Editorial policy and ethic norms

 ETHICS REGULATIONS

The editorial board of the journal “Economics of Ukraine” abided in its work by the international ethical rules of scientific publications, which involve the observance of the principles of fairness, confidentiality, impartiality and objectivity, high quality demands of scientific research, support for new knowledge, collegiality in decision-making regarding the publication of articles, strict observance of copyright and related rights, categorical rejection of plagiarism in any of its manifestations, as well as prevention of possible conflicts of interests, etc. The activity of the editorial board is organized and carried out following internationally recognized standards of the quality of scientific works, based on the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics and the Elsevier Publishing Ethics Resource Kit, in particular, and also relies on the experience of reputable international publishing houses.Compliance with the rules of scientific publications ethics by all participants in the publishing process ensures the authors' rights to intellectual property, increases the quality of the publication, and prevents the possibility of improper use of the author's materials for the particular person's benefit. Free publication of articles is aimed at supporting economic research, primarily domestic, and the development of open science.

COMPLIANCE WITH THE PRINCIPLES AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF COPE, WAME, DORA ETC.

The editorial board of the journal adheres to the following principles and recommendations of international organizations:

  1. COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)

The journal adheres to the ethical standards defined by COPE: transparency in the process of submitting, reviewing and publishing articles; impartiality and independence of editors and reviewers; academic integrity – avoiding plagiarism, falsification, duplicate publications; correct authorship – a clear definition of the contribution of each of the authors; working with complaints - the existence of open and clear procedures for consideration of appeals and complaints about ethics; retraction and correction of articles - a clear procedure for retractions, corrections and error reports.

  1. WAME (World Association of Medical Editors, principles for editors of all sciences)

WAME recommendations: editorial independence – editor's decisions are made without pressure from sponsors, institutions or commercial interests; conflicts of interest - all authors, reviewers and editors are obliged to declare them; peer review – an objective, fair and timely expert assessment is provided; funding transparency – information on grants, sponsors and research funding sources is disclosed; support for young scientists – publications of scientists at the initial stage of their careers are supported.

3.DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment)

The journal adheres to the principles of honest evaluation of scientific activity: not only bibliometric indicators (impact factor, h-index) are taken into account, but manuscripts are evaluated according to their quality, novelty and contribution to science; various types of research results are valued - software, data, algorithms, technical solutions; interdisciplinary research is recognized as equivalent to classical publications.

  1. ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors – general principles for all sciences)

Authorship criteria – the author is only the one who made a significant contribution to the writing of the work.

Research ethics – adherence to norms regarding working with data, human participants, and experiments.

Data openness – encouraging authors to preserve and provide access to research data.

AUTHORS ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITIES

Authors warrant that the manuscript is their original work, has not been previously published, has not been submitted to, or is under consideration for publication in another periodical. Parallel submission of the same manuscript to another Journal is illegal.It is the journal's policy not to publish preprints of articles.

If the submitted manuscript is the result of a research project or its previous version was presented at a conference (under the same or a similar title) in the form of an oral presentation, detailed information about the project, conference, etc., should be provided in a footnote or the “Acknowledgments” section.

Authors must consider international and national copyright laws. Research results in the article should be presented transparently, and the author's and someone else's achievements should be clearly defined.All citations and borrowings must come with properly fashioned bibliographic references. Excessive borrowing, piracy, and plagiarism in any form, including citations without appropriate references, paraphrasing, and appropriation of other people's research results, are unacceptable and considered unethical actions.If the research was conducted by a group of scientists, all who participated in it — made their intellectual contribution to the concept and structure of the article, and the interpretation of the research results should be listed as authors when publishing the results.The personal researcher's contribution may be noted particularly.The criterion of authorship, in this case, is the real creative contribution of the scientist.All authors mentioned in the article must take public responsibility for the content of the article.

If the provisions (elements) of the article have already been published by the author, it is necessary to refer to the previous article(s), indicating clearly how the new work differs from the previous one(s). Verbatim copying, repetition of one's works, and paraphrasing are not allowed; they can be used only as a basis for new conclusions.

Reporting standards

The Journal, as the academic communication basis, ensures that all articles contain enough information to enable others to recreate the work described. The submitted manuscript should contain sufficient detail and references to enable reviewers and subsequent readers to verify the statements made in it and supply full details of the methods used, including time frames, etc.Authors must disclose research sources on the editorial team's demand.

Authors are solely responsible for the content of their materials and must ensure that they have permission from all parties involved to publish the content. The authors confirm that data protection regulations, ethical standards, copyrights of third parties, and other rights are respected in the data collection process, processing, and data sharing.

Authors who intend to include figures, tables, or other material that has already been published elsewhere must obtain permission from the copyright holder. Any material received without such confirmation is assumed to be from the authors.

Authors should name all sources of funding for the project, if available.

Authorship

Only contributors who have made a significant contribution to the manuscript are considered as authors. Contributions of persons who were just involved in important aspects of the research project and manuscript preparation should be listed in the appropriate footnote or “Acknowledgments” section.

Authors should consider the authorship criteria. To be on the list of authors, they must:

  • make a significant contribution to the work concept or design; or collect, analyze, or interpret data for the work;
  • contribute to the writing of a work or a critical review of its important intellectual content;
  • make final approval of the version to be published; agree to be responsible for all aspects of the work;
  • ensure that questions relating to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are investigated and resolved properly;
  • agree to be on the list of authors and approve the full list of authors.

Adding or removing the authors during the editorial process is allowed only by providing reasonable explanations to the Editorial board.

Sources of information and citations

Authors are required to cite sources that have significantly influenced their research and manuscript properly. Information received in private conversation or correspondence with third parties during the examination of project applications, manuscripts, and similar materials is not to be used without the written consent of the source of the information.

Artificial Intelligence

The Editorial board supports the use of innovative technologies in the scientific process, but emphasizes the need to observe the principles of academic integrity, transparency and responsibility when using artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

The Editorial board shares the position of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Code of Ethics for Reviewers on the Use of AI in Research, and adheres to Elsevier's Policy on the Use of Generative AI.

Based on this, we emphasize that:

the authors undertake to use artificial intelligence responsibly when preparing and working on the manuscript, to declare any use of AI for data collection, processing, analysis or interpretation in the "Research methods" section of the article, and to indicate the use of AI when compiling tables and constructing figures. A manuscript in which artificial intelligence-generated content is detected without an appropriate indication of this in the author's manuscript will be rejected. Submission of materials completely generated by AI without a significant author's contribution to the scientific content, analysis and interpretation of the results is not allowed.Regardless of the use of AI technologies, the authors bear full responsibility for the scientific integrity, reliability, originality and quality of the submitted materials;

reviewers and editors do not have the right to involve ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence in conducting scientific examination of manuscripts of articles submitted for review, as chatbots store the hints given to them, including the content of the manuscript, which violates the confidentiality of the submitted manuscript;

in the editorial process, the use of artificial intelligence tools is allowed as an aid in checking the manuscript (in particular, to detect possible plagiarism, fact-checking, language editing, etc.). At the same time, the final decision regarding the acceptance or rejection of the manuscript is made exclusively by the Editorial Board, regardless of the results obtained with the use of AI;

the use of AI technologies must not violate copyright, privacy principles, or cause distortion or manipulation of data. Concealing the fact of using AI or misleading readers about the source of the text or research results is unacceptable;

authors, reviewers and members of the Editorial Board are bound by this policy. If violations are found, appropriate measures may be taken, including corrections, refusal to publish or withdrawal of the article in accordance with current editorial procedures.

Fundamental errors in published works

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in their published work, an author must immediately notify the editor-in-chief (deputy editor-in-chief, executive secretary) about it and be ready to cooperate to retract or correct the article.

Policy on archiving and long-term storage in public access

The journal uses digital object identifiers (DOIs), and also stores its metadata and full texts of articles on the journal website, on the website of the V. Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine, in various national and international repositories to ensure long-term digital preservation of articles and guarantee open access to them.

Authors have the right to self-deposit the final PDF version of their article in an institutional repository, a subject repository, a general repository, a personal web page (including social networks such as Research Gate, Academia.edu, etc.) and/or the web resource of the author's institution at any time after publication. In this case, you need to provide full bibliographic information about the original publication (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages) and link to the article's DOI and license.

Copyright and Licensing

Authors reserve the copyright for published articles and grant the publisher the non-exclusive right to publish the article, cite it as the publishing original for repeated usage, and distribute it in all forms and media.Articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International CC BY 4.0 license (CC BY-NC-ND license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

By submitting a manuscript, authors agree to adhere to the journal's editorial policy.

Conflict of interest

Authors must disclose in their manuscript any financial or other material conflict of interest that could affect the results presented or their interpretation. If there is no conflict of interest to declare, the following standard statement must be added: “No conflict of interest was disclosed.”The conflict of interest nature can be non-financial or financial. Examples of conflicts of interest include (but are not limited to):

  • persons who receive funding, wages, or other forms of payments from the organization; own stocks or shares of a company that may benefit financially (or lose financially) from the publication of the results;
  • natural persons or organizations or employers who finance them and own (or apply for) the relevant patents;
  • official affiliation and membership in interest groups related to the publication content;
  • political, religious, or ideological competing interests.

The Journal publications must not contain content promoting any commercial products without indicating that such publication is an advertisement.

JOURNAL'S EDITORIAL BOARD POLICIES

The procedure for the selection of members of the governing and editorial bodies involves the public approval of the Editorial Board members and founding documents of the editorial office at the Academic Council of the Institute of Economics and Forecasting of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and then at a session of the Department of Economics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine.

The editorial board is re-elected every five years. Leading scientists from various scientific and educational institutions of an economic specialty from all over Ukraine and other countries are involved in the Editorial Board.

The editor-in-chief, editorial boardmembers, deputy editor-in-chief, and executive secretary (hereinafter the Editorial Board) direct their efforts to publish the received new scientific knowledge, sharing the freedom of choice of research areas by scientists, but demanding their professional behavior and disapprove falsification, plagiarism, unfair practices, censorship, and pseudoscience.The editorial board, which evolves the leading scientists in their field of economic knowledge with observance of linguistic, cultural, academic, geographical, institutional pluralism, and gender parity, is responsible for the formation and implementation of the editorial policy, which will contribute to the free distribution of scientific knowledge in compliance with copyright.

The Editorial Board is responsible for deciding which submitted articles will be published. The Editorial Board follows the editorial policy and is limited by the current legal requirements regarding the observance of copyright.

The editor-in-chief and members of the editorial board act in the interests of the professional reputation of the authors-scientists and cannot have their own interests in relation to articles that are approved or rejected.When making such decisions, they are guided by the principles of impartiality, objectivity, high level of scientific research and knowledge.The author is informed whether the manuscript corresponds to the vertical of the periodical, and the decision regarding the article based on the results of the review is brought to his attention — “Publish”, “Publish accepting comments”, “For improvement and approval (by a specific member of the editorial board/reviewer)”, “For improvement with resubmission for review by the editorial board”, “Reject”.The duration of expert scientific evaluation of the manuscript is up to 1 month from the date of its submission.

The editorial board reserves the right to refuse publication of the submitted manuscript if it does not meet the content standards and if there are formal features or irrefutable evidence of the scientist's unethical behavior or signs of plagiarism.

The Editorial Board should not have a conflict of interest concerning the articles they are considering for publication.If there is a possibility of a conflict of interest in connection with the materials processing, the selection of reviewers and all decisions regarding the manuscript should be made by the Editorial Board (if one or more members of the Editorial Board have a conflict of interest regarding the submitted manuscript, these Editorial Board members must withdraw from the reviewer's selection and do not participate in decision-making related to the manuscript).

The Editorial Board evaluates manuscripts for their scientific content without any racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic, or political discrimination.

The Editorial Board may not use unpublished material disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the written consent of the authors. Information and ideas contained in submitted manuscripts must be kept confidential and cannot be used for self-interest. 

All accepted materials are reviewed by independent experts (external reviewers), selected and appointed for each article). The editorial board uses a double “blind” peer review model, taking all reasonable steps to ensure the anonymity of reviewers before, during, and after the review process. Articles are also reviewed by members of the Editorial Board responsible for a certain section, who express their opinion when the Editorial Board decides to publish an article.

The editor-in-chief, editorial board members, and employees of the editorial and publishing group should not inform or give information about the articles to anyone except the reviewers, the authors themselves, and the publisher, if necessary. Unpublished data from manuscripts should not be disclosed to third parties.

The submissions of the Editor-in-Chief and members of the Journal's Editorial Board - are considered according to the general rules of review (double "blind" review), with mandatory review of manuscripts by independent third-party reviewers and scientific experts not related to the authors in any way. These submissions are considered at a meeting of the Journal's Editorial Board on the basis of authors' anonymity, and a collegial decision is made on them.

The publication of articles by the Editor-in-Chief and members of the Journal's Editorial board is allowed more than once a year, provided that independent reviewers recognize their absolute relevance for this specific period of time, the presence of a current analysis of the economic situation, proposals that require the earliest possible publication, as well as a unanimous decision of the Journal’s Editorial Board.

REVIEWERS ETHICAL PRINCIPLES

The purpose of the reviewer's activity is to objectively and impartially evaluate the quality of the article, determine the degree of novelty in the topic disclosure, its compliance with the scientific and ethical standards of publications, and the journal requirements.Expert evaluations are meant to help the author improve the quality of the material presentation and the Editorial Board to make an objective decision on the article publication.The reviewer must have advanced knowledgeof the world scientific achievementsin the scientific field in which the article submitted for review was written in order to qualitatively assess its novelty and determine the adequacy of the review of already available publications on the subject under consideration.If the reviewer does not consider himself an expert on the article topic or cannot meet the specified deadlines, he should withdraw from the review.Reviewers are to provide competent and unbiased feedback in a written form on the scientific significance and value of the manuscript on time.

The review procedure in the journal is based on COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers, which guarantees high quality of expertise, constructive dialogue with authors and strict adherence to the principles of academic integrity.

Reviewers evaluate the manuscript according to the following criteria: correspondence to the journal specialty, the relevance of the researched topic and applied methods, originality and scientific relevance of information, presentation style, and scientific apparatus.Reviewers should warn about any reasonable suspicions or information about possible violations of ethical standards on the part of the authors.Reviewers should mention relevant published works that have not been cited by the authors and alert the Editorial Board of significant similarities between the reviewed manuscript and any other manuscript already published or under review in another periodical if they are aware of them.

Reviewers must not have any conflict of interest towards the research, the authors, and/or the research funding sources. If such conflicts exist, reviewers should report them immediately.

Feedback on the article should be made objectively; personal criticism of the author by the reviewer is inappropriate. Experts must express their opinions clearly and with reason.

Any manuscripts received for review should be treated as confidential documents. Reviewers should not use unpublished material disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the written consent of the authors. Information and ideas contained in submitted manuscripts are kept confidential and not used for personal profit.

PRINCIPLES OF PROFESSIONAL ETHICS IN PUBLISHER'S ACTIVITIES

The publisher is responsible for publishing the author's works, observing the following basic principles and procedures:

  • monitors compliance with ethical obligations by authors and all participants of the editorial process in accordance with the requirements mentioned above and enables their implementation;
  • provides the journal with support in claim handling regarding the ethical aspects of published materials and helps to interact with other journals and/or publishers;
  • realizes that the activity of the journal is not a commercial project and is not aimed at making a profit;
  • facilitates the process of publishing corrections, clarifications, rebuttals, and apologies if necessary;
  • supports the journal in its efforts to prevent the publication of plagiarism in any of its forms or pseudo-scientific articles and provides an opportunity to retract publications that contain plagiarism and false information.

RETRACTION POLICY

Violation of publisher, copyright holder, or author(s) legal restrictions, professional codes of ethics, and research misconduct (multiple submissions, duplicate publication, false claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data and data fabrication, plain errors reported by authors, unethical research) or any other serious violations require the article to be retracted.Occasionally, a retraction procedure may be used to correct errors in a manuscript or publication. The primary purpose of a retraction is to correct an error while preserving the integrity of the scientific research, not to punish the author.

The reason for the retraction and the person initiating it is stated clearly in the retraction notice for any retracted article.The standards for working with the retraction of an already published article involve: in the electronic version, the retraction note has a link to the original article. There is a link to a retraction note in the electronic version of the original article that clearly states that the article has been retracted.The original article remains unchanged except for a watermark in the pdf file on each page stating that it is “retracted”.

COMPLAINT CONSIDERATION PROCEDURE REGARDING VIOLATIONS OF ACADEMIC INTEGRITY AND PUBLICATION ETHICS

 1. Submission of a complaint

The complaint can be submitted by the author, reviewer, reader or any other member of the scientific community to the editorial e-mail and contain: a clear description of the essence of the violation; evidence (links to sources, copies of documents, extracts from texts, etc.); contact details of the applicant.

  1. Initial review

The complaint is registered by the Deputy Editor-in-Chief and forwarded to the Editor-in-Chief, who conducts a preliminary analysis and determines whether it relates to issues of academic integrity and publication ethics. In case of insufficient data, the applicant may be invited to provide additional materials.

  1. Consideration of the complaint by the Editorial board

The complaint is submitted to the Editorial board, which determines:

the nature of the violation (plagiarism, falsification of data, double publication, wrongful authorship, violation of the review procedure, etc.);

the scope and consequences of the violation;

available evidence.

If necessary, independent experts are involved.

  1. Making a decision

The Editorial board can make one of the following decisions:

          Reject the complaint (if it is unfounded or not supported by evidence).

          Make comments to the authors and oblige them to correct errors.

          Reject the article (if a violation is detected at the review stage).

          Retract an already published article (with a corresponding official publication of the retraction).

          Notify the scientific institution or the employer of the author about the recorded violations.

          Deny the author further publications in the journal within a specified time (sanction).

  1. Notification of the parties

The author(s) and the applicant receive a written notification of the results of the review.If an article is withdrawn, a notice with the reasons is published on the journal's website.

  1. Appeal

The author(s) or applicant has the right to appeal within 30 days of receiving the decision.

The appeal is considered by the Editor-in-Chief and, if necessary, by members of the editorial board or external experts.

  1. Principles of the process

Transparency: the procedure is clearly regulated and available for review on the journal's website.

Confidentiality: Complainants and reviewers remain anonymous (at their request).

Impartiality: decisions are made collegially, taking into account all the evidence.

Compliance with international standards - the procedure is based on the principles of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics).