Editors should be accountable for everything published in the journal: this includes having measures in place to assess the quality of the material they accept for the journal and a willingness to publish corrections and clarifications when required.
Editors should act in a fair and balanced way when carrying out their duties, without discrimination on grounds of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or religious or political beliefs.
Editors should guide authors and reviewers on everything that is expected of them.
Editors should make decisions on which articles to publish based on quality and suitability.
Editors should handle submissions in a fair, unbiased, and timely manner and treat all manuscripts as confidential, for distribution to others for purposes of peer-review only.
Editors should have systems to ensure that peer reviewers’ identities are protected unless they use an open review system that is declared to authors and reviewers.
Journal should have policies and systems in place to ensure that commercial considerations do not affect editorial decisions, and editors should handle submissions for funded issues in the same way as for standard issues so that articles are accepted entirely on their academic merit and without commercial influence.
Journals should have a declared mechanism for authors to appeal against editorial decisions.
Editors should have systems for managing their conflicts of interest as well as those of their staff, authors, reviewers, and editorial board members
