World Voices Nexus: The WCCES Chronicle
Policy on Publishing Ethics

1. Policy on authorship/ contributorship 
An individual or a group of individuals from anywhere in the world is eligible to author and contribute an article in the six official languages of the United Nations viz. Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish for consideration of World Voices Nexus (WVN) for possible publication after undergoing its peer-review process. However, WVN has a right to refuse consideration of articles from an individual or a group of individuals found of violating its ethics policies per the decision of the WCCES Bureau on a formal complaint (policy outlined in Point 2 below) registered against such an individual/ a group of individuals lodged by the formally assigned reviewers.
 
2. Policy on complaints and appeals 
Any individual or the formally appointed reviewers of WVN can file a formal complaint against an author/ authors of an article for reasons of plagiarism/ unethical practices/ allegations of research misconduct with the WVN Editor, who is authorized to refer such cases to the WCCES Ethics standing committee, the WCCES Publications standing committee and Legal Counsel for advice. Based upon the recommendations, the Editor then updates the WCCES Bureau for a decision. The decision is then communicated by the Editor’s office to the author. The author is entitled to appeal such a decision within one month of receiving it. Such an appeal is communicated back by the Editor to the WCCES Bureau, which has a right to review the decision and come back with a final decision in the matter. The Editor’s office communicates the final decision to the author.
 
The process of complaints and appeals is the same when an author files a complaint about the review feedback. The process of a complaint or an appeal is completed normally within 3 months.
 
3. Policy on conflicts of interest / competing interests 
The WVN Editorial Team will endeavor to assign articles to the reviewers with no conflicts of interest/ competing interests. A question in this regard is posed to all the reviewers at the outset to adhere to this policy. Furthermore, the identity/ties of the author(s) is/are not known to the reviewer(s) and vice-versa. At least three external reviewers are assigned to each article for review in a given time frame, excluding any member of the editorial team.
 
4. Policy on data sharing and reproducibility 
All the publications of WCCES viz. World Voices Nexus: The WCCES Chronicle, Global Comparative Education: Journal of the WCCES, and WCCES-Brill Book Series can reproduce articles of each other after asking the authors to make suitable modifications like curtailing them, expanding them, or adding a new dimension to the topic of the article/ chapter in a book. Likewise, the data relating the past, current and future publications may be shared by the editorial teams of these publications among them.
 
5. Policy on ethical oversight 
All functions of ethical oversight are assigned by the Editor to the WCCES Ethics standing committee, the WCCES Publications standing committee and the Legal Counsel.
 
6. Policy on intellectual property 
While receiving articles for potential publication, WVN assumes that the authors have shared their original thoughts/ research which have not been published/ being considered for publication anywhere else. The authors must explicitly bring this to the attention of the WVN Editor if this is not the case.
 
All the articles published in WVN automatically become the copyrighted intellectual property of the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES). No part of the articles can be published elsewhere without the explicit permission of the Editor of WVN.
 
7. Policy for post-publication discussions and corrections 
If, despite all efforts of quality control, some corrections are required in the articles already published in WVN, the authors/ readers should write to the Editor. The Editor will consult the editorial team to arrive at a decision whether to carry out the correction and upload a new version of the chronicle on the website or not.