Publishing Ethics

Asian Journal of Business Research (AJBR) is committed to high ethical standards. It is the aim and top priority of this journal to provide an unbiased and principled platform for authors, editors, and reviewers. AJBR endeavours to take precautionary measures to ensure that transparent policies are strictly adhered to throughout the peer review process from the submission to the actual publication of manuscript.

AJBR is committed to the best practices within scholarly publishing and rigorous standards to ensure Publication Ethics are closely adhere to. It includes the adherence to professional code of conduct, originality of manuscript, zero tolerance towards (self) plagiarism and fraud, authorship principle, and assurance of non-conflict of interest.

Therefore, AJBR supports and promotes the guidelines, statements, and values found within the Committee on Publications Ethics. Any cases of academic or publishing misconduct on the part of authors, editors, reviewers, or staff will be duly appraised and dealt with accordingly.

The following are the Publication Ethics Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. AJBR policy or procedure that ad esses specific principles is stated as follows:

Peer review process

All of a journal’s content, apart from any editorial material that is clearly marked as such, shall be subject to peer-review. Peer review is defined as obtaining advice on individual manuscripts from reviewers, expert in the field. This process, as well as any policies related to the journal’s peer review procedures, are clearly described on the journal’s website. Therefore, all manuscripts submitted to AJBR are subject to editorial preliminary review and subsequently double-blind peer review. Double-blind review is defined as a review process wherein both the authors and the reviewers are anonymous. Peer review is defined as the evaluation of academic work by other academics of the same field. All AJBR reviewers are appointed based on their areas of expertise. They are invited to review and their performance is evaluated each time. Those who perform well and consistently will then be appointed as an Editorial Review Board member.

Duties / Responsibilities of Editors

The editors have complete responsibility and authority to reject/accept a manuscript.
The editors’ decisions to accept or reject a manuscript for publication are based only on its importance, originality, clarity, relevance to the scope of the Journal and quality.
The editors take on the responsibility for pursuing cases of suspected misconduct (e.g., plagiarism or fraudulent data) even in submissions they do not intend to publish.
The editor responsible for a specific submission has no conflict of interest with respect to the manuscript and to the author(s).
The members of the editorial board can publish in the Journal, but they must not exploit their position; in such a case, the submission is handled by another editor and peer review is handled independently of the author/editor.
The editorial system preserves anonymity of reviewers. The list of reviewers is published once a year (see: Editorial Board).
The editors monitor the peer review process regularly, trying to increase its efficiency and prevent delays. As such, each manuscript which has passed the preliminary review process will be sent to three independent reviewers. Editorial decision will be made if two reviews are completed and their comments as well as decisions of the manuscript are consistent.

Duties / Responsibilities of Reviewers

Editorial decisions are based on peer review. The reviewers are expected to maintain absolute confidentiality with regard to the contents of manuscripts. The reviews are to be conducted objectively and the referees are expected to express their views clearly with supporting reasons. The reviewers should have no conflict of interest with the authors and the subject matter of the research. Reviewers follows the following rules:
In short, the Editorial Board follows the following rules:

Reviews should be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author, bias towards the topic and method are inappropriate.
Reviewers should express their views clearly with constructive comments, supporting arguments and references as necessary and should not be defamatory or libelous.
Reviewers should respect the confidentiality of the material supplied to them and should not discuss unpublished manuscripts with colleagues, be it in person or online, or use the information in their own work.
If a reviewer wants to pass a review request on to a colleague, they should obtain the permission from the Managing Editor first.
Reviewers should point out relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors.

Duties/Responsibilities of the Authors

Authors must present accurate original research work followed by objective discussion bringing out significance. The paper should bring out details of the available literature and references. Further all the authors must have significantly contributed to the research. Inaccurate statement constitutes unethical behavior and is unacceptable. Authors must ensure that the submitted work is original and has not been published elsewhere, and if the authors have used the work of others the same has been appropriately cited or quoted. Authors must follow Applicable copyright laws and conventions. Permission must be sought for Copyright materials and reproduced only with permission and acknowledgement of source . Authors must ensure that submitted article is not sent out to other journal. The corresponding author must endure that all co-authors are included in the paper, and that the latter have seen and approved the final version of the paper before submission for publication. All sources of financial support should also be stated.

Open Access Policy

This is an Open Access journal. Users have the right to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of articles in this journal, or use them for any other lawful purpose.

Open Access enables authors to obtain the maximum possible exposure for their work. Freely available papers are read more, cited more, and have more impact than ones available only to paid subscribers. We believe that the establishment of a major Open Access journal in business study will lead others to establish Open Access journals for many sub-fields and specialties in business, reclaiming full control for the profession of its research output. We hope that this will lead the profession to a new norm in which all research is freely available

Article Processing Charge

Starting 26 August 2024, authors of articles accepted for publication will be required to pay an article processing charge (APC) of USD 200. The APC is introduced to cover editorial expenses and administrative cost. It should be paid after the authors are informed of the acceptance for publication. Please note that any additional cost or surcharge should be borne by the authors. The payment slip should be submitted via email. Letter of Acceptance will only be issued after the payment is received.

Payment information:
Beneficiary Name: PERTUBUHAN PENYELIDIKAN SARAWAK
Name of Bank: Public Bank Berhad
Bank Address: No. 3, Jalan Central, Pekan Sibu, 96000 Sibu, Sarawak
Account Number: 3212261913
Swift Code: PBBEMYKL

About Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the use or close imitation of the language and ideas of another author and representation of them as one’s own original work. Duplicate publication, sometimes called self-plagiarism, occurs when an author reuses substantial parts of his or her own published work without providing the appropriate references. This can range from getting an identical paper published in multiple journals, where authors add small amounts of new data to a previous paper.

The editors will judge any case of which they become aware (either by their own knowledge of and reading about the literature, or when alerted by referees) on its own merits. If a case of plagiarism comes to light after a paper is published in AJBR Journals, the journal will conduct a preliminary investigation. If plagiarism is found, the journal will contact the author’s institute and funding agencies. A determination of misconduct will lead the Journal to run a statement, bidirectionally linked online to and from the original paper, to note the plagiarism and to provide a reference to the plagiarized material. AJBR considers only those manuscripts which contain less than 15% plagiarism. If any manuscript contains more than the mentioned percentage, it will be reverted back to the author for removing the plagiarism. If author does not send revised manuscript with less than 15% plagiarism, the journal will reject his/her manuscript.

Ethic Approval

All authors have to follow the ethical guidelines for journal publication. The authors are dutybound to obtain prior permission from the officials of the Institution/ University, where the work is to be undertaken, for conducting the experiments on animals including human and the work reported should not violate the law. Animal related experiments, prior to their execution, should be got examined and approved by the professionals (Institutional Ethical Committee) with respect to the moral aspects. Research on human beings must comply with the Code of Ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki) for Experiments Involving Humans; EU Directive 2010/63/EU for Animal Experiments. Human/animal details may be included only if they are essential for scientific purposes and the author(s) need to obtain written permission from the individual, parent, owners or guardian. All the manuscripts reporting the findings of experimental study involving human/animal subjects should provide a statement confirming that each subject or subject’s guardian obtains an informal consent, after the approval of experimental protocol by the ethics committee.

Conflict of Interest and Source of Funding

Author(s) must properly disclose and acknowledge all the sources of institutional, private and corporate financial and logistic support for the research within the manuscript.