Code of Ethics

It is necessary to agree on standards of ethical behavior expected of all parties involved in the act of publication: the journal editor, peer reviewers, authors, and the publisher. 

 

JOURNAL EDITOR

Publication decisions

The editor-in-chief of RIPCO will be responsible for deciding which articles submitted to the journal will be published. Their decision will be guided by the Editorial and Peer Review policies and constrained by applicable legal requirements regarding copyright infringement and plagiarism.

Fair game

The editor-in-chief and the editorial board will evaluate manuscripts for intellectual content without regard to the authors' race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnicity, citizenship, or political philosophy.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Policy

RIPCO is  committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. We seek to work with scholars from a range of institutional affiliations, nationalities, national origins, sexes, sexual orientation, disabilities, ages, or other individual status, and career stages.

Confidentiality

Any manuscript received for review should be treated as a confidential document. The editor and editorial staff of RIPCO will not disclose any information regarding a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisors, and the publisher, as appropriate.

Disclosure, Conflicts of Interest and Impartiality

Unpublished material disclosed in a submitted manuscript will not be used by the editors for personal or research purposes.

RIPCO does everything possible to ensure impartiality in decision-making at several levels:

  • At the editorial board level, its members must have no conflict of interest with an author or guest editor or with the content of a manuscript/special issue proposals and have to recuse themselves in case of. To avoid any conflict of interest inside the editorial team, during their mandate, editors do not submit to RIPCO manuscripts to which they are authors or co-authors.
  • At review process level, the associate editors must not present any conflicts of interest with the authors. They select reviewers who do not present any conflicts of interest with the authors or with the content of a manuscript. Authors must submit a blind version of their manuscript which is then sent to the reviewers. During the entire review process, authors and reviewers remain anonymous to each other. If the reviewer is able to identify even one of the authors of the manuscript, s/he is requested to report this to the editorial team who selects another reviewer in his place. In the case of special issues, the review process for manuscripts submitted by guest editors is handled by one of the journal's permanent associate editors.
  • At the decision process level, the editorial board selects the articles in an impartial manner. Manuscript are evaluated on two main criteria : their intellectual and scientific content and the compliance with the journal's editorial line without distinctions based on the author’s ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, nationality, university affiliation, or political views. It particularly pays attention to articles that contribute to the scientific debate. Any article offering relevant criticism of an article published in the journal can be submitted. Authors have a right of reply to criticism of their article(s).

 

PEER REVIEWERS

Duties, and Conflicts of Interest

Contribution to editorial decisions: Peer review helps the editor make editorial decisions and, through editorial communications with the author, can also help the author improve the paper.

Inside information or ideas obtained through peer review should be kept confidential and not used for personal gain. Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with the authors, companies, or institutions related to the articles.

Speed

Any selected reviewer who feels incompetent to evaluate the research reported in a manuscript or knows that timely review will be impossible should inform the editor and recuse themselves from the review process.

Confidentiality, and Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) 

Any manuscript received for review should be treated as a confidential document. They should not be shown or discussed with others unless authorized by the editor.

To protect authors' rights and research confidentiality, RIPCO does not currently allow the use of generative AI or AI-assisted technologies such as Chat-GPT or similar services for peer review.

Standards of objectivity

Reviews must be carried out objectively. The author's personal criticism is inappropriate. Reviewers should clearly express their opinions with supporting arguments.

Source recognition

Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors. Any statement, indicating that an observation, derivation or argument has been previously reported, should be accompanied by the relevant citation. A reviewer should also draw the editor's attention to any substantial similarities or overlaps between the manuscript under review and any other published material of which they have personal knowledge.

 

AUTHORS’ RESPONSIBILITIES

Responsibilities of the corresponding author

The corresponding author (submitting) is solely responsible for communicating with RIPCO and managing communication between co-authors. Before submission, the corresponding author ensures that all authors are included in the list of authors, that its order has been agreed upon by all authors, and that all authors are aware that the paper has been submitted.

After acceptance, the proof is sent to the corresponding author, who deals with RIPCO on behalf of all co-authors; RIPCO will not necessarily correct errors after publication if they result from errors present in a proof which was not shown to the co-authors before publication. The corresponding author is responsible for the accuracy of all content in the proof, particularly that the names of co-authors are present and spelled correctly, and that addresses and affiliations are current.

Confidential process

RIPCO treats the submitted manuscript and all communications with authors and reviewers as confidential. Authors must also treat communication with the Journal as confidential: correspondence with the review, reviewers' reports, and other confidential materials must not be published on a website or otherwise made public without prior permission from the Editorial Office, whether the submission is ultimately published or not.

Reporting standards

Authors of original research reports must provide an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion of its importance. The underlying data must be accurately represented in the document. A document should contain sufficient detail and references to allow others to reproduce the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable .

Data access and retention

Authors are asked to provide raw data related to an article for editorial review, and must be prepared to provide public access to such data (in accordance with the ALPSP-STM Statement on Data and Databases), if practicable, and must, in any case, be prepared to retain such data for a reasonable time after publication.

Originality and plagiarism

Authors must ensure that they have written entirely original works and, if authors have used the work and/or words of others, that they cited and referenced them properly.

RIPCO considers tampering, data fabrication, and plagiarism as the most serious breaches of integrity. To prevent and detect such behaviors, manuscripts received are systematically applied to an anti-plagiarism software. In this context, RIPCO invite contributors to check similarities prior to submitting their work. The authors are requested to proscribe any practice that does not comply with scientific ethics. Verification of the respect of the journal's criteria regarding plagiarism, is an important part of this three-level review process applied by RIPCO. In the case of special issues, the guest editor ensures that ethics of contributors regarding plagiarism and the parallel submission of their article to other journals. Concretely, prior to any blind review, all manuscripts are submitted to an anti-plagiarism software. All manuscripts with a worrying level of plagiarism are either rejected or sent back with the report to the authors for corrections.

Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication

RIPCO publishes original articles from the disciplines of management science and the humanities, in general, provided that they provide contributions to the organizational behavior field.  RIPCO prohibits submitting the same research in more than one journal, including in another language.

An author should not, in general, publish manuscripts describing essentially the same research in journals other than RIPCO. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal simultaneously constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable .

Source recognition

Proper recognition of the work of others should always be given. Authors should cite publications that were influential in determining the nature of the work reported.

References and copyright

Before submitting their article, authors must provide evidence that they have the right to use content of which they are not the creators. In particular, in the case of reproduction of tables, drawings, and passages of texts of more than 250 words, authors are expected to have written permission from the copyright owners to reproduce these elements. In all cases, the authors must cite/quote the source from which these tables, drawings, quotes, etc., according to APA standards. Authors should provide a list of references and use citations based on APA norms. They should obtain and indicate authorization/copyright when needed.

Authorship and contributorship

Authorship should be limited to those who made significant contributions to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study. All those who made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors. Where there are other individuals who participated in some substantial aspect of the research project, they should be acknowledged or listed as contributors.

The corresponding author must ensure that all appropriate co-authors and no inappropriate co-authors are included in the paper and that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and accepted its submission for publication.

Policies for Using Artificial Intelligence

The Editor-in-Chief, the editorial board, and peer reviewers must be explicitly informed of the use of AI by authors submitting papers to RIPCO. This usage may pertain to all stages of the research process, from the initial topic discovery to the final proofreading, including all intermediate phases. If applicable, authors should include a statement at the end of their text titled "Declaration on the use of artificial intelligence in research development." As suggested by APA, this should minimally include the following statement: "During the preparation of this manuscript submitted to RIPCO for evaluation, the author(s) utilized [NAME OF TOOL/SERVICE] for [REASON]. Following the use of this tool/service, the author(s) reviewed and amended the content as necessary and assume(s) full responsibility for the content of the publication."

Automatically generated content must be transparently and accurately identified by the authors. Such borrowings should be brief, akin to traditional author citations, and enclosed in quotation marks within the text. AI should not be listed among the authors of the submitted manuscript. The algorithm that generated content should be cited in the text as an author, similar to a traditional human reference (e.g., OpenAI, 2024). It should also be listed in the bibliography in the following format: OpenAI. (2024). Prompt: Write me a charter aimed at promoting responsible and ethical use of generative artificial intelligence in scientific journals. ChatGPT-4 (accessed on 01/01/2024), [URL]. The author is the publisher of the AI solution. The date corresponds to the year of the version used. The prompt is the question asked, which should be quoted verbatim. This is followed by the general name of the generative AI along with its version number, the date of inquiry, and the consulted URL. 

Authors are encouraged to upload the entire dialogue held with the AI solution – questions and responses – in addition to the manuscript on the RIPCO electronic platform. AI solutions should not be used for the complete drafting of the submitted manuscript. They are instead recommended for enhancing its readability, namely style, syntax, spelling, and translation.

Authors must comply with copyright and intellectual property rights when using AI. If authors are tempted to use these technologies for “second-hand reading” - a practice strongly discouraged by RIPCO's editorial board - they must check the accuracy of all automatically-generated content and references before the first submission. The reading of the primary source should be prioritized over the interpretation made by the algorithm, particularly in the production of summaries, reading notes, or syntheses of work. In this logic, RIPCO rejects the inclusion of summary or comparative tables generated by AI in literature reviews.

It is strictly prohibited to rely on fictional data—whether quantitative or qualitative—generated by AI to produce research results. When statistical treatments are conducted for demonstration purposes, they are performed using specifically dedicated software, not AI solutions. The names of these tools should be mentioned in the methods section.

Any breach of the principles outlined above is equated with plagiarism. It leads to disciplinary measures that may include publication withdrawal, revision of the evaluation process, or other appropriate actions.

Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest

All authors must declare in their manuscript any financial or other substantial conflicts of interest that could be construed as influencing the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project must be disclosed.

Human or Animal Dangers and Subjects

If the work involves chemicals, procedures, or equipment that present unusual hazards inherent in their use, the author should clearly identify these in the manuscript.

Fundamental errors in published works

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his or her own published work, it is the author's obligation to promptly notify the journal editor or publisher and cooperate with the editor in retracting or correct the paper.

Reviewer Suggestions

Authors are not required to provide reviewers. The editorial board will use external reviewers to evaluate manuscripts.

 

PUBLISHER

CrossMark Policy Statement

CrossMark is an initiative by several CrossRef editors to provide a standard way for readers to locate the authoritative version of an article or other published content. By applying the CrossMark button, Éditions MA-ESKA undertakes to maintain the content it publishes and to alert readers of changes if and when they occur.

The Crossmark button gives readers quick and easy access to the current status of a content item, including any corrections, retractions, or updates to that record.

For more information about CrossMark, please visit the CrossMark website.

MA-ESKA Editions content that will have the CrossMark button is limited to current and future content of the review and is limited to specific publication types.

Report of misconduct, retraction and errata

Any allegation of research misconduct should be reported to the editor-in-chief by email. Authors can retract or correct articles after publication by sending an email to the editor-in-chief. If needed, the editor and publisher can publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies.

Editions ESKA is committed to preserving the integrity of the literature and issues Errata, Expressions of Concern, or Retraction Notices as the situation requires and in accordance with the COPE Correction and Retraction Guidelines. In all cases, these opinions are linked to the original article.

Information about COPE's Correction and Retraction Guidelines can be found here:

Correction Guidelines

Retraction Guidelines.

Membership / COPE Guidelines

RIPCO follows the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The review takes responsibility for applying rigorous peer review and strict ethical policies and standards to ensure that it adds high-quality scientific works to the field of academic publishing. Unfortunately, cases of plagiarism, data falsification, inappropriate author credit, and others may occur. RIPCO takes these publishing ethics issues very seriously and our editors are trained to proceed in such cases with a zero-tolerance policy. To verify the originality of content submitted to our journals, we use similarity check to compare submissions with previous publications.

Backup method / Electronic preservation used

RIPCO uses the CLOCKSS system to create a distributed archival system among participating libraries and allows those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for preservation and restoration purposes.

Digital articles published in RIPCO are available through CAIRN and CAIRN international under paywall.