Publishing information
Publishing information
This section provides information to assist authors and reviewers in understanding the various policies and guidance followed by the journal.
For information relating to the journal including Editorial Board members, please see the About section.
Journal information
There are no submission fees or publication fees for this journal. All articles are available free of charge on the journal website.
People, Place and Policy (PPP) is a forum for articles which address the relationship and interaction between people, place and policy. For further information, including the aims and scope of the journal, please read the About section of our website.
Policies
A competing interest is anything that interferes with the presentation, peer review, editorial decision-making, or publication of articles submitted to PPP.
Competing interests can be financial or non-financial, professional, or personal.
Competing interests can arise in relationship to an organisation or another person.
It is a requirement of PPP that all potential competing interests are declared. Failure to declare competing interests can result in immediate rejection of a manuscript. If an undisclosed competing interest comes to light after publication, PPP will take action in
accordance with its Retraction Policy Guideline.
What to declare
All potentially competing interests must be declared if they occurred within 5 years of conducting, or preparing for publication, the research under consideration. A full list is provided below.
Interests outside the 5-year time frame must also be declared if they could reasonably be perceived as competing according to the definition above.
Financial competing interests
Financial competing interests include but are not limited to:
- Paid employment or consultancy.
- Board membership.
- Research grants (from any source, restricted or unrestricted).
- Travel grants and honoraria for speaking or participation at meetings.
- Gifts.
Non-financial competing interests
Non-financial competing interests include but are not limited to:
- Membership in a government or other advisory board.
- Relationship (paid or unpaid) with organisations and funding bodies including. nongovernmental organizations, research institutions, or charities.
- Membership of lobbying or advocacy organisations.
- Writing or consulting for an educational company.
- Personal relationships (i.e. friend, spouse, family member, current or previous mentor, adversary) with individuals involved in the submission or evaluation of a paper, such as authors, reviewers, editors, or members of the editorial board of PPP.
- Personal convictions (political, religious, ideological, or other) related to a paper’s topic that might interfere with an unbiased publication process (at the stage of authorship, peer review, editorial decision-making, or publication).
Who must declare competing interests?
Authors
At the time of submission, authors must state what competing interests are relevant to the submitted research. These may include but are not limited to:
- Names of all funding sources.
- Description of funder’s role in the study design; collection, analysis, and
interpretation of data; writing of the paper; and/or decision to submit for publication. - Whether they have served or currently serve on the editorial board of PPP.
Editors and reviewers
Editors (professional or academic) and reviewers must declare their own competing interests and if necessary disqualify themselves from involvement in the assessment of a manuscript.
Common reasons for editors and reviewers to disqualify themselves from the peer review process may include but are not limited to:
- They work at the same institution or organization as an author, currently or recently.
- They collaborate with an author, currently or recently.
- They have published with an author during the past 5 years.
- They have held grants with an author, currently or recently.
- They have a personal relationship with an author that does not allow them to evaluate the manuscript objectively.
Readers
Anyone who comments on published PPP articles must declare all competing interests (financial or non-financial) at the time of posting the comment.
Editorial actions and decisions
PPP editors must take all competing interests into account during the review process and ensure that any relevant ones are declared in the published article.
PPP editors will not publish commissioned or any other non-research articles if they are aware of a competing interest that, in their judgment, could introduce bias or a
reasonable perception of bias.
PPP editors do not consult reviewers who have competing interests that, in the editors’ judgment, could interfere with unbiased review.
In submitting an article to People, Place and Policy (PPP) I certify that:
1. I am authorized by my co-authors to enter into these arrangements.
2. I warrant, on behalf of myself and my co-authors, that:
- the article is original, has not been formally published in any other peer reviewed journal, is not under consideration by any other journal and does not
infringe any existing copyright or any other third party rights; - I am/we are the sole author(s) of the article and have full authority to enter into
this agreement and in granting rights to PPP are not in breach of any other
obligation; - the article contains nothing that is unlawful, libellous, or which would, if
published, constitute a breach of contract or of confidence or of commitment
given to secrecy; - I/we have taken due care to ensure the integrity of the article. To my/our
knowledge all statements contained in it purporting to be facts are true and any
formula or instruction contained in the article will not, if followed accurately,
cause any injury, illness or damage to the user.
3. I, and all co-authors, agree that the article, if editorially accepted for publication, shall be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0. If the law requires that the article be published in the public domain, I/we will notify PPP at the time of submission, and in such cases the article shall be released under the Creative Commons 1.0 Public Domain Dedication waiver. For the avoidance of doubt it is stated that sections 1 and 2 of this license agreement shall apply and prevail regardless of whether the article is published under Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 or the Creative Commons 1.0 Public Domain Dedication waiver
4. I, and all co-authors, agree that, if the article is editorially accepted for publication in PPP, data included in the article shall be made available under the Creative Commons 1.0 Public Domain Dedication waiver, unless otherwise stated. For the avoidance of doubt it is stated that sections 1, 2, and 3 of this license agreement shall apply and prevail.
Upon receiving your submission, your article will undergo an initial evaluation by the Editorial Team. Sometimes articles can be desk rejected without peer review at this stage. This will be due to the article bring out of scope for the journal or otherwise unsuitable.
If your article passes the initial evaluation by the Editorial Team, it will then move through the peer review process. An email notification from the OJS portal will be sent to you when a decision has been reached.
For Research articles and Review articles, the journal holds to a rigorous double-anonymised review procedure, in which the identity of both the reviewer and author are concealed from both parties. To maintain the integrity of this process the Editorial Team assign reviewers and cannot accept author recommendations.
For Focus and Featured Graphic articles, the journal adheres to a single-blind review procedure, where the reviewers know the identity of the authors, but the authors do not know the identity of the reviewers.
For Editorial articles and Book Review articles, the journal does not require peer review to be accepted. These will be reviewed internally by the Editorial Team prior to publication.
PPP aims to review articles as quickly as possible, while maintaining rigor. Reviewers will provide comments for the author as well as recommendations to the Editor. The Editor will then make the final decision on all manuscripts, including those appearing in a special issue.
If major revisions are needed, there may be a requirement of the author to resubmit the article after they have addressed any comments from the first review. If that’s the case, the article may have to undergo another round of reviews, which will result in another set of comments and recommendations to the Editor.
A PPP Editor may occasionally submit their own articles for possible publication in the Journal. In these cases, the peer review process will be managed by alternative members of the Board and the submitting Editor member will not be involved in the decision-making process.
We will try to ensure continued readability and accessibility and as part of that the site is regularly backed up. All issues of the journal are archived on the Sheffield Hallam University servers. Articles will not be removed unless there is an acceptable reason as outlined in the Retraction Policy.
Authors are permitted, without embargo, to deposit their articles (including pre-prints and post-prints) online, e.g. in institutional repositories, in pre-print servers or on their webpages, as long as they link to the published version via DOI when the DOI becomes available.
The editors or author may decide to retract an article following publication in PPP. This best practice is adopted for article retraction by PPP.
A retraction can be made under the advice of members of the scholarly community, where the editors:
- have evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of honest mistake or misconduct;
- discover the findings have been published elsewhere, and this has not been properly
referenced or justified; - have evidence of plagiarism;
- discover undeclared competing interests.
The retraction process:
- A retraction note titled “Retraction: [article title]” signed by the authors and/or the editor is published in a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in the contents list.
- In the electronic version, a link is made to the original article.
- The online article is preceded by a screen containing the retraction note. It is to this
screen that the link resolves; the reader can then proceed to the article itself. - The original article is retained unchanged save for a watermark on the .pdf
indicating on each page that it is “retracted.” - The HTML version of the document is removed.
Statements
As an open access journal, authors retain the copyright in their articles and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
License/copyright information is clearly indicated in published PDFs.
Papers submitted to PPP may report on research findings and should have received appropriate ethical approval from their institution. If you have any queries in relation to your paper, please contact the PPP Team prior to submission. For information relating to individual areas of misconduct, see below:
- Plagiarism: Any reports of plagiarism in PPP articles are taken very seriously. Not only do we want to protect the rights of the authors but also the reputation of the journal, so if anything of this nature is brought to our attention it will be investigated. If an article is found to have plagiarised other work, then we will take action, whether that is in the form of publishing a correction, retracting the article or reporting it to the authors’ institution.
- Research misconduct: If the research has not been conducted within an appropriate ethical framework/process, the article may be rejected. But if the article has been published then the article could be retracted in accord with the PPP Retraction Policy.
- Authorship: Authors are required to provide a full list of authors and it should only contain names of those who have made a significant contribution to the work (author criteria includes: contribution to the conception, design, analysis, interpretation of data, writing and/or revision of the manuscript) as they are accountable for the content once it is in the public domain. Corresponding authors are expected to confirm with any co-authors to ensure that they approve the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication. Anyone who does not fit the criteria of an author, can be listed in the Acknowledgements section of the paper.
If an author discovers a significant error in their published article, they are under obligation to notify the PPP Team and assist them in retracting or correcting the paper. Similar cooperation is expected of the author if PPP contacts them regarding any issue reported to us by third parties.
Complaints: Any complaints or queries in relation to these items or anything else should be sent through to ppp-online@shu.ac.uk and the Editorial Team will deal with and respond.
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. Please also read the Journal’s Copyright statement and Licence terms.
The names and email addresses provided by authors, reviewers or subscribers to this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal. As a journal affiliated with Sheffield Hallam University we adhere to the Privacy Policy published on the University’s external website.
PPP is an open access UK journal published in English. Articles submitted should be original; they should not have been published before, nor should they be currently under consideration elsewhere. The journal publishes three issues per year (Spring, Summer and Autumn/Winter).