Establishing Sensible and Practical Guidelines for Desk Rejections

Publishing has become, in several respects, more challenging in recent years. Academics are faced with evolving ethics that appear to be more stringent in a bid to reduce scientific fraud, the emergence of science watchdogs that are now scrutinizing the published literature with critical eyes to hold academics, editors and publishers more accountable, and a barrage of checks and balances that are required between when a paper is submitted and eventually accepted, to ensure quality control. Scientists are often under increasing pressure to produce papers in an increasingly stringent publishing environment. In such a climate, timing is everything, as is the efficiency of the process. Academics appreciate that rejections are part of the fabric of attempting to get a paper published, but they expect the reason to be clear, based on careful evaluation of their work, and not on superficial or unsubstantiated excuses. A desk rejection occurs when a paper gets rejected even before it has entered the peer review process. This paper examines the features of some desk rejections and offers some guidelines that would make desk rejections valid, fair and ethical. Academics who publish are under constant pressure to do so quickly, but effectively. They are dependent on the editors’ good judgment and the publisher’s procedures. Unfair, unsubstantiated, or tardy desk rejections disadvantage academics, and editors and publishers must be held accountable for wasting their time, resources, and patience.     

Should Authors be Requested to Suggest Peer Reviewers?

As part of a continuous process to explore the factors that might weaken or corrupt traditional peer review, in this paper, we query the ethics, fairness and validity of the request, by editors, of authors to suggest peer reviewers during the submission process. One of the reasons for the current crisis in science pertains to a loss in trust as a result of a flawed peer review which is by nature biased unless it is open peer review. As we indicate, the fact that some editors and journals rely on authors’ suggestions in terms of who should peer review their paper already instills a potential way to abuse the trust of the submission and publishing system. An author-suggested peer reviewer choice might also tempt authors to seek reviewers who might be more receptive or sympathetic to the authors’ message or results, and thus favor the outcome of that paper. Authors should thus not be placed in such a potentially ethically compromising situation, especially as a mandatory condition for submission. However, the fact that they do not have an opt-out choice during the submission process—especially when using an online submission system that makes such a suggestion compulsory—may constitute a violation of authors’ rights.     

A Repertoire of Marketers' Trust-Building Strategies Within The Sales-Marketing Interface

Examining how sales and marketing personnel interrelate is analogous to studying intergroup cooperation wherein two groups – sales and marketing – are required to work cooperatively to achieve specific firm-level objectives. While extensive literature in psychology and management has implied that trust is an important precursor of enhanced intergroup cooperation, no extant scholarly work has explicated the specific activities sales and marketing personnel may engage in to build trust within the sales-marketing interface (SMI). We use qualitative methodology and in-depth interview data collected from 29 sales and marketing executives in Saudi Arabia to investigate the specific activities that may help marketers build trust with their sales counterparts and signal to them that they are a dependable partner. Study findings suggest that when marketers (a) act as salespeople's ambassadors to senior leaders; (b) stay invested in salespeople's success; and (c) act as a semipermeable barrier between salespeople and the leadership, they are able to engender trust with salespeople. In addition to providing a preliminary thesis regarding how marketers may build trust within SMI, study findings highlight how the specific trust-building activities may contribute to strategic phenomena such as marketing-strategy making, sales buy-in of marketing strategies, and organizational learning.     

Responsible Conduct of Human Subjects Research in Islamic Communities

Science and Engineering Ethics - In order to increase understanding of the ethical implications of biomedical, behavioral and clinical research, the Fogarty International Center, part of the United...