewing the manuscript. If in doubt whether a relationship constitutes conflict of interest, the reviewer should at least consult with the Editor about this.

A reviewer has two to four weeks to assess a manuscript. If s/he cannot meet this deadline, s/he should inform the Editor without delay so that an alternate reviewer can be engaged.

The Journal considers the peer-review as a constructive process. It is with this perspective that the reviewers should frame their comments, giving clear and detailed directions as to how the manuscripts can be improved. If a manuscript involves flagrant problems that make it unsuitable for publication, comments should nonetheless be tempered and even-handed.