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, avoid conflicts of interest, and 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 and constructiveness), provide training or feedback when needed, and maintain reviewer anonymity and confidentiality according to journal policy.
- Ethical Dilemmas: Investigate suspected misconduct such as plagiarism, data manipulation, or reviewer fraud. Where appropriate, involve the publisher’s ethics committee and suspend publication until the matter is resolved.
- Editorial Board & Policy Review: Regularly review journal scope, policies, special issues, and editorial board composition to ensure disciplinary and geographic diversity.
- Transparency & Independence: Make editorial decisions free from commercial or external influence while safeguarding editorial integrity.
Best Practice Advice
- Encourage prompt peer review and timely feedback to authors to minimise the time from submission to editorial decision.
- Use standardized checklists and templates for ethics approval, data availability, and reviewer reports to improve consistency.
- Promote awareness of publication ethics, research reproducibility, data transparency, and open science practices.
- Monitor journal performance responsibly using a range of metrics, without relying excessively on a single indicator.
Conflicts of Interest
- Editors must disclose any personal or institutional relationships with authors, reviewers, or sponsoring organisations. Where a conflict exists, responsibility should be transferred to another editor.
- Editors must ensure reviewers also declare conflicts of interest. If a conflict arises during review, the reviewer should be replaced.
Appeals and Complaints
- Provide authors with a clear process for appealing editorial decisions within the journal’s specified timeframe.
- Handle complaints relating to editorial conduct, reviewer behaviour, or publication ethics professionally, confidentially, and with appropriate documentation.