BISA Journals Complaints and Appeals Procedure

If you have a complaint in relation to publishing ethics about the Review of International Studies or the European Journal of International Security, the complaint should be raised in the first instance with the journal editors.

The editors of the BISA journals have full control of the intellectual trajectory and publishing strategy for their respective journals. They are accountable for this to the BISA Board of Trustees through their annual reports to the Board.

Please note that both journals receive a very high volume of submissions, and have to reject many manuscripts, even those of reasonable quality. Therefore, our editors will only proceed to peer review with the highest quality manuscripts where there is a strong chance that they will be of publishable quality following a maximum of two rounds of revisions. Rejections of manuscripts for quality reasons are not, therefore, grounds for complaint.

Any complaints about the editorial or publishing practices must relate to specific concerns of an ethical nature, where evidence can be supplied by the complainant that there has been some breach of publication ethics. Examples include issues of: authorship; plagiarism; duplicate and redundant publication; bias or discrimination; and competing interests or funding.

The Complaints Procedure

Our editors will treat all complaints seriously and will endeavour to address them in a prompt and fair manner. Your complaint will be acknowledged as soon as practicable and normally within five working days. They will write to you subsequently setting out how they propose dealing with the complaint with timelines. They will then write to you with their response to the complaint by the deadline indicated. In the interests of all parties, you must treat any complaints proceedings confidentially.

When submitting any complaint, we strongly advise you to read the guidance of Cambridge University Press (CUP) and to follow the guidance and flow charts published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Please also communicate any competing interests that you may have with any of the editors or any third parties that are the subject of the complaint. Our editors will also follow the COPE guidance and flow charts when investigating complaints. Our editors are committed to responding to any complaint in writing. They will provide details of how the complaint was investigated and will clearly set out their findings with reference to the COPE guidance and flow charts. As appropriate, they will also communicate any proposed remedy. Depending on the complexity of the complaint, investigations may take several weeks. Nevertheless, our editors are committed to keeping you informed of expected timelines.

The Appeals Procedure

In the unlikely event that you consider the editors have failed in their duties to adequately investigate the complaint in line with the COPE guidance and flow charts, you are advised to report this to the Chair of the BISA Board of Trustees: office@bisa.ac.uk. Your complaint will be acknowledged as soon as practicable and normally within five working days. The Chair or their designate will write to you subsequently indicating whether they consider there to be adequate grounds for investigating the editors’ response to the original complaint. Should the Chair determine that there are grounds for investigating the editors’ response to the original complaint, they will communicate this to you. The Chair will then appoint a small panel of BISA trustees with appropriate experience to investigate. The Chair will ensure that there are no competing interests between the panel members, the editors, the complainant, or any parties subject to complaint. In the event that competing interests are identified, the Chair will appoint BISA member(s) of appropriate experience to join the panel. The role of the panel is not to re-investigate the complaint, but to determine whether appropriate procedures were followed by the editors. This may involve consulting with CUP as well. Following investigation, the Chair, on behalf of the panel, will communicate the panel’s findings in writing, as well as any proposed remedy.