Duties and Responsibilities of Editors

Duties and Responsibilities of Editors

• Editorial independence. Make decisions on scholarly merit, scope, rigour, ethics and relevance. Decisions must be independent of the publisher's commercial interests, APC income, sponsorship, advertising, author status or anticipated citations.
• Fair and inclusive assessment. Evaluate manuscripts without discrimination based on nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, disability, age, political belief, institutional prestige or other irrelevant characteristic. Local or regional studies must be judged by their scholarly contribution, not by origin.
• Protect manuscript content, author and reviewer information, reports, investigations and correspondence. Limit access to persons with a legitimate editorial role.
• Conflict disclosure and recusal. Declare and record financial, professional, collaborative, personal or institutional conflicts. Recuse from the entire handling and decision process where impartiality may reasonably be questioned.
• Qualified and independent reviewers. Select reviewers for expertise and independence, verify identity and contact details, avoid overuse of the same reviewers, and monitor timeliness and report quality.
• Integrity of double-anonymous review. Ensure author files are anonymised, protect reviewer identities, and do not reveal confidential information unless required by law or agreed under a published policy.
• Reasoned decisions. Base decisions on the manuscript and quality of evidence in the reviews. Do not treat reviewer votes as automatic. Explain decisions and identify the changes required for reconsideration.
• No coercive citation. Do not require authors to cite the journal, editors, reviewers or particular articles unless the references are specifically relevant. Remove reviewer citation requests that lack scholarly justification.
• Ethical oversight. Check ethics, consent, privacy, conflicts, funding, authorship, data, AI and permissions. Use relevant COPE guidance for suspected misconduct and give affected parties a fair opportunity to respond.
• Peer-review manipulation prevention. Verify reviewer identities and independence, scrutinise suspicious recommendations or email domains, restrict unauthorised changes to reviewer records and preserve the audit trail.
• Corrections and the scholarly record. Act promptly on credible post-publication concerns. Publish linked corrections, expressions of concern or retractions where warranted and avoid silent alteration of the version of record.
• Appeals and complaints. Ensure appeals and complaints are handled impartially, by a person not responsible for the contested action where possible, and within the published procedure.
• Special-issue oversight. Approve proposals, appoint qualified guest editors, manage conflicts, monitor acceptance patterns and retain final control. Apply the same standards as regular issues.
• AI governance. Do not upload confidential submissions to unauthorised AI services or allow AI to make final decisions. Disclose and supervise any approved AI-assisted editorial process.
• Editorial records and performance. Maintain secure records of submissions, reviewer invitations, conflicts, reports, decisions, revisions, appeals and integrity cases. Monitor decision times, reviewer quality, corrections and policy compliance.
• Board governance. Keep the editorial board current, obtain members' consent to serve, publish full affiliations and roles, review performance periodically and remove inaccurate or inactive listings.

9.1 Independence for editor-authored submissions

An editor or board member submitting to Planning Malaysia must be completely excluded from access to reviewer identities, reports and decisions. The manuscript must be assigned to an independent senior editor, reviewed externally and labelled on publication with a statement such as: The author is a member of the journal's editorial team and was not involved in the peer review or decision for this article.