Policies & Publishing Standards

Editorial & Peer Review

• Peer Review Policy — How manuscripts are assessed, reviewed, and decided upon.
• Reviewer Responsibilities — Expectations and responsibilities for peer reviewers.
• Peer Review Confidentiality — Confidentiality obligations covering manuscripts and reviewer identities during review.
• Editorial Independence — Principles separating editorial decisions from commercial or personal interests.
• Editorial Board — The editorial governance structure for PenScholar journals.

Research & Publication Ethics

• Publication Ethics — PenScholar’s core ethical principles for scholarly publishing.
• Authorship & Contributorship — How authorship is determined and what is expected of authors.
• AI Use & Disclosure — Responsible use of AI and generative AI tools in research, manuscript preparation, peer review, and editorial work, including disclosure requirements.
• Conflicts of Interest — Disclosure expectations for authors, reviewers, and editors.
• Research Misconduct — How PenScholar addresses plagiarism, fabrication, and duplicate publication.
• Research Involving Human Participants — Ethical approval and consent expectations for research involving human participants.
• Research Integrity — Honest reporting, fabrication and falsification, plagiarism, authorship, and data and image integrity in the conduct of research itself.

Authors & Submissions

• Author Guidelines — Complete preparation and submission requirements for authors.
• Submission Requirements — What to confirm before submitting a manuscript.
• Manuscript Preparation — Formatting, structure, and reference requirements.
• Ethics & Integrity Declarations — Authorship, ORCID, research ethics, and originality declarations required at submission.
• Conflicts, Funding & Data Availability — Disclosures required at the point of submission.
• Figures, Tables & Supplementary Materials — Requirements for figures, tables, and supplementary files.

Open Access & Rights

• Open Access Policy — How access to published research is provided.
• Copyright & Licensing — Copyright ownership and licensing terms for published work.
• Author Rights — What authors retain the right to do with their own published work.
• Reuse & Permissions — Terms for reusing or requesting permission to reuse published content.
• Publication Fees — Article processing charge information by journal.

Corrections & Retractions

• Corrections & Updates — How the published record is corrected after publication.
• Retractions — When and how a published article may be retracted.

Research Data & Transparency

Conflicts of interest and human-participants research are covered under Research & Publication Ethics above; this category covers research data, data sharing, and the funding/data-availability disclosures made at submission.

• Research Data & Data Sharing — PenScholar’s approach to data availability, responsible data sharing, repositories, sensitive data, and reproducibility.
• Funding & Data Availability Disclosure — Declaring funding sources, grant numbers, and how underlying research data can be accessed at submission.

Accessibility & Legal

• Privacy Policy — How personal information submitted to PenScholar is handled.
• Terms of Use — The terms governing use of the PenScholar Journals website.
• Accessibility — PenScholar’s approach to a website that is usable by as many people as possible.