Notes from the editors: Ethical guidelines at Journal of Operations Management
为《运营管理期刊》的作者提供了七条伦理指南，涵盖投稿透明度、数据披露、利益冲突、审稿义务等，旨在维护学术社区的诚信与互惠。
A lot has been written about what constitutes good reviewing and editing, and the guidelines on how to prepare a manuscript for publication are equally abundant. But we feel it is equally important to clarify and discuss the foundations of what constitutes proper author etiquette. There are also many ethical questions related to authoring manuscripts that should be explicated, if only to avoid confusion. Again, the impetus for writing this editorial is empirical: unfortunately, we run into problems and misunderstandings sufficiently often to warrant some reflection and guidance. Here are seven things all JOM authors should keep in mind as they think of their professional duties as authors. The best way to be open about these issues toward the editors is to include with every submission a detailed cover letter. We receive cover letters with less than 50 percent of the submissions—we would like this percentage to be a hundred. In your cover letter, do not just tell us why your manuscript is important and why it makes a contribution, take it also as an opportunity to provide full disclosure and tell us everything we need to know about the manuscript. We also expect our editorial team to follow some simple rules to prevent conflicts of interest. In our experience, by far the most common form of plagiarism is self-plagiarism, which is re-using material one has used in previous publications. We strongly recommend all authors to pay close attention to this. There are no hard and fast rules on what constitutes plagiarism, but you should know that all manuscripts submitted to JOM are submitted to CrossCheck (http://www.ithenticate.com/products/crosscheck), a software that detects plagiarism. The CrossCheck output tells the Editor-in-Chief what percentage of the text in the manuscript can be found in other published sources. Typically, for legitimate manuscripts, this percentage is less than five percent. If the percentage is ten and above, we usually take a closer look at what is causing this; anything over twenty percent is always a cause for concern, and we will contact, without exception, the author and ask for clarification. Sometimes the reason for the high percentage is legitimate and innocuous, for example, it is due to the posting of a working paper version of the manuscript on a web site. This problem can be solved by removing the working paper from the site. In the absence of a legitimate explanation, we typically desk reject the manuscript, because all manuscripts submitted to JOM must be original contributions not published in other sources. It is up to the discretion of the Editor-in-Chief to decide whether a revised version of the manuscript can be submitted. The other form of plagiarism—passing someone else's work as one's own—is obviously a huge cause for concern when it happens and we take it very seriously, because it amounts to intellectual theft. However, this form of plagiarism is so rare at JOM we do not feel it needs to be addressed here. We all know that collecting good data takes time and effort, and getting more than one paper out of a database is tempting. This is fine, but authors must be very clear about this in their submissions. Here is our simple rule of thumb: the data are primary data if and only if they were collected specifically for the purpose of the submitted manuscript. If they were not, the authors must disclose this in a cover letter. Whenever no declaration is made, the editors and the reviewers will assume the data are primary data. If it turns out later in the review process the data are secondary, the Editor-in-Chief may move to reject the paper. Again, using secondary data is not a problem—pretending as if secondary data were primary is. Disclosure is particularly important if the data were collected or the dataset constructed by the researchers. If the authors use already published data (e.g., the Compustat database), then it is obvious it is secondary data, and no further clarifications are required. Disclosure about data also encompasses author effort. For example, if you use a survey database where the data were collected in a collective effort by a group of colleagues, we need to know what your specific role in the data collection effort was. Please be as specific as possible in the cover letter about your role in the data collection process. Sometimes reviewers and Associate Editors handling the manuscript should be provided access to raw data. Unless there are legal or other compelling factors that prohibit raw data disclosure, authors should provide their raw data upon request as well. All data submitted to the journal will be treated confidentially. While we hope JOM would be our authors' first choice, some manuscripts that are submitted to us are clearly rejects from other journals. Our preference aside, there is nothing wrong with submitting to JOM a manuscript that was rejected from another journal. But again, transparency is crucial. If you are submitting a rejected manuscript to us, we strongly encourage you to provide full disclosure of its history. We need to know where the paper was submitted, why it was rejected, and what you did in preparation before submitting to JOM to remedy the problems identified in the reviews. If we find out that the reviewers raised pertinent questions and you chose not to address them (resubmitted the essentially same manuscript to JOM without any changes), we will reject the manuscript. We consider such “recycling” of manuscripts both unprofessional and unethical, because it is a tell-tale sign that authors are more interested in getting the paper published than making sure its quality is intact. We really do not want to see “I reviewed this exactly same paper for Journal XYZ just six months ago” in a reviewer report. However, if your manuscript was rejected from another journal because it was out of the scope of the journal, this obviously does not warrant changes before re-submitting to JOM. Obviously, an Editorial Review Board member or an ad hoc reviewer must never agree to review a paper written by a close colleague, and editors (Editors-in-Chief, Department Editors, Associate Editors) must similarly recuse themselves from evaluating the work of colleagues in situations where conflict of interest is possible. We would classify as close colleague your own doctoral students, students on whose doctoral committees you have served, colleagues with whom you have co-authored in the past five years, and colleagues who are at the same university as you are. Importantly, sometimes conflicts of interest extend to authors as well. Most authors do their research work as part of their salaried job and have no conflicts of interest in submitting their manuscripts to JOM. But in addition to our salaries as faculty members, many of us write books, sell software, give training seminars, and do consulting. Now, if the publication of an article in JOM links either directly or indirectly to such sources of extra income, you must declare this in a cover letter at the time of manuscript submission. This does not mean we think you cannot be trusted, instead, what we mean is that the editors and the reviewers need to know. For example, if you promote in your manuscript a specific statistical method and benefit financially from the sale of a software that implements said method, the editors and the reviewers need to know. What is a significant amount of extra income? We use the guidelines of the U.S. National Institute of Health: all remuneration over $5000 per year must be reported. Remuneration encompasses not only salary and consulting fees, but also royalties, honoraria, paid authorship, and capital gains. If you are unsure about whether or not to disclose something, we would rather have you err on the side of disclosing more than what is needed, hence, “if in doubt, spell it out.” We hold ourselves to the same standards as Editors-in-Chief. When you receive a review on a manuscript you submitted and are invited to revise and resubmit your manuscript, it is your responsibility to address all comments you have received from the reviewers and the editors. Ignoring any single point in a review is sufficient grounds for rejection at the re-submission stage, so please pay close attention to this. The best option is to write a point-by-point response to the review and send this along with the revised manuscript. This ensures you have addressed all comments and concerns, and it helps the reviewers and the Associate Editor enormously in navigating the revision. However, addressing reviewer comments does not mean you have to do exactly as the reviewers or the Associate Editor tell you or that you have to modify the manuscript accordingly. Reviewers and editors are your peers, not your superiors. It is perfectly fine to disagree with a review comment, but this disagreement must be detailed and explicit. And just like we require our reviewers and editors to maintain a scholarly, respectful, and constructive communication style, we expect the same from authors in their communication, no matter how vigorously they disagree with a specific point. Everyone who is associated with JOM has had many of their manuscripts rejected; we all know how disappointing and discouraging rejections are. We fully understand the urge to contact the editor and challenge the rejection, ask for clarification and guidance. Please, avoid the temptation: we have already told you in our decision letter all we want to tell you about the decision. We simply do not have the time to offer further personal editorial services to help authors “fix” rejected manuscripts. The reason is very practical: We absolutely love discussion and debate, and in an ideal world, we would happily discuss each rejected manuscript at great length with the authors. In the real world, we serve the journal with little or no relief from our other duties as faculty members. Last year, in addition to the journal restructuring effort, we both handled over three hundred manuscripts, and ended up devoting somewhere around 600 hours of our time into managing the journal. Please be considerate before you ask us to commit the 601st. We do everything we can to treat all authors and all manuscripts with the care and the expertise they deserve. We encourage our reviewers and Associate Editors to use their expertise to write developmental reviews. We ask you to return the courtesy and respect the decision we make. The only situation in which we encourage you to contact us is if there is a material, factual error, in the review you have received. It has to be an unambiguous factual mistake, not a question of interpretation or policy. It should go without saying that we will not enter into a debate about whether the manuscript is or is not within the scope of the journal: if the Editor-in-Chief rules your manuscript to be out of scope, then it is by definition out of scope. Policy is always our prerogative. We feel compelled to point this out, because the vast majority of author challenges are challenges on policy and interpretation, not fact. In the case of a material, factual error, this is what you should do. Create a table with two columns: “Your Factual Claim” and “My Factual Claim.” Then, write in the “Your Factual Claim” column all the factual statements that you found in the review that you think were not only incorrect but also pertinent to the decision to reject the manuscript. In the “My Factual Claim” column, write what you think is the correct factual claim. Then, e-mail this table along with a cover letter to both Editors-in-Chief. We promise to look at your claim and determine whether corrective measures should be taken. Please keep in mind that nobody serving in an editorial role in the JOM Team has any incentive to reject good papers. Just the opposite, the more high-quality papers we publish, the better for the JOM community. Like we have mentioned in earlier editorials as well as various talks and conference meetings, we live in a digital world and are not page constrained. Accepting one author's manuscript for publication does not “take a slot away” from other authors. There are no slots. Whenever you send a manuscript to us and it is sent out to review, an Editor-in-Chief, a Department Editor, an Associate Editor, and two reviewers will take time off their busy schedule to give attention to your work. If you submit manuscripts to JOM, we expect you to volunteer your time as a reviewer as well. It should not come as a surprise that the demand for reviews exceeds the supply. Consequently, from now on, we have decided to enforce this as editorial policy: the EIC reserves the right to desk reject a manuscript if none of the authors on the manuscript have volunteered their time to review for the journal or any one of the authors consistently declines review requests sent to them from the journal. If you decide to submit manuscripts to JOM, you cannot simultaneously decline requests to review your colleagues' work. Declining to review due to a busy teaching schedule or vacation is no longer considered legitimate. What would you think if we desk rejected your manuscript, saying we are too busy to look at it because we are on vacation? Well, this is exactly how we feel when reviewers decline our review requests. JOM is a scholarly community that operates solely on the basis of reciprocity. We also ask you to be considerate in terms of how many manuscripts with your name on them are in the review process at any given time. We would like this number to be one most of the time, occasionally it may be two. Three is already too many. All these seven points echo the same sentiment: we want JOM to be a scholarly community where the top OM scientists in the world challenge and support one another to produce the highest quality research possible, and where all scholars also volunteer their time to review the work of their peers. Our primary job as Editors-in-Chief is to facilitate unfettered academic debate, the fuel and the fire of scientific progress.