e-ISSN 2518-1181
DOI 10.33146/2518-1181
Online Media ID R40-06293

Editorial Policies

The Journal's editorial policy is based on international best practices, including the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing and the Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors, prepared by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics).

Publication Ethics

The Journal is committed to upholding the highest standards of publication ethics and taking all possible measures against publication malpractices.

Responsibility of Editors, Authors, and Reviewers

The Editors accept and consider submissions from any author, regardless of gender, nationality, religious/political/sexual orientation. To achieve the highest level of objectivity and infringement of copyright in the examination process, the Editors must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript and its Author to anyone other than the corresponding Author and Reviewers (including potential). Based on the reports received from the Reviewers, the Editors have the right to accept or reject a manuscript for publication or to demand its modification. Only the manuscripts with positive revisions could be published. Whereas the decision about one manuscript could not be made upon two required reports, the additional opinion could be requested from another Reviewer. The final selection of articles for publication, and the form of publication, shall rest with the Editor. Unpublished manuscripts must not be used for any purpose by Editors and must be kept strictly confidential from third parties. Authors will be informed about the decision on their manuscript as promptly as possible. Following acceptance, an article will usually be published in the next available issue.

The Editors reserve the right to edit or otherwise alter all contributions, but authors will receive proofs for approval before publication.

Authors contributing to Oblìk ì fìnansi agree to publish their articles under the CC BY-NC 4.0 International License. It allows third parties to share work (copy, distribute, transmit) and to adapt it, under the condition that the authors are given credit, that the work is not used for commercial purposes, and that in the event of reuse or distribution, the terms of this license are made clear. Authors retain the copyright of their work, with first publication rights granted to Oblìk ì fìnansi. The authors agree to the terms of this Copyright Notice, which will apply to this submission if and when this journal publishes it.

The authors are responsible for the accuracy of facts, quotations, private names, enterprises and organizations titles, geographical locations, etc. The Editors and members of the Editorial Board do not always share the views and thoughts expressed in the articles published.

After the acceptance, all articles are reviewed by Reviewers. A Reviewer should give their statement clearly and objectively, avoiding personal criticism and subjectivity. All comments and suggestions from Reviewer should be followed with supporting arguments. Reviewer obliges to keep all received manuscripts in strict confidentiality and not use them for personal advantage. The appropriate acknowledgments of all data sources within the manuscript should be certified by the Reviewer. Any similarity to published articles or doubt to plagiarism must be immediately brought to the Editor. A Reviewer should inform the Editor if having any professional issues, such as falling out of the manuscript's subject from their scope of research or lack of time to make the proper examination. 

Reviewer reports should align with the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers. All reviewer comments regarding the article are discussed only between the parties involved in the publication process: editors, authors, and reviewers.

Journal uses the double anonymized review model. In this type of peer review, the reviewers don't know the authors' identity and vice versa. This helps preserve publication ethics standards and ensure the quality level of published research.

Plagiarism Policy

Respecting intellectual property rights is a foundational principle of the Journal’s Publication Ethics. Plagiarism, in which one misrepresents ideas, words, or other creative expressions as one's own, is a clear violation of such ethical principles.

All manuscripts submitted by authors for publication in OiF undergo a mandatory plagiarism check. To do this, the Journal uses services such as Grammarly's AI-powered Plagiarism Detector, iThenticate, and Plag. Manuscripts in which plagiarism is detected will be rejected.

Instead, it is the responsibility of each author to ensure that submitted articles are original research and prepared in compliance with high ethical standards regarding plagiarism.

If plagiarism is discovered post-publication, the Journal will follow the guidance outlined in the Article Correction, Retraction, and Removal Policy section. The Publisher expects readers, reviewers, and editors to report any suspected plagiarism by contacting the appropriate Editor.

To notify the Publisher of possible facts of plagiarism, send an email to the Editor of the Journal at magazine@faaf.org.ua, indicating the data necessary for the investigation:

  • The names and contacts of the person(s) making a claim and their relationship to the allegation (e.g., author of original work, reviewer, or Editor of plagiarizing work).
  • The bibliographic data of the original article(s) (article title, author, where, and when it was published).
  • The link to the article (or article's DOI) in which plagiarism was detected; a quote, idea, statement, or other element in this article, which is suspected of being plagiarized.

The Editor will immediately notify all parties of the decision made based on the results of the investigation and the measures taken by the Journal. In addition, the author who committed plagiarism may be granted an automatic refusal for two years to accept for publication all current and future manuscripts.

Open Access Policy

Journal’s open access policy is committed to the recommendations and standards of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).

Here is the definition of "open access" from the BOAI: "By 'open access' to research literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."

Thus, OiF Journal provides immediate open access to its content under the terms of the CC BY-NC license, making research freely available to the public, which supports a greater global exchange of knowledge, meaning:

  • Everyone has free and unlimited access to the full-text of articles published in this journal; manuscripts are freely available without subscription or price barriers;
  • Articles are released immediately in open access (no embargo period).

Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy describes how the Journal collects and uses your personal data.

To provide our publishing services, we collect and process personal data from you as the manuscript's author. We may collect information from you such as, but not limited to, your name, degree and academic title, your position, and name of the institution/organization you represent, contact phone number and email address, your ORCID iD  ("Personal Data"). You are not required to provide us with all of the Personal Data listed above, but if you do not do so, we may not be able to provide you with our publishing services effectively. 

Your Personal Data may be used in the following ways:

  • To provide our publishing services to you;
  • To process payments from you (APC);
  • To respond to your inquiries;
  • To send relevant advertisements to you by email;
  • To request your participation in surveys or other initiatives that help us to gather information used to develop and enhance our publishing services.

Part of your Personal Data (that identifies you as the article's author) is transferred to international scientometric databases, information products, and e-libraries.

We will retain your Personal Data for an unlimited period afterward to cover any queries that may arise to your article (for example, outstanding payments, copyright infringement). 

Consequently, the Personal Data entered in this journal website will be used exclusively for the purposes stated above and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

Policy on Using AI Tools

The Journal’s Generative AI policies aim to provide greater transparency and guidance to all participants in the publication process: authors, reviewers, and editors. Journal publisher will continue to monitor developments in this area and will adjust or refine policies as appropriate.

For authors

Increasingly, generative AI and AI-assisted technologies are helping researchers synthesize complex literature, provide an overview of a field or research question, identify research gaps, generate ideas, and provide tailored support for tasks such as content organization and language and readability improvement. Authors preparing a manuscript for an OiF journal can use AI Tools to support them. However, these tools must never be used as a substitute for human critical thinking, expertise, and evaluation. AI Tools should always be applied with human oversight and control.

Ultimately, authors are responsible and accountable for the contents of their work. This includes accountability for:

  • Carefully reviewing and verifying the accuracy, comprehensiveness, and impartiality of all AI-generated output (including checking the sources, as AI-generated references can be incorrect or fabricated).
  • Editing and adapting all material thoroughly to ensure the manuscript represents the author’s authentic and original contribution and reflects their own analysis, interpretation, insights, and ideas.
  • Ensuring the use of any tools or sources, AI-based or otherwise, is made clear and transparent to readers.
  • Ensuring the manuscript is developed in a way that safeguards data privacy, intellectual property, and other rights by checking the terms and conditions of any AI tool used.

Additionally, authors should check the terms and conditions of any AI Tool they wish to use to ensure that, they only grant to the AI Tool the right to use their materials to provide the service to them and that they do not grant to the AI Tool any other rights to the materials that they input into the AI Tool (including without limitation the right to train the AI Tool on those materials). They must also ensure that the AI Tool does not impose constraints on the use of its outputs that could restrict the subsequent publication of the relevant article.

AI Tool use in the research process should be declared and described in detail in the methods section. Authors should describe their use of AI, including the name of the AI Tool used, the purpose of the use, and the extent of their oversight. Disclosing the use of AI Tools supports transparency and trust between all participants in the publication process and facilitates compliance with the terms of use of the relevant AI Tool. Basic checks of grammar, spelling, and punctuation need no disclosure.

Authors should not list AI Tools as an author or co-author, nor cite AI Tools as an author. Authorship implies responsibilities and tasks that can only be attributed to and performed by humans.

The Journal does not permit the use of Generative AI or AI-assisted tools to create or alter images in submitted manuscripts, including enhancing, obscuring, moving, removing, or introducing specific features within images or figures. The Journal also does not accept for publication manuscripts fully or partially generated by AI Tools, in which the author’s contribution is absent.

For reviewers and editors

The manuscript submitted for review and the reviewer’s report are confidential documents, so reviewers and editors must adhere to the following rules. Reviewers and editors should not upload a submitted manuscript or any part of it into a generative AI tool, as this may violate the authors’ confidentiality and proprietary rights and, where the paper contains personally identifiable information, may breach data privacy rights. This confidentiality requirement extends to the peer review report and to all editors’ communications about the manuscript, as they may contain confidential information about the manuscript and/or the authors.

Thus, reviewers and editors should not upload submitted manuscripts, their reports, or letters into an AI tool, even if only to improve language and readability.

Reviewers should not use generative AI or AI-assisted technologies to assist in the scientific review of a paper, as the critical thinking and original assessment needed for peer review are outside of the scope of this technology, and there is a risk that the technology will generate incorrect, incomplete, or biased conclusions about the manuscript. The reviewer is responsible and accountable for the content of the review report.

Licensing, Copyright and Self-Archiving Policy

Copyright and Author's licence to publish

Institute of Accounting and Finance is the Publisher of Oblìk ì fìnansi (OiF). The Publisher does not require authors of original research articles to assign the copyright of their published contributions. However, the authors grant the Publisher an exclusive licence (the right of first publication) to publish their manuscripts in the OiF. Thus, the authors retain the copyright for all articles published in the Journal, and the Publisher does not restrict the rights of the copyright owner in any way.

By accepting the terms of publication and submitting the manuscript, the author thus transfers to the Publisher the right to its publication and declares that his research is original, unpublished work, which has not been published previously, has not been accepted for publication elsewhere, and is not under consideration for publication by any publisher in any print or electronic media.

As part of the Journal's efforts to improve transparency and unambiguous attribution of scholarly contributions, corresponding authors of published articles must provide their Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID) ID; co-authors are encouraged to provide ORCID IDs.

Licensing

Open access content in this journal is published under a Creative Commons licence. In particular, all articles are published and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). This type of Creative Commons license allows others to use, adapt, and share the work for non-commercial purposes only, with the mandatory condition of attribution.

The Publisher indicates the copyright holder and licensing terms on the full text of all published articles.

Preprints

The Journal allows the posting of preprints of research manuscripts on the authors' choice of preprint servers or on the authors' or institutional websites.

A preprint is an author's version of a research manuscript before formal peer review at a journal, which is deposited on a public server. The author can post apreprint at any time during the peer-review process. Posting of preprints is not considered prior publication and will not jeopardize consideration at the OiF Journal.

Once the preprint is published, it is the author's responsibility to ensure that the preprint record is updated with a publication reference, including the DOI and a URL link to the published version of the article on the journal website. Authors may choose any license for the preprint, including Creative Commons licenses.

Self-archiving of published articles

The Journal encourages authors to self-archive their published articles on their personal websites and/or in their funders' or institutions' repositories for public discussion. Authors should cite the publication reference and DOI number and provide a link to the URL of the published article on the Journal's website. The requirement to link to the Journal's website is designed to protect the integrity and authenticity of the scientific record.

Terms for the use of archived published articles

Articles published in the OiF that are made available through academic repositories remain subject to copyright. The following restrictions on the use of such articles apply:

  • Archived articles may not be used for purposes that are intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation by means of sale, resale, licence, loan, transfer, or any other form of commercial exploitation.
  • Archived articles may not be published verbatim in whole or in part, whether or not this is done for commercial purposes, either in print or online, because it would violate copyright. This restriction does not apply to reproducing normal quotations with an appropriate citation.

Article Correction, Retraction, and Removal Policy

Each manuscript undergoes thorough review and proofreading before it is published to ensure the authenticity and accuracy of its content. However, circumstances may arise where an article needs to be corrected, retracted, or even removed.

Article Correction

If an authors discover an error in a published article, they should contact the journal as soon as possible. Typically, the corresponding author will be responsible for sharing the details of the error with the journal. All co-authors must agree on the correction.

The journal editor will review the proposed correction, together with any accompanying data or information, and determine the appropriate mechanism to correct the article. If the necessary corrections affect the study's results or conclusions, the Editor may consult the journal's editorial team before making a decision.

On rare occasions, the Publisher may need to correct an error made during the publication of an article. In this case, the Editor will notify the authors and post an erratum to correct the error.

Article retraction

A published article may be retracted to correct errors that are too extensive in the view of the Editor to publish a correction, or due to infringements of journal policies, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, or the like.

In particular, a published article may be retracted in the following cases:

  • The Editor has clear evidence that the research findings are unreliable, either as a result of significant error (e.g., miscalculation or experimental error), or as a result of fabrication (e.g., of data) or falsification (e.g., image manipulation).
  • There is evidence of compromised peer-review or systematic manipulation of the editorial process.
  • The article is plagiarized in whole or in part.
  • Copyright has been infringed, or there is some other serious legal issue (e.g., libel, breach of privacy).
  • The article contains material or data that the authors were not authorised to publish.
  • There is evidence or material concerns of authorship being sold, identity theft, or fictitious authorship.
  • There is evidence of any other breach of the journal’s publishing policies (citation manipulation, conflict of interest, undeclared use of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies, etc).

The decision to retract is made by the Editor-in-Chief in consultation with the members of the Editorial Board after a detailed analysis of the evidence of the identified violation.

An unnumbered additional page with a retraction notice titled “Retraction: [article title]” signed by the Editor and, if appropriate, by the authors is added to the published article on the journal website. The original article is retained unchanged except for a watermark on the .pdf indicating on each page that it is “retracted.”

The Publisher removes the retracted article from the international reference and scientometric databases in which the journal is indexed, in accordance with the terms of the license agreements.

Article removal

Removal of an article will only occur if:

  • The article is defamatory or infringes others’ legal rights, and retraction is not a sufficient remedy.
  • There is a court order requiring the Publisher to remove the article.

In these circumstances, while the metadata (Title and Authors) will be retained, the article text will be replaced with a screen indicating that the article has been removed for legal reasons.

Digital Archiving Policy

The Publisher is committed to the permanent availability and preservation of published scholarly research. For this reason, the Publisher cooperates with journal content aggregators (EBSCO, J-Gate, Index Copernicus) and also maintains its own digital archive.

The Publisher stores all digital content (XML and PDF) of the Journal on a secure server accessible to the readers online. In the event of technical issues, the digital content will be restored from a backup stored by the Publisher.

Additionally, all digital content of the Journal is transferred to the Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine's (VNLU) repository for storage. The VNLU is the country's primary research and information center that ensures the long-term preservation of the digital content of Ukraine's scientific journals.

Thus, in the event of unforeseen circumstances (e.g., the journal website is temporarily unavailable), readers will still have access to published articles through independent archives (EBSCO, J-Gate, Index Copernicus, Vernadskyi National Library of Ukraine).

Copyright for the Journal Website

The Journal website is the intellectual property of the Institute of Accounting and Finance (IAF), and its copyright is governed by Ukrainian law. At the same time, the authors retain the copyright for all published articles posted on the Journal website.

The IAF reserves the right to modify the content and terms of use of the Journal website, and to delete them. The IAF does not accept any liability for the information or the contents of other web pages to which the Journal website refers.