Terms of Service

Submission to JOIBS constitutes agreement to abide by these ethical standards for the conduct of research:

• All research involving human participants must identify the Institutional Review Board that has approved the conduct of the research.

• Authors must state that the data are accurate representations of participant responses and have not been manipulated by the researchers, except where clearly and transparently noted (such as when authors use any of a variety of well-established practices for imputing data). This can be done in a cover letter, the manuscript itself, or publicly available supplemental materials, but it must be stated explicitly somewhere.

• All data and materials should be made publicly available whenever possible. If the data cannot be publicly posted, an explanation justifying why it is not possible to do so must appear in the submitted manuscript.

• Nothing in the written report has been plagiarized from work by people who are not authors on the submitted paper. Extensive quoting or paraphrasing from the submitting authors’ own work is acceptable if it is duly noted in the manuscript.

Submissions

By submitting your article to the Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (JOIBS), you agree to have it published there, should it be accepted. That agreement is final and binding. JOIBS will then have full discretion of how and when to publish it. All submitted articles must not be under concurrent consideration at another journal.

Instructions for Submitting an Article

Manuscripts for possible publication should be submitted via the portal at: https://joibs.org/index.php/joibs/about/submissions. You will need to register for a JOIBS account to do this. There is a $75 one-time fee for submitting to JOIBS.

Please include a cover letter with contact information for all authors, including institutional affiliation, email address, and mailing address. Submitters without an institutional affiliation must submit an email address, a mailing address, and a curriculum vita or resumé. JOIBS reserves the right to reject manuscripts for any reason whatsoever. The $75 fee pays for processing costs and will not be refunded under any circumstances.

Copy-Editing, Proofing, and Errors

JOIBS does not provide copy-editing or proofing services. You are responsible for ensuring your published manuscript is free of errors, including typos. If errors (even minor) are found post-publication, and reported to you, you agree to correct them (e.g., by uploading a corrected paper) within one month of being contacted about the errors (you can request an extension if this is a hardship).

Format

JOIBS does not format your articles. After acceptance, you will be required to re-format your paper according to our standard template. At that time, please download the template at this link. Fill in all the information highlighted on the first page. References should be in APA style (7th edition). See examples of the template in our published papers at this link.

JOIBS keeps submission fees low, in part, by not having copy-editors or proof-developers, and by having a minimalist production team.

Copyright

If your paper is accepted, it will be copyrighted under a CC BY-NC - Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. In short, authors retain copyright but grant anyone the right to use the material if they attribute it to the authors and do not use it for commercial purposes. Go here for more details, including all the legal aspects of this type of license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

Open Peer Review

JOIBS uses a process of open peer review. After your article is accepted and published, it will become publicly available for anyone to read. Peer reviews will also be published and be publicly viewable.

Retraction Policies

We will base retraction on C.O.P.E. guidelines, which can be found here: https://publicationethics.org/files/retraction%20guidelines.pdf. We reserve the right to retract a paper if errors go uncorrected for more than a month (as described in Copy-Editing, Proofing, and Errors). We will never retract a paper in response to social media mobs, open or private letters calling for retraction, denunciation petitions, or the like if such petitions fail to show that the published paper meets C.O.P.E. guidelines for retraction. Similarly, authors may only retract their own published papers if they meet C.O.P.E. guidelines. Critics are welcome, however, to publish their criticisms as part of JOIBS’ policy of open peer review.