Publication Ethics

During the peer review process, reviewers are selected by the editorial board of the relevant book series on the basis of their expertise in the field. The editorial board evaluates the reviewers’ opinions and decides whether to accept, request revisions or reject the manuscript. Invited reviewers must hold at least a PhD or an equivalent research qualification, or possess relevant, certified expertise, and must be independent in every respect with regard to the manuscript under review. During the peer review process, the editorial board pays particular attention to verifying authenticity, detecting plagiarism, and ensuring the ethical use of artificial intelligence tools, for which the publisher provides technical assistance as required. The general principles of the peer review process are summarised in the Peer Review Policy.

Procedure for managing conflicts of interest involving authors, editors and reviewers: the review process is conducted by the editorial board of the relevant book series in accordance with principles agreed with the publisher. Open access publication is decided by the editorial board. Although the publisher is not authorised to participate in editorial decision-making, it has the right to reject a manuscript for publication if it provides a detailed explanation. It also has the right to retract a publication in the event of a serious violation of professional standards. The publisher is entitled to view the peer reviews associated with the publication. Should the publisher identify any issues during the peer review or editorial process, it will endeavour to resolve them by involving the parties concerned and to report any conflicts of interest to the editorial board.

In the event of a problem, complaint or request for redress, please contact the publisher’s central office (info@openaccess.pub). We will investigate any complaints or requests received with the involvement of the relevant parties (e.g. author, co-publisher, editorial board).

The publisher treats the data of the creators, editors and funders of the publications as confidential and uses them solely for the purposes of maintaining contact and handling contractual matters. Information on data protection relating to the publication platform is set out in the Privacy Policy.

To provide the website’s multilingual semantic search and summarisation functions, we use language models provided by OpenAI, which draw exclusively on the books’ metadata, bibliographies and full texts as their source.

The publication process is summarised in detail in the Publish with us section, from which the Manuscript Submission Guidelines can also be downloaded. Information on funding models and costs is provided on the Publication Costs page.