The Basque Journal of People & Public Organizations’ management is committed to maintaining the ethical standards featured in this text in its editorial policy. These principles take as a reference the guidelines published by COPE (Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Members of the Editorial Board). For this purpose, all parties involved in the process -members of the Editorial Board, members of the Advisory Board (referees) and authors- must know and abide by the following principles:

Members of the Editorial Board:

The Editorial Board will decide whether or not to publish submitted papers after consulting the reports of the referees and will only take into consideration the relevance, originality, clarity and suitability to the Journal’s subject matter of the manuscripts. Non-discrimination regarding the race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnic origin, country of origin, nationality or political orientation of the authors will be guaranteed. The Editorial Board must offer mechanisms for appeal against editorial decisions.

Members of the Editorial Board and other staff associated with the journal will preserve unfailingly the anonymity of all the persons involved in the process of evaluation of papers ant they will guarantee that the materials sent by authors will be properly handled, avoiding its disclosure beyond those involved in the evaluation.

Members of the Editorial Board must report if there’s a conflict of interest regarding the decision to publish a paper. In such case, they will abstain from the decision-making process.

The Editorial Board shall publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies should they be necessary.

The Editorial Board commits to constantly improve the Journal regarding the quality of its articles, its indexation and visibility. To that end, the opinions of the authors, referees and Advisory board shall be requested.

If, as a result of the evaluation process, the Editorial Board would receive serious allegations about malpractice or misconduct by the authors, they will be given the opportunity to offer the appropriate explanations.

Authors:

The authors shall be held liable for the content of their manuscripts and they must indicate that they are the authors. They must justify, when applicable, the reasons for possible changes in the authorship of the text.

Authors must ensure that the content of the paper submitted to the journal is original and unpublished. If some sections of the paper have been published, this situation must be reported to the Technical Secretary. Likewise, they must ensure that their work is not the result of partial or complete plagiarism of another one, and that they have not omitted intentionally bibliographic citations.

Authors should ensure that, at the time of submitting a manuscript for its consideration by the Journal, it is not being assessed at the same time in other publications.

If the author or authors are aware of conflicts of interest, actual or potential, in the evaluation process of their manuscript, they must report such situation to the Technical Secretary. In this sense, the will have the right to inform, in writing and in a well-founded way, to the Technical Secretary on conflicts of interest with members of the Editorial Board of the Journal or potential referees.

Authors have the right to know the content of the reviewers' evaluations and must make the corresponding improvements or changes if the result of the evaluation is "publishable as it is" or "publishable after revision"

Referees:

After agreeing to review an article, referees must respect the agreed time periods; if they are unable to meet a deadline they should give the Technical Secretary sufficient prior warning of this.

Reviews must be conducted in an objective, confidential and impartial way.

Referees agree to offer precise bibliographical details on important texts on the subject matter that the author may have omitted.

If the review of an article supposes a conflict with the referee’s own interests, the referee must report it and reject the review proposal.

Evaluators should inform the Technical Secretary of any situation regarding the manuscripts evaluated that, in their view, transgresses the ethical policy of the journal and / or basic standards of scientific production, such as plagiarism, dishonest presentation of results, fabrication, falsification, manipulation and / or omission of evidence.

Plagiarism and malpractice:

Plagiarism is defined as: the use or reproduction of expressions and ideas of other authors or papers as an own original work without a correct indication of their origin or without specification of the source; and the abusive use of expressions and thoughts of other authors, even if the source is included.

Scientific malpractice is defined as: the fabrication either in whole or in part of the data from a research included in the submitted manuscript; the forge or the manipulation of the data; authorship conflicts, and fictitious authorship.

The Editorial Board will propose to the management of IVAP the adoption of the appropriate measures in the case of plagiarism or scientific malpractice. The authors will be responsible either legally or scientifically for the violation of the rights of others or the principles previously enunciated.

Editorial policy:

Manuscripts can be sent all year long. Papers are evaluated as they are received, by the following procedure: a) after receipt of the article, it is communicated to the sender to the email address indicated; b) the Editorial Board decides to reject it (in the case of manuscripts that are not related to our aims and scopes) or to start the external review process, which will be duly communicated; c) anonymous peer-review of the paper by the double blind procedure (if the reviews are discrepant the Editorial Board could send the paper to an additional reviewer) conducted by experts in the field concerned; d) in view of the reports of the evaluators, a final judgment will be drawn up by the Editorial Board on whether to accept for publication or to reject the manuscript, which will be communicated to the author. This process has an average duration of 16 weeks from the receipt of the manuscript by the Technical Secretary (alexander-rodriguez@ivap.eus ) until it is published. During this time, authors are asked to avoid postulating their manuscript in other journals.

The Journal does not charge author processing or submission charges. Authors will not have to pay any amount for the publication of their article. The editing costs will be assumed by the IVAP and the transfer of the intellectual property rights by the authors to the IVAP will be remunerated to authors in accordance with the fees provided in the current regulations.