🔎 1. Principle
Editorial decisions on every submission to IJTIMES are made on the basis of scholarly merit, methodological soundness, and scope-fit alone, as assessed through external peer review. The publisher, KG Publication, plays no role in editorial decisions on individual submissions. The Editor-in-Chief and the editorial team operate independently of any commercial, organisational, or personal interest of the publisher, and the publisher recognises and supports this independence as a condition of the publishing relationship.
📑 2. Editorial Submissions Policy
The journal recognises that members of the editorial team and the active reviewer pool may, in the course of their own scholarly work, submit manuscripts to the journal. To prevent any actual or perceived conflict of interest, the journal applies the following protocol to every such submission, in alignment with COPE guidance.
2.1 Categories of Editorial Submissions
An editorial submission is any manuscript on which one or more of the authors holds at least one of the following roles at the time of submission:
- Editor-in-Chief, Honorary Editor, Publication or Managing Editor, Associate Editor, Section Editor, or Proofing Editor of the journal
- Active reviewer in the journal's reviewer pool, defined as having completed a review for the journal in the preceding 24 months
2.2 Handling Protocol
- Independent editor assignment. The submission is assigned to an editor who is not the author, is not in a direct reporting line with the author, and does not share an institutional affiliation with the author.
- Recusal of the author-editor. The author-editor is fully recused from any editorial discussion, decision, or workflow access concerning the submission.
- Double-blind external peer review. The submission undergoes double-blind external peer review by reviewers who are not part of the editorial team and who declare no conflict with the author-editor.
- Independent decision. The acceptance, revision, or rejection decision is made by the independent handling editor on the basis of the external reviews, without consultation with the author-editor.
- Transparency declaration. Every published article that is an editorial submission carries an explicit declaration noting the independent handling.
- Audit trail. The journal retains a complete workflow record for every editorial submission, available on request to indexing bodies and for audit purposes.
📋 3. Public Commitment on Proportion
The journal commits to keeping the proportion of articles authored by editorial team members and active reviewers below 15 per cent in any rolling 12-month period. This figure is monitored by the Editor-in-Chief on a per-issue basis and reported transparently in the journal's annual editorial summary.
📊 4. Reporting
IJTIMES publishes an annual transparency note in the first issue of each calendar year, stating the proportion of editorial submissions in the preceding year and the actions taken to maintain editorial integrity.
⛔ 5. Conflicts of Interest Declared by Editors
All editors complete an annual conflict-of-interest declaration covering personal, financial, institutional, and intellectual interests. Editors recuse themselves from any submission in which they have a competing interest with the authors, including but not limited to recent co-authorship (within five years), shared institutional affiliation, doctoral supervisory or supervisee relationship, or financial interest.
🏢 6. Independence from the Publisher
KG Publication, the publisher of IJTIMES, plays no role in editorial decisions on individual submissions. The publisher is responsible for the journal's hosting, technical infrastructure, financial administration, and indexing-application coordination. The publisher does not have access to the editorial workflow for individual submissions, and does not see manuscripts or peer-review reports prior to publication. Publisher details are available on the Publisher page.
📢 7. Concerns and Complaints
Concerns about editorial independence or about the handling of any specific submission may be raised confidentially with the Editor-in-Chief at editor@ijtimes.com. Complaints that cannot be resolved at editor level may be escalated to COPE under the COPE complaints process.
This policy is reviewed annually and was last revised on 25 April 2026.