Publication Ethics and Policies

jesp publishes only peer-reviewed, original scholarship and is committed to maintaining the highest standards of publication ethics. jesp supports the Committee on Publication Ethics (cope), and the editorial team is guided by its Code of Conduct. The editors also encourage external reviewers to follow cope’s Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers.

All authors listed on any papers submitted to jesp must be in agreement that (1) everyone named as an author qualifies as an author according to disciplinary norms and (2) no one who would reasonably be considered an author has been excluded. Contributors seeking guidance on who should be listed as an author are advised to consult the icmje definitions of the roles of authors and contributors. (These definitions were formulated with medical journals in mind, but they have been widely adopted across the humanities and social sciences.) In the event of an authorship dispute or change request at any stage of the publishing process, the editorial team will be guided by the relevant cope guidelines and flowcharts in deciding how to proceed.

jesp considers all forms of ghost and gift authorship to be unethical. (“Ghost authors” are individuals—typically but not always paid—who are not listed as authors but who nonetheless make substantial contributions to a paper or submission. “Gift authors” are individuals who make little or no contribution to a paper but are nonetheless listed as authors.) Any allegation of ghost or gift authorship will be investigated by the editorial team in accordance with cope guidelines. If ghost or gift authors are identified, the list of authors will be amended, either before publication or through a post-publication correction.

All submissions to jesp should contain original work produced by the named authors. The words or ideas of others must be appropriately acknowledged and cited. Sources that have been influential in shaping the submitted work should also be cited. Any information obtained privately—in conversation, correspondence, or discussion with third parties, for example—must not be used or reported without explicit, written permission from the source.

Plagiarism is the use of someone else’s words, figures, images, or ideas without acknowledgement. Allegations or suspicions of plagiarism will be thoroughly investigated by the editorial team in accordance with cope guidelines. Any submission that is found to include plagiarized material, in whole or in part, will be rejected. If plagiarism is discovered after publication, the editorial team will issue a correction or retraction in accordance with the procedures outlined below. jesp expects editors and external reviewers, as well as readers, to notify the editorial team of cases of suspected plagiarism by contacting the managing editor.

Text recycling—sometimes called self-plagiarism—involves an author’s reuse of passages from their own previously published texts without proper attribution. The editorial team will assess submissions that contain recycled text in accordance with the relevant cope guidelines. Submissions that contain unacceptable recycling will be returned to the author(s) for adjustment or rejected. If text recycling is discovered after publication, the editorial team will follow the correction and retraction procedures outlined below.

Any manuscript submitted to jesp must be attributable to the listed author(s) as their original work, with any ideas or words that are not their own clearly indicated as such. Authors are fully responsible for the contents of their manuscript, including elements produced with ai assistance, and are therefore liable for any breach of the standards and policies articulated here.

The use of generative ai tools can complicate questions of attributability in ways that are difficult to delineate and that are subject to change over time. The editorial team regards uses of ai that undermine the attributability of a manuscript’s contents to its author(s) as grounds for rejection of the manuscript.

Authors are required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest, financial or otherwise. Before publication, authors of accepted manuscripts must declare any sources of financial support of their work in an acknowledgments footnote. (Authors should not disclose funding sources prior to acceptance, since doing so may compromise anonymous review.)

Editors and referees are required to recuse themselves from the review of individual manuscripts if they have a potential conflict of interest. jesp encourages editors to be mindful of potential conflicts of interest when inviting external reviewers.

Papers are published in pdf format at https://www.jesp.org and receive a permanent doi. jesp does not follow a set publication schedule; instead, issues are published on a rolling basis when a sufficient number of papers have been copyedited and typeset. There are no publication fees for authors, and public access to papers is free of charge. Authors retain copyright in their work, and papers are typically published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license, though authors can request a different Creative Commons license if one is required for funding purposes.

Once papers are published, the published version of record is fixed and cannot be altered. (In exceptional cases, corrections or retractions may be issued.)

As the copyright holders, authors are free to share their jesp papers widely by, for example, posting the published versions on personal or institutional websites, uploading them to repositories like PhilArchive and ssrn, or sharing them via email or social media. Authors are also free to reuse parts or all of their papers in future work (for example, in a book or edited volume) and may authorize reprints elsewhere.

Assuming that the standard Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license is chosen, readers are permitted to share papers freely as well, provided they are unmodified, properly attributed, and not used for commercial purposes. If a paper is published under a different Creative Commons license, some of these restrictions (especially regarding commercial use or adaptations) may not apply. Readers should refer to the specific license under which a particular paper is published for more details.

Note that the Creative Commons license specifies what others may do with a paper without further permission. The author(s) may always authorize additional uses—including commercial uses—even if the chosen license does not allow them. The permissions granted by the original license cannot be revoked, however.

jesp’s peer-review processes are designed to prevent errors of scholarship and instances of authorial misconduct. It may nevertheless sometimes be necessary to correct—or in the case of serious misconduct—retract a published article. If an author discovers an error or inaccuracy in their published work, it is the author’s obligation to notify the journal. The editors-in-chief will review possible errors together with the editorial team and will, if necessary, publish a correction. Any post-publication corrections will be clearly indicated on (and easily accessible from) the publication page of the original work. Alleged cases of misconduct (such as plagiarism, redundant publication, or ghost authorship) will be investigated by the editorial team in accordance with cope guidelines as far as possible. Any decision pertaining to retraction of a published article will be made only after consultation with the advisory board.

jesp is committed to ensuring the accessibility and long-term integrity of the scholarly record. All content published in jesp is archived both internally and through Portico, a trusted third-party digital preservation service. This ensures that the journal’s content remains accessible even in the event of platform failure, technological obsolescence, or journal discontinuation.