All submissions are initially assessed by the co-editors, who decide whether or not the article is suitable for peer review. Submissions considered suitable for peer review are assigned to two or more subject experts, who assess the article for clarity, validity, and sound methodology. If suitable experts external to the journal cannot be found then members of the Editorial Board may be asked to complete a review task.

Authors may be invited to recommend specific individuals from the peer review process. JCSI does not guarantee to use these suggestions. All reviewers must be independent from the submission and will be asked to declare all competing interests.

JCSI operates a double-blind peer review process, meaning that authors and reviewers remain anonymous for the review process. The review period is expected to take around six to eight weeks, although this can vary depending on reviewer availability. Reviewers are asked to provide formative feedback, even if an article is not deemed suitable for publication in the journal.

Based on the reviewer reports, the co-editors will make a recommendation for rejection, minor or major revisions, or acceptance. Overall editorial responsibility rests with JCSI's co-editors, who are supported by an expert Editorial Board.

Members of the editorial team/board are permitted to submit their own papers to the journal. In cases where an author is associated with the journal, they will be removed from all editorial tasks for that paper and another member of the team will be assigned responsibility for overseeing peer review. A competing interest must also be declared within the submission and any resulting publication.

Reviewers are asked to provide comment on the below topics and guidelines:

• Content: Does the article fit within the scope of the journal? Is the submission original, relevant and rigorous? Is the author’s depth of understanding of the issues researched adequate? Are the sources and references adequate? Has the existing knowledge base been explored and built upon? Are the chosen methodologies appropriate and have they and the evidential base been appropriately used? Does the conclusion reflect the argument in the main body text and bring something new to the debate?
• Structure and argument: Does the abstract summarize the arguments in a succinct and accurate way? Is the manuscript logically structured and do the arguments flow coherently? Is there enough reference to methodology in the introduction and are the arguments fully evidenced and substantiated? Does the introduction signpost the arguments in the logical way and does the conclusion adequately summarize them?
• Figures/tables: Does the author’s use of tables, charts, figures or maps illustrate the arguments and support the evidential base? Is the quality of the formatting and presentation adequate?
• Formatting: Does the submitted file adhere to the general author guidelines listed for the journal? Are the citations and references formatted to house-style?
• Language: Is the text well written and jargon free? Please comment on the quality of English and need for grammatical improvement.
• Data availability: Has data used in the study been adequately described and made available? Is the data curated in a usable format? Is there a Data Availability statement providing information on how to access the data?

The journal is happy to accept submissions of papers that have been loaded onto preprint servers or personal websites, have been presented at conferences, or other informal communication channels. These formats will not be deemed prior publication. The journal accepts papers that have been published within formal conference proceedings, provided that the paper provides substantially more data, analysis and/or discussion than the original conference paper. If the paper was presented but not formally published then more overlap is permitted. The accepted manuscript may also be uploaded to an open platform, under a CC BY licence. Authors must retain copyright to such postings.

Authors are encouraged to link any prior posting of their paper to the final published version within the journal if it is editorially accepted and published.

The journal allows authors to deposit draft versions of their paper into a suitable preprint server, on condition that the author agrees to the below:

• The author retains copyright to the preprint and developed works from it, and is permitted to submit to the journal.
• The author declares that a preprint is available within the cover letter presented during submission. This must include a link to the location of the preprint.
• The author acknowledges that having a preprint publicly available means that the journal cannot guarantee the anonymity of the author during the review process, even if they anonymise the submitted files (see review policy).
• Should the submission be published, the authors are expected to update the information associated with the preprint version to show that a final version has been published in the journal, including the DOI linking directly to the publication.

The journal strongly recommends that all authors submitting a paper register an account with Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID). Registration provides a unique and persistent digital identifier for the account that enables accurate attribution and improves the discoverability of published papers, ensuring that the correct author receives the correct credit for their work. As the ORCID remains the same throughout the lifetime of the account, changes of name, affiliation, or research area do not effect the discoverability of an author's past work and aid correspondence with colleagues.

The journal encourages all corresponding authors to include an ORCID within their submitting author data whilst co-authors are recommended to include one. ORCID numbers should be added to the author data upon submission and will be published alongside the submitted paper, should it be accepted.

Open Data

The journal strongly encourages authors to make all data associated with their submission openly available, according to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). Data should be cited and referenced within the manuscript and should be linked to from a Data Accessibility Statement, which must describe how the data underlying the findings of the article can be accessed and reused. If data is not being made available with the journal publication (e.g. legal constraints) then a statement from the author should be provided within the submission to explain why. Data obtained from other sources must be appropriately credited. All data should be curated in a format that allows easy understanding and analysis (e.g. sensible column headers, descriptions in a readme text file). This help will ensure its reuse potential.

Structured Methods

As the traditional Materials and Methods section often includes insufficient detail for readers to wholly assess the research process, the journal encourages authors to publish detailed descriptions of their structured methods in open, online platforms such as protocols.io. By providing a step-by-step description of the methods used in the study, the chance of reproducibility and usability increases, whilst also allowing authors to build on their own works and gain additional credit and citations.

Open Code

If research includes the use of software code, statistical analysis or algorithms then we also recommend that authors upload the code into Code Ocean, where it will be hosted on an open, cloud-based computational reproducibility platform, providing researchers and developers with an easy way to share, validate and discover code published in academic journals.

For more information on how to incorporate open data, protocols.io or Code Ocean into a submission, please visit our reproducibility page.

All listed authors must qualify as such, as defined in our authorship guidelines, which have been developed from the ICMJE definitions. All authors must have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper.

We are committed to transparent and bias-free research. To ensure that all publications are as open as possible all authors, reviewers and editors are required to declare any interests that could appear to compromise, conflict or influence the validity of the publication. This process is designed to reinforce the readers' trust in the research data.

Please declare any competing interests that you have. A conflict of interest must be declared if there is any reason why the information or the interpretation of information being produced may be influenced by a personal or financial relationship with other organizations or individuals, or if these relationships could be reasonably perceived from other people as having influencing objective data or decision-making. Everyone involved in the submission, editorial processing, peer review and publication should declare any competing interests that they may have as early as possible.

In addition, authors are required to specify funding sources and detail requirements for ethical research in the submitted manuscript, ensuring that ethical approval and consent statements are detailed within the manuscript (see Author Guidelines).

Any author or reviewer that is linked to the journal must declare what this relationship is within the competing interests statement, including all members of the editorial team/editorial board. For example, the co-editors, Editorial Board members, etc., should clearly display their position in the journal.

Competing interests can take the form of both financial and non-financial relationships. The declaration of such relationships helps to ensure that academic rigor is maintained and that publications cannot be accused of undue bias or misinformation.

Examples of competing interests:

• authorship including one of the editorial team/board
• receipt of payment, in any form, from an organization or individual related to the subject matter
• ownership of stocks or shares in organizations directly related to the subject matter
• receipt of grants or funding
• membership of relevant boards
• related patents/applied for patents
• gifts
• known relationships that will hinder impartiality (e.g. colleagues, family, mentor, previous supervisor/student).
• political, religious, ideological interests
• commercial

Competing interests should generally be declared to cover at least the previous 5 years - e.g., if a reviewer supervised the author's PhD then (and if they feel comfortable reviewing the work) their professional relationship should have ended over 5 years ago. This is a minimum requirement, and individuals must declare if they have had a previous relationship with someone/an organization relevant to the submission that could be deemed to influence decision making.

For authors

Please place the competing interests section at the end of the manuscript, immediately before the reference list. The authors' initials should be used to denote differing competing interests. For example:

"TW completed paid consultancy work from [company name] as part of the data acquisition for this study. BH has minority shares in [company name], which part funded the research grant for this project. SM is a member of the editorial board for [journal name], which is on a voluntary basis. All other authors have no competing interests."

If there are no competing interests, please add the below statement:

"'The author has no competing interests to declare" for papers with a single author or "The authors have no competing interests to declare" when multiple authors are contributing.

For reviewers

If you have any competing interests, please list them in the text box available on your reviewer page. For example:

"I was previously employed by the laboratory that collected this data."

If you do not have competing interests, please add the below statement:

"I have no competing interests to declare."

In accordance with guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (where applicable), the journal handles different kinds of errors. All articles have their proofs checked prior to publication by the author/editor, which should ensure that content errors are not present. Please contact your editorial manager if an article needs correcting.

Post-publication changes are not permitted to the publication, unless in exceptional circumstances. If an error is discovered in a published article, then the publisher will assess whether a Correction paper or Retraction is required.

For a variety of reasons, some articles may require correction after publication. Such reasons can range from small errors through to more serious issues concerning ethics and copyright. In accordance with guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics, the journal handles different kinds of error in the following ways.

• - Amendment
• - Correction article
• - Retraction article - Retraction & Withdrawal

To minimize requests for post-publication edits:

• - Editors should ensure that the author(s) has been given an opportunity to sign off their final draft & metadata, prior to the files being sent to typesetting. It should be made clear that future edits will not be possible
• - Editors should also give the final draft & metadata a thorough read through prior to sending it to typesetting to make sure that they are happy with the content
• - All articles will have had their PDF proofs checked by the author or editor prior to publication. This is a final chance to catch layout errors and minor editorial issues such as typos. This is not an opportunity for wider content editing

Please contact the Journal/Editorial Manager if you believe that an article needs correcting. We reserve the right to decide what constitutes a minor or major issue and whether an amendment or correction article is necessary.

Amendment

For very minor content or metadata issues, the journal may directly amend the article (both PDF and HTML) if the error is reported very soon after publication (normally <48h) AND the publication has not yet been sent out for indexing.

In-line amendments are strictly limited to only obvious and small mistakes. Corrections relating to the scientific content or other major metadata issues (e.g. a change in authorship) will require a formal correction to be published. Should an in-line amendment be made then a note may also be added to the publication to alert readers to this fact.

To avoid multiple versions of the same publication being circulated, should a publication have already been sent out to indexing services then in-line edits will not be permitted.

Correction Article

After an article has been published it will immediately be available to the public. Shortly after publication we will also send the publication information and files to multiple indexes to aid this dissemination. Once this indexing process has begun (usually within a day or so of publication), all corrections must be released as a separate publication, linked to the original. This ensures that the integrity and transparency of the academic record is maintained.

Where an error affects the data being presented, the arguments being made, or the conclusions of an article (but not the validity of the findings), or contains incorrect information about the article metadata (author list, title, editor, etc.), a correction article will be posted. Correction articles are used to formally correct the scientific record and to ensure errors in metadata are properly highlighted. Correction articles will appear as an article in the journal’s table of contents and will be delivered to indexes in the usual fashion. The original article will contain a note that links to the correction to alert readers. The wording of the note will be drafted by the co-editors and be approved by both the editor(s) and author(s). The editor(s), in collaboration with the author, will decide whether the error should be corrected by such a correction article.

Post-indexing, we won't issue Correction articles for trivial issues, such as minor formatting or typos, because when the original is not changed such a notice only highlights a minor slip that readers might not notice or can easily ignore.

Retraction

Retractions are used to remove a published paper from the scientific record. In accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics’ guidance (adapted from http://publicationethics.org/files/retraction%20guidelines_0.pdf), retractions are used when:

• - editors have clear evidence that the article’s findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error)
• - the findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper crossreferencing, permission or justification (i.e. cases of redundant/duplicate publication)
• - Article publication constitutes plagiarism
• The article reports unethical research

Retraction articles will be drafted and posted in the same way as correction articles and with the editors’ approval. The original article will remain but readers will be alerted to the retraction via a note at the top of the article.

Retraction & Withdrawal

In rare circumstances, articles will need to be removed from the journal site in whole or in part. This is usually for legal reasons, such as copyright infringement or ethical concerns. The abstract and metadata of the original article will remain, but a note that links to the Retraction article will appear in place of the remaining contents.

Exceptions

In some cases legal or privacy issues may lead to exceptions to the above processes. Such examples will be dealt with on a case by case basis, with standard processes followed as much as possible.

Allegations of misconduct will be taken with utmost seriousness, regardless of whether those involved are internal or external to the journal, or whether the submission in question is pre- or post-publication. If an allegation of misconduct is made to the journal, it must be immediately passed on to the publisher, who will follow guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) on how to address the nature of the problem. Should the matter involve allegations against a member of the journal or publishing team, an independent and objective individual(s) may be sought to lead the investigation. Where misconduct is proven or strongly suspected, the journal has an obligation to report the issue to the author's institution, who may conduct their own investigation. This applies to both research misconduct (e.g. completing research without ethical approval and consent, fabricating or falsifying data etc) and publication misconduct (e.g. manipulating the peer review process, plagiarism etc). Should an investigation conclude that misconduct or misinformation has occurred then the author, along with their institution will be notified. Should the publication record need to be corrected, the journal's correction policy will be followed.

Should an author wish to lodge a complaint against an editorial decision or the editorial process in general they should first approach the co-editors of the journal, explaining their complaint and ask for a reasoned response. Should this not be forthcoming or adequate, the author should raise the matter with the publisher, who will investigate the nature of the complaint and act as arbiter on whether the complaint should be upheld and investigated further. This will follow guidelines set out by COPE.

The journal does not tolerate abusive behavior or correspondence towards its staff, academic editors, authors or reviewers. Any person engaged with the journal resorting to abusive behaviour or correspondence will have their contribution immediately withdrawn and future engagement with the journal will be at the discretion of the co-editors and/or publisher.

Manuscripts submitted to JCSI must be original, and not submitted for publication anywhere else. Authors must give assurance that the entire manuscript reports original work. The primary author must affirm that all of the other authors have read and approved of the manuscript. All submissions will be subject to evaluation through the use of a plagiarism detection service. The journal editors follow the Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for editors outlined by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).