Ethics, Policies & Practices

advances.in/psychology adheres to the core principles outlined by the COPE framework.

Authorship Policies

Authorship and Contributorship

Authors and reviewers must log in to our publication system using their ORCID credentials. If the credentials do not seem to match those of the corresponding author or reviewer, a validation procedure similar to the one presented here will be followed. If the author or reviewer’s identity cannot be unambiguously verified, the submission process will be halted. If detected in retrospect after publication, the article may be retracted.

The requirements for authorship are outlined in detail in the author guidelines, and repeated here. advances.in/psychology adopts the definitions and requirements of authorship from McKnutt et al. (2018) in PNAS:

“Each author is expected to have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; or the creation of new software used in the work; or have drafted the work or substantively revised it; AND to have approved the submitted version (and any substantially modified version that involves the author’s contribution to the study); AND to have agreed both to be personally accountable for the author’s own contributions and to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work, even ones in which the author was not personally involved, are appropriately investigated, resolved, and the resolution documented in the literature.”

Authors should specify their contributions to the submitted work using their initials in the relevant field in the submission systems. For instance, in the case of an experiment, this section could read as:

“K.T., P.J., and D.R. designed the study. K.T. collected the data. P.J. and F.D. analyzed the data and wrote up the results. K.T. and P.J. drafted the introduction, methods, and discussion sections. All authors provided critical revisions.”

Before submitting to this journal, the following criteria need to be met:

• The authors acknowledge the contributions of other scholars or entities through citations whenever applicable. 
• The manuscript is original – that is, it has not been published in another journal or other outlet that may compromise its Creative Commons copyright.  
• The manuscript is not currently submitted to and/or under consideration at another journal or alternative outlet.
• All authors have consented to its submission to the journal. All authors agree with providing additional information about them (e.g., their emails, affiliations).
• The authors are legally entitled to submit the manuscript and grant us the rights to publish it open access following the Create Commons (CC-by) licenses.
• Permission to use any potential third-party materials was obtained. The authors agree to attach documentation of this permission to their submission or to provide it when requested.
• All information in the manuscript is correct and accurate and complies with the field’s highest ethical and scientific standards.
• All information and data were obtained legally and comply with the laws and regulations of the authors’ countries and the U.K.
• All authors agree that their names, affiliations, and contact details may be published on our journal and third-party websites.

We continuously monitor potential problems related to authorship, including those described here. All authors must consent that the corresponding author submits a given manuscript in all authors’ names. Any changes to the authorship order or addition of new authors during the peer-review process require the permission of all authors. In case of authorship disputes, the peer-review process is halted until the authors have formally resolved the dispute in a document signed by all authors.

Research Ethics Statement

All research is expected to comply with the ethical guidelines of the American Psychological Association. If the manuscript involves research with human or non-human animal subjects, the authors should specify in the Methods section the institutional review board that reviewed the study and the number of the review (e.g., “The institutional review board of the University of Soverfield approved the present research (Nr. 22454433)”). If an institutional review board is unavailable to the authors, they should specify how national and international ethical standards were adhered to. At a minimum, informed consent needs to be obtained from human research subjects. The authors should confirm this by adding the following or similar sentence to the manuscript (“Informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to participation.”) or explain exceptions to this standard when applicable.

Conflicts of Interest / Competing Interests

All authors must declare any financial or personal conflict of interest or competing interest when submitting their manuscript via the predefined field in the submission system. If undisclosed conflicts of interest are detected during the peer review process, the manuscript will be halted until the issue has been resolved. If detected after the manuscript was published as an article online, potential conflicts of interest will be investigated and clarified as quickly as possible. In minor cases, the conflict of interest section of the article may be updated in a published correction. In severe cases, the article may be retracted. 

Disclosure of Financial Support and Funding Sources

In the interest of transparency and to recognize the valuable contributions of organizations and individuals who financially support research, all authors are required to disclose their sources of funding for the study. This information should be provided in a dedicated funding section within the manuscript.

The funding disclosure should include:

1. The full name of each funder or sponsor
2. Grant numbers, if applicable
3. A brief description of the role the funder played in the research process, if any

Authors must clearly indicate if any funders or sponsors had involvement or influence in the study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation of results, manuscript preparation, or the decision to publish. This is crucial for readers to assess potential conflicts of interest and evaluate the objectivity of the research.

Examples of funder involvement that must be disclosed include:

• Participating in study design or imposing methodological requirements
• Providing, collecting, or managing data
• Conducting or guiding data analysis and interpretation
• Writing, reviewing, or approving the manuscript prior to submission
• Making publication decisions or imposing restrictions on publishing

If the funders had no direct involvement in the research process, this should also be clearly stated.

Failure to disclose funding sources or to accurately describe funder involvement may be considered a form of misconduct and could result in manuscript rejection or retraction.

Acknowledging Non-Author Contributions

Any individuals who made significant contributions to the published work but do not meet the criteria for authorship should be recognized in the Acknowledgements section of the paper. This includes people who provided personal, non-financial support such as:

• Technical assistance with experiments, data collection, or analysis
• Help with preparing materials, such as providing reagents, samples, or equipment
• Feedback on drafts of the manuscript
• General advice, discussion, or critiques that shaped the research
• Mentorship or supervision that guided the project but was not substantial enough for authorship

Contributions meriting acknowledgement are generally ones that facilitated the research but did not directly participate in the conception, design, data acquisition, analysis, or writing of the work itself in a manner sufficient to take public responsibility for any part of the content.

Before acknowledging someone, authors should:

• Obtain consent from the individual to be acknowledged, informing them how their contribution will be described
• Consider if the individual would prefer an alternative form of credit, such as a citation to their previous work that supported the project, rather than a personal acknowledgement
• Use discretion in deciding which contributions warrant acknowledgement to avoid diluting its meaning or making the section unnecessarily long

The Acknowledgements should be brief, specific, and consistent in format with the journal’s guidelines. If there are no other contributions to recognize besides the listed authors, funders, and previously published materials, then an Acknowledgements section is not needed.

Data and Reproducibility

As outlined in the author guidelines, we follow the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) guidelines regarding data and reproducibility. The policy of advances.in/psychology is to publish papers only if the data, methods used in the analysis, and materials used to conduct the research are clearly and precisely documented and are maximally available to any researcher for purposes of reproducing the results or replicating the procedure.

1. Authors reusing data available from public repositories must provide program code, scripts for statistical packages, and other documentation sufficient to allow an informed researcher to precisely reproduce all published results.
2. Authors using original data must
   1. make the data available at a trusted digital repository (Note: If all data required to reproduce the reported analyses appears in the article text, tables, and figures then it does not also need to be posted to a repository.)
   2. include all variables, treatment conditions, and observations described in the manuscript
   3. provide a full account of the procedures used to collect, preprocess, clean, or generate the data
   4. provide program code, scripts, codebooks, and other documentation sufficient to precisely reproduce all published results
   5. provide research materials and description of procedures necessary to conduct an independent replication of the research.
3. In rare cases, despite authors’ best efforts, some or all data or materials cannot be shared for legal or ethical reasons. In such cases, authors must inform the editors at the time of submission. This will be taken into account during the review process. Authors are encouraged to anticipate data and material sharing at the beginning of their projects to provide for these circumstances. It is understood that in some cases access will be provided under restrictions to protect confidential or proprietary information. Editors may grant exceptions to data and material access requirements provided authors:
   1. explain the restrictions on the dataset or materials and how they preclude public access.
   2. provide a public description of the steps others should follow to request access to the data or materials.
   3. provide software and other documentation that will precisely reproduce all published results.
   4. provide access to all data and materials for which the constraints do not apply.
4. Data, program code, research materials, and other documentation of the research process should be made available through a trusted digital repository. Trusted repositories adhere to policies that make data discoverable, accessible, usable, and preserved for the long term. Trusted repositories also assign unique and persistent identifiers. For example, these services are offered by partners in the Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences (Data-PASS) and most institutional repositories. Author-maintained websites are not compliant with this requirement.
   1. Dissemination of these materials may be delayed until publication. Under exceptional circumstances, editors may grant an embargo of the public release of data for at most one year after publication.
   2. Articles accepted for publication will not be assigned a publication date until the above conditions have been met. Authors are responsible for ensuring that their articles continue to fulfill these conditions. Failure to do so may lead to an editorial expression of concern or retraction of the article.

The policy of advances.in/psychology is to publish papers where authors follow standards for disclosing key aspects of the research design and data analysis. Authors are required to review the standards available for many research applications from http://www.equator-network.org/ and use those that are relevant for the reported research applications. At manuscript submission, authors must confirm that they reviewed the standards, report whether any standards were relevant for the research application, and confirm that they followed those standards in the manuscript.

Ethical Oversight

Authors are expected to follow the ethical guidelines of the American Psychological Association and comparable national and international regulations. All submitted research has to comply with the laws of the country where it was conducted and those of the U.K.

For research on vulnerable populations, adherence to ethical principles requires extra care and attention. According to the American Psychological Association, these populations include, but are not limited to, “children, prisoners, pregnant women, or people with intellectual disability.” Vulnerable groups also include economically or educationally disadvantaged individuals or people who belong to minority groups that are stigmatized in society. The rights of members of these groups, their well-being, and their accurate representation in research need to be warranted at any time. Authors need to pay special attention to avoid the further stigmatization of these groups in research reports and articles. We encourage authors to involve members of the respective groups in all stages of the research process whenever possible.

In any publication and openly available data, research subjects must not be identifiable. Therefore, authors need to prevent the possibility of direct or indirect identification of research subjects through anonymization and appropriate aggregation of data.

Any potential breach of research ethics will be treated and scrutinized according to the following procedure (also outlined in this flow chart): First, the reviewers or editors will be thanked for sharing their concerns, and the author(s) will be asked to respond to the allegations. If the response is satisfactory, an apology will be extended to the author(s), and the case will be closed. If the response is unsatisfactory, the review process will be halted. All involved parties will be informed about the decision. The journal staff may then contact the institution(s) of the author(s) to investigate the case further and/or discuss it with COPE. If resolved at this stage, an apology will be extended to the author(s). If unresolved, the relevant authorities in the country in which the research was conducted will be contacted, and the manuscript will be rejected. The involved parties will be informed about this outcome.

Preprints

Authors may share preprints on:

• Personal websites or blogs
• Laboratory or institutional repositories
• Non-profit preprint servers (e.g., arXiv, bioRxiv, PsyArXiv, SocArXiv)
• Research-focused social networking sites (e.g., ResearchGate)

When depositing a preprint, authors should retain copyright to their work. If a preprint is later accepted by advances.in/psychology, authors should update the preprint record with a link to the final published version of record.

Journal Management and Publishing Policies

Intellectual Property

Upon submission, all manuscripts are checked for plagiarism via Turnitin. In addition, peer reviewers may suspect plagiarism when evaluating a given submission. If plagiarism is detected, the manuscript is unsubmitted, and the author is informed. The response will depend on the degree of plagiarism. We follow procedures based on those outlined by COPE.

In the clear case of plagiarism, the corresponding author will be given the opportunity to provide an explanation. If the plagiarism resulted from inexperience (e.g., due to first-time authorship) or an error, the manuscript will be rejected or a revision will be requested. All involved parties will be informed about the decision. If the explanation is unsatisfactory, all authors will be informed, and the manuscript will be rejected. The affiliations of the authors and potential overseeing institutions may be informed.

In the case of suspected redundancy (i.e., severe self-plagiarism, double reporting), the corresponding author will be given the opportunity to provide an explanation. If the overlap is unwarranted, the manuscript will be rejected, and all involved parties will be informed about the decision. The affiliations of the authors and potential overseeing institutions may be informed. If the redundancy is justified but not documented appropriately, the authors will be asked to revise their manuscript, clarifying the differences from previous/similar work and citing existing work.

In minor, likely unintentional cases of plagiarism, the authors will be informed and asked to revise their manuscript accordingly. In the case plagiarism is detected after publication, the article may be retracted, or a correction may be published.

Copyright and Licensing

All articles published in advances.in/psychology are made available under an open-access model with the Creative Commons by 4.0 license. This means that authors maintain the copyright of their work while granting the journal the non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide, and irrevocable right to publish their manuscript, including its figures, tables, data, and any additional provided material. Authors provide the journal with the right of first publication. As such, redistributors of published articles are required to cite the title of the work, the authors’ names, the journal name, the year of publication, volume number, and DOI.

Authors retain the right to publish the manuscript in other channels, but any subsequent publication must acknowledge that the manuscript was originally published by advances.in/psychology.

Journal Management

The journal advances.in/psychology is owned by the publisher Advances.in. The publisher’s business model is for profit but fair and sustainable as it pays editors and reviewers for their work.

Peer Review Processes

advances.in/psychology practices transparent double-blind peer review. Usually, manuscripts are reviewed by one reviewer with expertise in the field of the submission and another reviewer with expertise in a different, albeit related field. This evaluation ensures that successful submissions advance the state of the art and, at the same time, are relevant and accessible to a broader audience. We pay editors and reviewers for their work (more information can be found here). For transparency, the anonymous reviews are published as a report alongside the accepted article. We rely on the evaluations by editorial board members and other external reviewers.

The editor makes the decision to publish a manuscript based on the reviewers’ evaluations. For further information, please see our Peer-review Policy.

Allegations of Misconduct

We treat every alleged misconduct, whether reported before or after the publication of an article, seriously and with utmost care. The editor-in-chief, as well as the consulting editor, will evaluate the respective allegations (contact details can be found here; alternatively contact info@advances.in). We will ask whistleblowers whether they wish their identity to be revealed or kept confidential. The accused individual(s) will be given the opportunity to respond to the allegations and/or clarify their case. In case of suspicion of ethical misconduct, we may contact the institutional review boards and affiliated institutions of the respective authors or relevant national overseeing institutions. All involved parties will be informed of the result of the investigation. We will retract the respective article with a notice published online if misconduct is confirmed. In case of reviewer misconduct, the reviewer will be permanently excluded from reviewing for the journal in the future. In the case of well-founded misconduct allegations against the editor(s), an external ad-hoc committee will be formed.

Complaints

In the case of well-founded complaints against the journal, its staff, or editorial board members, either (a) an ad-hoc committee will be formed by researchers unrelated to the journal, or (b) COPE will be contacted for a neutral evaluation. Then, based on the evaluation from either source, improvements to the journal’s structure and procedures will be implemented. 

Permanency, Retractions, Post-publication Discussions and Corrections

We follow the procedures and considerations for post-publication discussions and corrections outlined by COPE here. Adhering to general standards of academic publishing, we generally do not modify articles after publication. However, in cases of significant errors or suspected misconduct, the journal will issue corrections, expressions of concern, or retractions.

Journal editors should consider issuing a retraction if they have strong evidence that the published findings are not reliable due to serious errors, data fabrication or falsification; if the work is plagiarized; if the findings were previously published elsewhere without proper disclosure, attribution, permissions or justification; if it contains unauthorized material or data; if there are serious copyright or legal issues; if the research was unethical; if peer review was compromised or manipulated; or if authors failed to disclose a major conflict of interest that likely impacted interpretations and recommendations.

Retracted articles will be labelled with a “Retraction notice,” but remain accessible to all readers, published promptly, and state who is retracting the article and the reasons why.

Retractions are generally not warranted for authorship disputes if the findings remain valid, if correction of errors is sufficient, if evidence is inconclusive pending further investigation, or if disclosed conflicts of interest likely did not influence conclusions. In some cases, an expression of concern may be more appropriate than a full retraction.

Republishing a corrected version of an article will only be allowed in extraordinarily rare and exceptional situations. One example would be if an article was originally published with missing content because of a mistake during the production process.

If a corrected article is republished, this will be noted in the “Article History” section by adding a separate publication date for what is termed the “corrected version of record” or cVoR. A publisher’s note will also be included to explain why the corrected version was necessary.

However, republication will not be done for minor errors or omissions that do not fundamentally impact the reliability or interpretation of the published work. Substantial corrections that meaningfully alter data, conclusions, or the overall message and integrity of the article will be handled through other mechanisms, such as publishing an erratum, expression of concern, or even a full retraction when warranted. The bar for republishing a corrected article will be set very high to avoid any perception of impropriety or manipulation of the scholarly record after publication.

These guidelines aim to uphold the integrity of the published scientific record. Corrections and changes after publication will be made judiciously and only when absolutely necessary to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the reported research. Transparency about any post-publication edits will be maintained through clear documentation in the article history and accompanying notices.

We invite readers to submit commentaries on accepted articles. The editor will determine whether the commentary is suitable for publication. All commentaries need to be peer-reviewed before publication. The authors of the original article may be invited as reviewers. Serious concerns regarding a published manuscript will be followed up and may result in the publication of a correction or retraction.