Ethical and Malpractice Policy

Publication ethics and malpractice statement

"Poslovna izvrsnost - Business Excellence" is a peer-reviewed international scientific journal published by Department of Trade and International Business of Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Zagreb, Croatia. The journal aspires to select only quality papers for publication and is committed to promoting the highest ethical publication practices and to maintaining the integrity of the scientific record. 

This statement stems from the fact that "Poslovna izvrsnost - Business Excellence" strongly supports academic honesty and professional integrity. It is why high ethical standards are expected from all parties involved in the publishing process: authors, reviewers and publisher. The journal is oriented towards connecting the Croatian and the CEE regional economic and business research community. 

The journal upholds the legal provisions of the Republic of Croatia in relation to the copyright and publishing rights while adhering to the stated policies on open access, licensing and archiving, as well as to the generally accepted ethical and formal rules on academic writing. This statement is based on main principles given by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) in document Guidelines on good publication practice. The publishing ethics standards applying to journal "Poslovna izvrsnost - Business Excellence" are stated below.

Authorship

Authors are all those researchers who have made a significant contribution to the paper. Papers should include a full list of authors and their institutional and/or corporate affiliations. Authorship should be limited to those who have contributed significantly and who shall be quoted as coauthors, while other participants should be acknowledged and/or recorded as contributors. The corresponding author is responsible for including all authors and for coordination between the journal and the authors. 

Authors are responsible for ensuring that they respect anyone’s copyright. This includes proper acknowledgement of the sources and authors, and their permission for using photographs, charts, graphs, tables or any other data sets. Authors are required to cooperate in the review process in order to reach the highest quality outcome. 

At the end of the paper, authors can acknowledge other persons or organizations who have contributed to the research. 

Authors are required to clearly indicate whether or not financial support was provided at any stage of the writing process. Possible conflicts of interest, financial or other conflicts that might be interpreted as affecting the outcomes or the analyses of the research should be clearly stated. 

The authors are entitled to moral and intellectual rights regarding their manuscripts. The authors retain the copyright over manuscript.

Research results integrity

Business Excellence journal encourages authors to be honest in presenting their research results. Forgery, falsification or selective reporting of data with the intent to deceive and mislead reviewers and readers is highly unethical. The results of research should be stored for a reasonable time in order to allow a peer-review upon request. 

Plagiarism

Authors should acknowledge the work of others used in their research and cite publications that have influenced the direction and course of their study. Reproducing text from other papers without properly referring the source i.e. plagiarism is not acceptable. Authors should avoid the practice of self-plagiarism, i.e. production of many papers with almost the same content. The originality of the papers is verified by using the Turnitin software.

Unique submission policy

Business Excellence journal accepts previously unpublished papers. The submissions of the same paper concurrently to more than one journal is not accepted way of behaviour and will not be tolerated.

Equity and objectivity of reviewers

The submitted papers are the subject to the double-blind review process. Business Excellence journal endeavors to assure highly ethical and quality review process. Reviewers do not know who the authors of the paper being reviewed are. If reviewers do become aware of authors when reviewing a particular paper, they should inform the Editor and they have to refuse to review such manuscripts. Also, reviewers should avoid any other conflict of interest towards the particular paper. The conflict of interest can result from collaborative, financial, institutional, personal, or other relationships with any of the companies, institutions, or people related to the papers in the review process. During the review process reviewers should be objective, fair and professional. In their comments and judgments, reviewers have to avoid personal biases. In all circumstances, reviewers should respect the confidentiality of the review process. Reviewers should explain and support their scholarly judgments adequately. The final judgment together with comments for authors is delivered only to Editors who will organize further distribution to authors.

Corrections and retractions and misconduct practice

If there are errors in published works, all authors have to inform the Editorial promptly in order to provide prompt retractions or corrections. Retractions will be issued if there is a clear evidence of some crucial error within the paper (for example: experimental errors, a lot of miscalculations, data fabrication, if paper is previously published elsewhere without proper referencing, if there is plagiarism etc.). Errata (corrections) will be issued if there are smaller errors in papers (for example, data in a portion of paper are miscalculated, there is a honest error in referencing, there is a spelling mistake in the author list, etc.)

If a possible misconduct is brought to the attention of the Business Excellence Editorial, he will seek advice from the papers’ reviewers and the Editorial Board in dealing with the misconduct. If there is the evidence, we will resolve the matter by appropriate corrections in the printed and electronic version of the journal; by refusing an author's future work for a certain period, and by contacting editors of other journals, especially those where the paper of the directly affected author is published. But the legal activities regarding authors’ misconducts are in the hands of those who employ the researchers.

Role of editors in publication decisions

The editors are responsible for final decision which of the articles submitted to the journal should be published. The editors may be guided by the policies of the journal's Editorial board and constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. The editors will rely on reviews of papers in making this decision. The editorial staff should ensure equal and objective treatment of authors in review process which is not influenced by authors' race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political orientation. The editorial staff must keep review process confident and objective by not disclosing any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, as appropriate.

Further information

Should you have any doubts regarding the ethical issues, please refer to the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (http://www.esf.org/coordinating-research/mo-fora/research-integrity.html). 

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement (in pdf) available here