Editorial Policies

JOINETECH (International Journal of Economic and Technological Studies) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to fostering innovation and advancing scholarly and practical knowledge at the intersection of economics, business, and technology.

The publication of an article in a scientific journal that employs a double-blind peer review system plays a crucial role in the dissemination of knowledge, fostering the progress of academic and scientific communities. The integrity of this process relies heavily on the thorough and unbiased evaluation of submitted manuscripts, which, in turn, contributes to the credibility and development of the research field. Therefore, ethical conduct is expected from all parties involved: authors, editors, and reviewers.

This journal adheres to rigorous ethical standards, which are in line with the principles of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics). All contributors to the peer review process are required to understand and accept these guidelines to ensure fairness, transparency, and academic rigor. Moreover, we comply with the "Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing," as outlined by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

 

Transparency and Ethical Practices

Conflicts of Interest Declaration

All authors must disclose any financial or personal relationships that may influence, or be perceived to influence, their work. Potential conflicts of interest include, but are not limited to, employment, consulting agreements, patents, funding, and honoraria. Authors must complete a declaration of competing interests upon manuscript submission. This information will be made available with the published article.

Editors and reviewers are also obligated to declare any conflicts of interest. If any are identified, they may be excluded from the review process for the manuscript in question.

What Constitutes a Conflict of Interest?

Conflicts of interest may be both financial and non-financial. A financial conflict exists when a person's personal or professional interests could be seen as influencing their interpretation of data or the presentation of research findings. Non-financial conflicts may involve personal, political, academic, or ideological issues that may influence objectivity.

Informed Consent and Publication of Participant Data

Authors must obtain informed consent from participants for the publication of any identifiable data, images, or videos. For deceased participants, consent must be obtained from their closest family members. The privacy of participants must be protected to the fullest extent, and images should be anonymized using acceptable methods (e.g., no use of black bars over eyes). If consent cannot be obtained, authors must justify the decision, and the data will be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

Data Sharing and Ethical Responsibility

Authors must ensure that research data complies with ethical guidelines, respecting participants’ privacy and complying with local laws regarding data protection. If applicable, authors should disclose if they have obtained consent for sharing datasets and whether these datasets contain personal identifiers.

 

Malpractice

Duplicate Publication

Manuscripts submitted to this journal must be original and should not be under consideration or published elsewhere, including in other languages. The journal allows and encourages submission to recognized preprint servers, where the article is openly available for scientific review prior to submission. Authors should provide the preprint details, including the server name and any identification numbers, when submitting the manuscript. The journal considers preprints only when shared within the scientific community, and not with the public or media.

Plagiarism and Self-Plagiarism

Plagiarism, defined as presenting another's work or ideas as one's own, is strictly prohibited. This includes reusing substantial portions of one's previous publications without proper citation (self-plagiarism). Authors are responsible for ensuring that all ideas, data, and quotes used in the article are properly attributed.

If plagiarism is detected after publication, the journal will follow the procedures outlined by COPE, conducting an investigation and contacting relevant institutions as necessary. If confirmed, the journal may retract or correct the article.

Fabrication and Falsification of Data

The fabrication of data refers to the invention of research results, while falsification involves manipulating data to mislead or present inaccurate findings. Both practices undermine the credibility of research and are considered severe ethical violations.

The journal will take prompt action if evidence of fabrication or falsification is discovered, and articles may be retracted or corrected.

 

Modifications, Retractions, and Deletions

Errata and Corrections

Authors should inform the journal if they identify any typographical or factual errors after publication. Corrections will be published if the errors affect the integrity of the article's conclusions or visibility.

Withdrawal of Articles

Authors may request the withdrawal of their article before it is published. To do so, they must provide a written justification, which will be reviewed by the editorial team. If the article has already been published, it will be retracted following the COPE guidelines.

Retraction of Articles

An article will be retracted under the following conditions:

A retraction notice will be published alongside the original article, providing a brief explanation. The article will remain accessible, but a prominent retraction notice will be added.

Deletion of Articles

In rare cases, an article may be deleted entirely if it violates legal rights or is subject to a court order. In such cases, a notice explaining the reason for deletion will be posted in place of the article.

 

Appeals and Complaints

Appeals Against Rejection

Authors wishing to appeal a rejection must first contact the Editor. The appeal will be reviewed, and the final decision will be made by the editorial committee. Appeals may be considered if new data is provided or if a procedural error is identified.

Complaints

Complaints regarding the journal's processes or ethical concerns will be addressed by the editorial team. Authors or reviewers can express their concerns directly to the Editor, and the journal management will consider feedback to improve its procedures.

Publicity and Marketing

This journal does not engage in paid advertising or marketing practices. All content is published in adherence to the highest academic and ethical standards.

 

Open access policy and authorship

Copyright

At the time of submitting the application, the authors will be asked to agree with the "publication agreement". If extracts from other copyrighted works are included, the author (s) must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and cite the source in the article.

If a table or figure has been previously published, authors must obtain written permission from the copyright owner to reproduce the material in both print and electronic form and submit it with the manuscript. This is indicated both for illustrations and other materials taken from previously published works that are not in the public domain.

JOINETECH does not charge authors any article processing charges (APCs) to publish their papers.

JOINETECH provides immediate free access to its content, with the conviction that making this information available to the public favors a greater global knowledge exchange.

In this sense, the journal follows the DOAJ definition of open access: "We define them as journals in which the copyright holder of a scholarly work grants the rights of use to others using an open licence (Creative Commons or equivalent) that allows immediate free access to the work and permits any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text of articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose.

JOINETECH adheres to different initiatives that promote free access to knowledge, such as Plan S of the cOAlition S, or the principles of the communication infrastructure for academic publication and open science AmeliCA, so all JOINETECH contents are from free and open access and are published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0).

That is why the authors who publish in JOINETECH must accept the following conditions:

- The authors retain the copyright, assigning to JOINETECH the right of the 1st publication, with the work registered with the Creative Commons attribution license (which allows third parties to use what is published as long as they mention the authorship of the work and the 1st publication in this journal).

- Authors can make other independent and additional contractual agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the version of the article published in JOINETECH (eg, publish it in a book or in an institutional repository) provided that it is clearly indicated that the work was published for the first time in JOINETECH.

- Authors are allowed, and even recommended, to publish their work on the Internet (institutional, personal pages, social networks, etc.) since it can facilitate exchanges.

- Authors are allowed, and even encouraged, to deposit supplementary material, at least the research data underlying publications, in institutional or thematic open access repositories federated in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

Author contributions

In the initial submission of the article the authors must attach for transparency reasons a ‘CRediT author statement’. This statement must report the order of signature of the article as well as the specific contribution of each of the authors to the article, using as main relevant roles: Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Resources; Software; Supervision; Validation; Visualization; Writing-original draft; Writing-review and editing; Funding adquisition. The CRediT author statement must be signed by all authors; although the corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that the information is accurate and accepted by all authors. From this moment on, changes in the authorship of the paper are not allowed; that is, authors cannot be added or removed during the review or final editing processes of the paper.

Acknowledgments

All contributors who do not meet the authorship criteria and have helped to carry out the research presented in the article should appear in an ‘Acknowledgements’ section to be included before the ‘References’ section. If the paper proceeds to peer review, this section will be anonymised in the same way as the rest of the paper. If the article is accepted for publication, this information will, again, be included in the body of the text.

Funding

In the event that any institution(s) have helped to fund the research presented in the article, authors should identify these agencies or entities together with the project codes in a ‘Funding’ section to be included between the ‘Acknowledgements’ section, if any, and the ‘References’ section. If the paper proceeds to peer review, this section will be anonymised in the same way as the rest of the paper. If the article is accepted for publication, this information will, again, be included in the body of the text as well as in the metadata of the article.

Bibliographic references

Authors must be fair, but discriminatory, in their selection of references. Bibliographic details (for example, date and page numbers) must be accurate. Only articles that are genuinely important should be included: citations of marginal relevance should not be included and authors should avoid citing articles in predatory journals or pseudo-journals. Retracted publications should never be cited in the bibliography; when discussing retractions, the notice of retraction should be cited. If a misprint, correction, or editorial expression of concern has been published for reference, it should be included in the bibliography.

Disclaimer

JOINETECH is not responsible for the content of any article and the fact that it sponsors its dissemination does not necessarily imply compliance with the theses presented.

"The publisher, in any case, is exempt from all responsibility derived from the possible infringement of intellectual property rights by the author."