The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory follows the Core Practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). These policies apply to manuscripts submitted, manuscripts under review, and published articles, and to everyone involved in the journal: authors, reviewers, editors, and the publisher. Editorial decisions are based on scholarly merit alone and are never affected by an author’s nationality, ethnicity, political beliefs, race, religion, gender, institutional affiliation, or ability to pay (JCRT charges no fees).
Authorship and contributorship
Everyone listed as an author must have made a substantial intellectual contribution to the work, approved the final version, and agreed to be accountable for it. Everyone who meets those criteria must be listed. Contributors who do not meet them are named in an acknowledgment. Changes to authorship after submission require the written agreement of all authors. Automated tools and generative AI cannot be authors.
Competing interests
Authors must disclose any financial, personal, or professional relationship that could be seen to influence the work, including funding sources. Reviewers must decline to review a manuscript where they have a competing interest, including a recent collaboration or a close personal or institutional relationship with the author. Editors do not handle manuscripts in which they have a competing interest, and an editor’s own submission is handled entirely by other editors (see Peer Review).
Research misconduct
Allegations of plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, duplicate publication, citation manipulation, or undisclosed generative-AI use are investigated by the editors following COPE’s guidance. The author is given the opportunity to respond. Where misconduct is confirmed, the journal may reject or retract the work and may inform the author’s institution. JCRT does not itself adjudicate research misconduct at an institution; it refers such matters to the appropriate body.
Data and reproducibility
Where an article rests on data, archival material, or other sources that can be shared, authors are encouraged to make them available and must cite them so that readers can locate them. Authors must be able to produce their underlying materials on reasonable request.
Ethical oversight
Research involving human participants must have been conducted with informed consent and, where applicable, with the approval of an institutional ethics board, which the article must state. The journal does not publish material that discloses identifiable personal information without consent.
Intellectual property
Authors retain copyright of their work and warrant that it is original, that it does not infringe the rights of others, and that any third-party material is used with permission or under fair use and is attributed.
Post-publication discussion and corrections
Readers may respond to a published article by writing to [email protected]; substantive responses may be published, with a reply from the original author. Errors that do not affect the argument are corrected and noted on the article page. Errors that undermine the findings, or confirmed misconduct, lead to retraction: the article remains online, clearly marked as retracted, with a retraction notice explaining why, following COPE’s retraction guidelines.
Complaints and appeals
An author may appeal an editorial decision once, in writing, to [email protected], setting out the grounds. Appeals are considered by an editor who was not involved in the original decision. Complaints about the conduct of the journal, its editors, or its reviewers are handled by the Executive Editor, or by the Senior Editor if the complaint concerns the Executive Editor, and are answered in writing.