Policies for authors
Authorship, conflicts of interest, preprints, AI usage, data availability, and licensing.
These are the policies every OAJEA submission is expected to comply with, covering who should be listed as an author, how to handle conflicts of interest, and what you may and may not do with preprints, AI tools, and prior text.
Authorship and contributorship#
Everyone listed as an author must have made a substantial intellectual contribution to the work — typically some combination of conceiving or designing the study, acquiring or analysing the data, and drafting or critically revising the manuscript — and must have approved the final version and agreed to be accountable for it. Contributions that do not meet this bar, such as supplying funding, providing routine technical support, or general supervision without intellectual input, are better acknowledged in the Acknowledgements section rather than credited with authorship. Every author must have seen and approved the final manuscript before submission, and the corresponding author confirms this on the submission form on behalf of all co-authors.
Note
Author order should reflect an agreement among the authors about relative contribution; OAJEA does not mandate a particular ordering convention, but expects the order to be settled before submission, not renegotiated during review.
Conflicts of interest#
Authors must disclose, in the manuscript's Conflict of Interest statement, any financial or personal relationship that could be seen as influencing the work — funding sources, paid consultancies, patents or patent applications related to the work, and equity or board positions in a company with a stake in the outcome. Disclosure is not a barrier to publication; failing to disclose a relevant conflict, if discovered later, is grounds for a published correction.
Preprints#
OAJEA permits prior posting of a manuscript to a recognised preprint server (such as an institutional repository or a discipline-specific preprint service) before or during peer review. Posting a preprint does not count as prior publication and does not disqualify a submission. If your manuscript has a preprint, disclose its DOI or URL in the cover letter, and update the preprint with a link to the published version once your article is available, so readers can find the version of record.
AI usage#
Generative AI tools may be used during manuscript preparation — for example, to improve language, suggest phrasing, or assist with code — but their use must be disclosed in the Methods or Acknowledgements section, describing which tool was used and for what purpose. An AI tool cannot be listed as an author: authorship requires the capacity to take accountability for the work, which a tool cannot do. Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, and integrity of any content produced with AI assistance, including verifying that generated text does not misrepresent sources or introduce fabricated citations.
Important
Undisclosed AI-generated text discovered during review or after publication is treated the same as any other undisclosed authorship or integrity issue, up to and including rejection or retraction.
Plagiarism and text recycling#
Manuscripts must be substantially original. Reusing your own previously published text at length ("self-plagiarism" or text recycling) without citation and without clearly marking it as reproduced material is treated the same as plagiarising another author's work. Short, clearly attributed methodological descriptions that are standard in the field are acceptable; verbatim reuse of results, discussion, or substantial passages from your own earlier papers is not, unless it is quoted and cited. Manuscripts found to contain plagiarised or uncredited recycled text are declined during review or retracted after publication.
Data availability#
Authors must include a Data Availability statement describing where the data underlying the manuscript's conclusions can be found — a repository link and accession identifier where possible. If data cannot be made public, the statement must explain the restriction (for example, participant privacy, third-party ownership, or a regulatory constraint) rather than being left out.
Corrections and retractions#
If an error is discovered after publication that does not undermine the article's overall conclusions, OAJEA publishes a formal correction linked to the original article. Where an error, data fabrication, plagiarism, or other integrity issue undermines the reliability of the findings, the article is retracted following COPE's retraction guidelines, with a public retraction notice explaining the reason. In both cases the original article remains accessible, marked accordingly, and keeps its DOI.
Tip
If you discover an error in your own published article, email the editorial office directly at [email protected] rather than waiting for someone else to find it — self-reported corrections are handled the same way and reflect well on the integrity of the original submission.
Licensing#
All OAJEA articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Authors retain copyright in their work; the licence permits anyone to copy, redistribute, and adapt the article for any purpose, including commercial use, provided appropriate credit is given to the original authors. OAJEA charges no fee for this — publication is free for authors and free for readers.