Ethical Statement

The Al Qasimia University Journal of Islamic Economics is highly committed to upholding ethics in publication and quality of articles. The Journal strives to abide by the Code of Conduct as defined by the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE). Conformance to standards of ethical behavior is therefore expected of all parties involved, including authors, editors and reviewers.

1. Duties of the Publisher. Al Qasimia University guarantees the resources needed for sound editorial work, including the online submission system, the Turnitin screening license, and the Scientific Publishing Department responsible for electronic and print production. The publisher protects the editorial process from commercial or administrative interference, preserves the published record, and supports the editors in investigating misconduct. The publisher never influences the acceptance or rejection of any manuscript.
2. Duties of the Editor-in-Chief. The Editor-in-Chief holds final responsibility for editorial decisions, applies the review policy uniformly, and bases decisions on scholarly merit, relevance to the journal scope, and compliance with these standards. The Editor-in-Chief documents the grounds of each decision in the OJS record.
3. Duties of the Managing Editor, the Editorial Secretary, and the Specialized Editors. The Managing Editor administers the online system, conducts all correspondence with authors and reviewers, and monitors timelines. The Editorial Secretary screens submissions for compliance with the Author Guidelines, conducts the Turnitin screening, and prepares the technical report. The specialized editors evaluate manuscripts and nominate reviewers within their fields. Each of them reports suspected misconduct to the Editor-in-Chief without delay.
4. Editorial Independence. Editorial decisions rest with the editors alone. Neither the publisher, nor advertisers, nor any external body may direct an editorial decision. The journal carries no advertising and charges no fees, which removes the two most common sources of commercial pressure.
5. Confidentiality. Editors and editorial staff disclose no information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, and the publisher where an investigation requires it.
6. Conflicts of Interest (Editors). An editor with a personal, financial, institutional, or scholarly conflict concerning a manuscript withdraws from handling it. The Editor-in-Chief reassigns the manuscript to an unconflicted editor and records the reassignment.
7. Fair and Impartial Decisions. Editors evaluate manuscripts on intellectual content without regard to the authors’ race, gender, religion, ethnic origin, citizenship, institutional affiliation, or political views.
8. Duties of Reviewers. Reviewers assist the editors in reaching decisions and help authors improve their work through objective, evidence-based, and courteous reports. Personal criticism of authors is unacceptable.
9. Reviewer Confidentiality. Reviewers treat manuscripts as confidential documents. Reviewers may not show, discuss, or share a manuscript with others, and may not use its content before publication.
10. Reviewer Competence and Timeliness. A reviewer who feels unqualified for a manuscript, or unable to complete the review within the stated period, notifies the editor at once and declines the assignment.
11. Reviewer Conflicts of Interest. Reviewers disclose any conflict arising from competitive, collaborative, or personal relationships with the authors or their institutions, and decline the assignment where a conflict exists.
12. Duties of Authors. Authors submit original work, present an accurate account of the research, describe methods with enough detail for verification, and cite the work of others accurately.
13. Originality and Plagiarism. Authors submit entirely original work and attribute every use of the words or ideas of others. Plagiarism in any form, including translated plagiarism, constitutes misconduct. The journal screens every submission, and every accepted version before production, with Turnitin under a maximum overall similarity of 20 percent, subject to the qualitative examination in the Plagiarism Policy.
14. Duplicate, Redundant, and Concurrent Submission. Authors may not submit the same manuscript to more than one journal at the same time, and may not publish substantially the same research in more than one venue. Prior conference presentation requires disclosure at submission.
15. Authorship and Contributorship. Authorship is limited to persons who made a substantial contribution to the conception, execution, or interpretation of the study and who approved the final version. All persons meeting these conditions appear as authors. Contributors who do not meet them appear in the acknowledgments. The journal accepts a maximum of five authors per article.
16. Changes in Authorship. Requests to add, remove, or reorder authors after submission require a written explanation and the signed agreement of all authors, including any author removed. The Editor-in-Chief examines the request under the relevant COPE flowchart before any change.
17. Acknowledgment of Funding. Authors disclose all sources of financial support for the research and state the role of the funder, if any, in the study design or writing.
18. Disclosure of Competing Interests. Authors disclose all financial and non-financial interests capable of influencing the interpretation of their work, in a statement within the manuscript.
19. Research Involving Human Participants. Studies involving human participants, including surveys and interviews, require prior approval from a competent research ethics committee, and the manuscript states the approving body and approval reference.
20. Research Involving Animals. Where a study involves animals, authors confirm compliance with applicable institutional and national standards. This clause applies rarely in the journal’s field and remains in force for completeness.
21. Informed Consent. Authors obtain informed consent from human participants and state so in the manuscript. Identifying details of participants appear only with documented consent.
22. Privacy and Protection of Personal Data. Authors anonymize personal data wherever possible and comply with applicable data-protection law in the collection and storage of research data.
23. Use of Copyrighted Material. Authors obtain written permission for the reproduction of copyrighted material beyond fair quotation, including images, tables, and extended texts, and supply the permission upon request.
24. Data Accuracy and Research Records. Authors retain the data and records underlying their results for a minimum of five years after publication and provide them to the editors upon reasonable request during an investigation.
25. Fabrication, Falsification, and Image Manipulation. Fabricating data, falsifying results, and manipulating images in a way which changes their evidentiary meaning constitute misconduct and lead to rejection or retraction.
26. Citation Manipulation. Adding citations which do not contribute to the scholarly content, whether to inflate any author’s or any journal’s citation record, constitutes misconduct. The journal never requires citation of its own articles as a condition of acceptance.
27. Peer-Review Manipulation. Suggesting fabricated reviewers, supplying false reviewer contact details, or interfering with the review process constitutes misconduct and leads to immediate rejection and notification of the author’s institution.
28. Allegations of Research Misconduct. Any person may report suspected misconduct, before or after publication, to the Editor-in-Chief. The journal examines allegations under the procedure in Section 33 and the relevant COPE flowcharts, regardless of the submission’s status or the time elapsed since publication.
29. Corrections, Retractions, and Expressions of Concern. The journal corrects or retracts published work, or issues an expression of concern, under the standalone policy in the Corrections and Retractions page, consistent with COPE Retraction Guidelines.
30. Post-Publication Discussion. The journal welcomes substantiated scholarly critique of published articles. Readers may submit comments to the Editor-in-Chief. The journal offers the original authors a right of reply and publishes exchanges of scholarly value.
31. Intellectual Property. The journal applies the copyright and licensing terms in the Copyright and Licensing page to all published content and respects the intellectual property rights of third parties.
32. Artificial Intelligence. The use of generative AI by authors, reviewers, and editors is governed by the standalone Artificial Intelligence Policy.
33. Procedure upon Suspected Misconduct. (1) The Editor-in-Chief gathers the documentary evidence. (2) The journal informs the author or other concerned party and requests a written response within twenty working days. (3) The Editor-in-Chief, with at least one unconflicted board member, evaluates the response against the evidence and the relevant COPE flowchart. (4) Outcomes range from acceptance of the explanation, to correction, rejection, retraction, a ban on future submissions for a defined period, and notification of the author’s institution in serious cases. (5) The journal records every stage and retains the file.

This statement draws on the COPE Core Practices (publicationethics.org/core-practices) and the DOAJ Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.