Role and Responsibilities

As an editor of a Zenith journal, you play a central role in safeguarding quality, ethics and the scholarly mission of the publication.

Editorial Workflow

• Triage: Evaluate initial submission for suitability (scope, originality, compliance with author guidelines) and ethical compliance (e.g., human/animal ethics, conflicts).
• Assign reviewers: Select appropriate independent experts, ensure diversity of reviewers and avoid conflicts of interest. Consider balanced geographic and institutional representation.
• Decision-making: Make fair and timely decisions based on peer review, editorial assessment and journal policy. Provide transparent rationale in decision letters.
• Communication: Maintain respectful, professional and clear communication with authors and reviewers. Refrain from harassing or discriminatory language.
• Peer-review oversight: Monitor reviewer performance (timeliness, constructiveness), provide training or feedback if necessary, and manage reviewer anonymity and confidentiality as per journal policy.
• Ethical dilemmas: If potential misconduct arises (e.g., plagiarism, data manipulation, reviewer fraud), initiate investigation, possibly involving publisher’s ethics committee. Interim measures (e.g., hold publication) may be necessary.
• Editorial board & policy review: Engage with editorial board to review scope, policy updates, special issues, journal metrics. Ensure board composition reflects wide disciplinary and geographic diversity.
• Transparency & independence: Ensure decisions are made independent of commercial/executive influence; maintain editorial integrity and safeguard against undue pressure.

Best Practice Advice

• Encourage prompt peer review and feedback to authors, striving to minimise time from submission to decision.
• Use check-lists and standard templates for ethics approval, data availability and reviewer reports to improve consistency.
• Promote authors’ and reviewers’ awareness of publication ethics, data reproducibility, and open science practices.
• Monitor journal metrics responsibly (e.g., citation metrics, impact) but avoid undue emphasis on single metric over research quality.

Conflicts of Interest

• Editors must declare any personal or institutional relationship with authors, reviewers or sponsoring organisations. Where a conflict exists, the editor should recuse themselves and assign an alternate editor.
• Editors must ensure that peer reviewers also declare conflicts; if one arises during review, the reviewer should be replaced.

Appeals and Complaints

• Provide a clear route for authors to appeal editorial decisions (within defined time frame, using provided form).
• Handle complaints about editorial conduct, reviewer misconduct or publication ethics professionally and confidentially, keeping records of investigations.