Management Issues

Editorial Policies

There is no Article Processing Charges (APC) for the papers submitted to Management Issues. Before submitting the manuscript to Management Issues, prospective authors are advised to read the aims & scope of the journal including submission guidelines.

Management Issues employs a two-staged evaluation of manuscript submissions, namely, initial Screening and Double-Blind Peer Review. All manuscripts that are submitted to Management Issues are initially screened by the Editorial Team to assess whether;

• the manuscripts are within the scope of the Management Issues and,
• the manuscripts are of acceptable quality and in compliance with the Management Issues’s Author Guidelines.

At this point, the manuscript may be rejected if the Editorial Board deems it inappropriate for publication in the Journal due to its unsuitability and quality problems. Each manuscript passing initial screening will be subjected to double-blind peer review process (i.e., neither authors nor peer-reviewers know each other) which involves two independent peer reviewers to whom the manuscripts are sent anonymously. The Editorial Board of Management Issues evaluates all manuscripts submitted together with corresponding review reports by reviewers. Management Issues makes the final decision and recommendation, obtaining advice and observations from the Editorial Board whenever necessary, regarding their publication. Usually, reviewers will complete their reviews within three to four weeks.

Editorial Board members in Management Issues are not entitled to publish their research papers/Book reviews in any of the particular issues they edit. However, the members of the Editorial Board may occasionally submit their own manuscripts for publication in the Management Issues. In such cases, the peer review process will be managed by alternative members of the Board and the submitting editorial Board member will have no involvement and contribution in the decision-making process.

Articles including supplementary material published in Management Issues undergo through peer review process. The reviews are not posted with materials published or posted on Journal’s webpage or any online repository.

The Journal ensures that contents published are preserved and available for future users. All contents are included in the Issue Archives of OUSL Research Repository (http://repository.ou.ac.lk/).

Publishing Ethics

Management Issues makes every effort to ensure that the content published is ethically sound. To help achieve this goal, it closely follows the advices outlined in the guidelines issued by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The link to access these resources is https://publicationethics.org/

Peer Review

Articles published in Management Issues undergo through peer review process. Submissions felt to be suitable for consideration will be sent for peer review by appropriate independent experts identified by the Editors-in-Chief. Editors will make a decision based on the reviewers’ reports and authors are sent these reports along with the editorial decision on their manuscript. Authors should note that even in light of one positive report, concerns raised by another reviewer may fundamentally undermine the study and result in the manuscript being rejected.

Standards of Reporting

Research should be communicated in a way that supports verification and reproducibility, and as such Management Issues encourages authors to provide comprehensive descriptions of their research rationale, protocol, methodology, and analysis. The Handling Editor may ask for the full disclosure of the methods and data subject to COPE guidelines (for editorial purposes). The disclosure of data will be considered in the decision of whether to publish the paper.

Corrections and Retractions

The Journal will issue corrections, retraction statements and other post-publication updates including Editor’s Notes on published content. These corrections include author correction, author name change, publisher correction and addendum.

The Open Access Policy

Your article will be published open access without having to pay an APC (article processing charge) or a submission fee. That is, the publication is free.

This journal fulfils the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) definition of open access.

This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.

Use of Third-party Material

Management Issues operates under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) (CC BY-SA) licence which enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, so long as attribution is given to the creator. The license allows for commercial use. If you remix, adapt, or build upon the material, you must license the modified material under identical terms. The full terms of this licence can be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ 

Authors who have published under this licence may share and distribute their article on websites and repositories immediately upon publication.

All authors publishing with Management Issues accept these as the terms of publication.

Author(s) must obtain the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in the article. These materials may include but are not limited to text, illustration, photographs, tables, data, audio, video, or screenshots.

The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material without plagiarism and subject to proper citation (acknowledgment) is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission. If author(s) wish to include any material in their papers for which they do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, they will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission. Management Issues does not publish any article with permissions for the use of third-party material pending.

Misconduct

Management Issues takes seriously all allegations of potential misconduct to protect the integrity of the scholarly record. In cases of suspected research or publication misconduct, it may be necessary for the Editor to contact and share manuscripts with third parties, for example, author(s)’ institution(s) and ethics committee(s).

Examples of misconduct include but are not limited to:

• Affiliation misrepresentation
• Breaches in copyright/use of third-party material without appropriate permissions
• Citation manipulation
• Duplicate submission/publication
• Image or data manipulation/fabrication
• Peer review manipulation
• Plagiarism
• Text-recycling/self-plagiarism
• Undisclosed competing interests
• Unethical research

Generative AI (Artificial Intelligence) usage

• Copywriting any part of an article using a generative AI tool/Large Language Models (LLM) is not permitted.
• The generation or reporting of results using a generative AI tool/LLM is not permitted.
• The in-text reporting of statistics using a generative AI tool/LLM is not permitted.
• Copy-editing an article using a generative AI tool/LLM in order to improve its language including spelling and grammar, and readability may be permissible. However, the author(s) remains responsible for the original work.
• The submission and publication of images created by AI tools or large-scale generative models is not permitted.

Policy on Handling Complaints

Once a complaint is received, an acknowledgement is sent to the complainant stating that an appropriate action will be taken on the complaint within five (5) working days from the receipt of the complaint.

The investigation process begins by the Managing Editor(s) as per the direction of the Editor-In-Chief. After the investigation is complete, a meeting is held and the decision taken is communicated by email.

The Journal considers complaints as an opportunity to improve the editorial process and practices. All complaints received are dealt in a timely manner maintaining the confidentiality of the complaints, unless otherwise required by the law or COPE guidelines on publication ethics.

The journal does not entertain anonymous complaints.

Allegations of Research Misconduct

All academic misconducts including ethical issues are dealt with due care in the following manner:

The editorial office receives a complaint relating to any material (e.g. article, case studies, book reviews etc.) submitted to or published in the Management Issues which is subject to academic misconduct.

It is the responsibility of the complainant to ensure that the complaint clearly and specifically details the nature of the misconduct and the manner in which it occurred (e.g., plagiarism, copyright violation, etc.). The complainant should clearly identify the material that is subject to misconduct and highlight the original work.

The editorial office will conduct an investigation into the matter, and the authors will be asked to provide an explanation, along with evidence, for the alleged misconduct.

If the author(s) accepts the misconduct and if the misconduct is rectifiable, the editorial office will take the following actions depending on the circumstances.

• If the material has been published, an erratum or retraction will be issued rectifying the issue.
• In the case of non-response by the author(s) within the stipulated time or failure to provide a satisfactory explanation, the article may be retracted or rejected if it is under review process

If the author(s) disagree with the complained misconduct, it will be dealt in accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines

If the author(s) disagree with the alleged misconduct, it will be addressed in accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines https://publicationethics.org/.

The complainant will be informed of the outcome, and the case will be closed

If author(s) have a conflict of interest, it must be declared upon submission. This allows the editor to evaluate the situation in which the conflict of interest occurred and decide on how the editors would like to proceed with the editorial work.

The editorial team closely follows the advice outlined in the guidelines and flowcharts on the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) website.

Copyright Notice

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The articles published in the Management Issues are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). The full terms of this licence may be found at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

Publication Fees

This journal does not charge any fees in connection with publication.

Instructions for Authors

 Before submitting a manuscript to Management Issues, the author(s) is advised to read and follow the author guidelines as per the document.

Submission Email: mifms@ousl.lk

The following are some of the ethical principles followed by Management Issues

• All manuscripts submitted to this journal should be original and should not have been published before in its current or similar form.
• The manuscript or any part thereof should not have been submitted elsewhere and should not be under consideration by any other publication.
• If author(s) has a conflict of interest, it must be declared upon submission. For more details regarding the conflict of interest, please read the research and publishing ethics guidelines issued by COPE.

By submitting any work to Management Issues, authors are guaranteeing that the work is not in infringement of any existing copyright.

Intellectual Property Rights

Author(s) certify that the submitted manuscript (and any supporting items) is their own intellectual property and the copyright has not been transferred to others.

All manuscripts, revisions, drafts, and galleys remain the intellectual property of the author(s) and author(s) retain the copyright to their work. 

Plagiarism

Trust and integrity are among what readers value the most in scholarly peer-reviewed journal content. Management Issues takes the issue of plagiarism very seriously. This applies to data, images, words or ideas taken from any materials in electronic or print formats without sufficient attribution. The use of any such material either directly or indirectly should be properly acknowledged in all instances. Author(s) should always cite source(s).

Submission Preparation Checklist

• The submission has not been previously published, in part or in whole, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
• All third-party-owned materials used have been identified with appropriate credit lines, and permission has been obtained from the copyright holder for all formats of the journal. Authors acknowledge their responsibility to gain all permissions prior to submission.
• All authors qualify as authors, and have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper.
• Tables are all cited in the main text and are included within the text document.
• The corresponding author is submitting an ORCID identifier in their author data and co-authors have been recommended to also provide an ORCID.
• The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines. Every effort has been made to ensure that the submission is ready for peer review according to the journal’s review policy. If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the submitted files (including file properties) have been anonymized.