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Editorial Policies

Publisher

The EBR is organizationally supported by the School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana, and co-financed with the Slovenian Research Agency (ARIS). Such organizational and financing structure allows EBR not to charge any submission, publication, or subscription fees, thus enabling the widest possible reach and access to the research community.

Journal management

The governance structure of the Journal ensures that editorial decisions are unbiased and independent.

EBR is managed by two Editors-in-Chief and an Editorial Board composed of subject editors. Subject Editors are appointed by Editor-in-Chief.

Editors-in-Chief are responsible for the EBR’s strategic and operational activities at the top level, foremost making sure that the scope and aims of the journal are being met. Editors-in-Chief are fully independent in managing the journal and in editorial decisions.

The EBR has an Editorial Board composed of Subject Editors, who are reputable scholars in their fields of expertise. The Editor-in-Chief assigns submitted manuscripts of sufficient quality to Subject Editors and, as a principle, relies on Subject Editors’, as well as reviewers' judgments whether an article should be accepted or not. The decision by Editor-in-Chief is final.

The Subject Editors are appointed by the Editor-in-Chief in line with the aims and scope of the journal, as well as the envisioned editorial policy. When appointing members of the Editorial Board, a balance is sought between disciplines, research methods, academic experience, and background, as well as gender. Subject Editors are responsible for carrying out the main stages of the peer-review process: working with reviewers and evaluating the manuscripts.

The Editorial Assistant is responsible for the technical support in the submission and review process, as well as for the publishing process once the manuscript is accepted.

Solicited manuscripts are limited to thematic special issues and announced through open Calls for papers. Proposals for thematic special issues should be sent to Editors-in-Chief who have the right to accept or decline such proposals. In arriving at decision, the Editors-in-Chief may seek the advice of Editorial Board members.

Duties of editors

EBR is committed to ensuring integrity and ethically sound publishing. Therefore, EBR closely follows the suggestion of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), as laid out in the COPE guidelines (Promoting integrity in scholarly research and its publication | COPE: Committee on Publication Ethics).

  • Editorial responsibility and decision-making
    The editorial team at EBR is responsible for selecting manuscripts for publication based on their scholarly merit, relevance to the journal’s scope, and compliance with ethical and legal standards. The editor’s decision should be based on reviewer input, the author’s response, and the quality and relevance of the manuscript. The final decision is made by the Editor-in-Chief.

  • Integrity and confidentiality
    Editors must treat all submitted materials as strictly confidential and ensure that manuscript content is accessible only to individuals directly involved in the editorial process. Under no circumstances should any part of a manuscript under review be shared with AI tools (e.g. large language models) or external platforms to generate feedback, summaries, or editorial input. Content may not be used for personal research or disclosed without the author’s explicit consent. Editors are also responsible for identifying and appropriately managing any potential conflicts of interest.

  • Author and reviewer relations
    Editors are expected to ensure a fair, unbiased, and timely peer review process. Submissions from editorial board members must be handled with particular care to avoid conflicts of interest. Reviewers should be encouraged to identify ethical concerns, such as plagiarism or data manipulation, and their contributions should be acknowledged. Reviews must be respectful and constructive; offensive or defamatory content must not be shared with authors.

  • Quality and ethical oversight
    Editors are expected to uphold high standards of quality and research integrity across all published content. They should ensure that studies involving human (or animal subjects) have received approval from a recognized ethics authority, such as an institutional review board or ethics committee, where applicable.
    Editors must remain attentive to potential issues related to intellectual property, legal compliance, and ethical conduct. In addition to pre-publication checks, editors also have a duty to respond to concerns raised after publication. If errors, misleading information, or ethical breaches are identified post-publication, appropriate actions must be taken promptly and transparently (in accordance with COPE guidelines).

Peer-Review Process

All submitted manuscripts to the EBR are reviewed using a double-blind review process. After screening the manuscripts for their fit with the journal's aims, scope, and quality standards (including plagiarism, a potential conflict of interest, and other possible ethical concerns), the Editor-in Chief passes suitable manuscripts to appropriate subject editors. Subject editors can either desk reject the paper or start the review process. At submission, the authors can propose potential reviewers, however, the EBR editors have the right to appoint reviewers at their discretion. The reviewers can recommend that the paper is accepted, rejected, a major revision or minor revision is needed. Based on the reviewers' assessment and recommendations, the subject editor proposes one of the following decisions regarding the manuscript: accept, reject, or revise. As a principle, the Editors-in-Chief rely on these judgments when making the final decision regarding the publication of manuscripts, but they have the final authority for the acceptance/rejection of an article. Editors and editorial team members are excluded from the review process and publication decisions when they are (co)authors of submitted manuscripts.

Reviewers

Authors must submit the names, addresses and/or e-mail addresses of two potential reviewers with the manuscript. The editors have the authority to decide whether or not to include the suggested reviewers.

Reviewers assist the editorial team in making editorial decisions. Reviews should be conducted objectively, and observations should be formulated clearly with supporting arguments so that authors can use them for improving the paper. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate.

Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the editor and excuse himself from the review process. Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.

Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage.

Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors. References to the ideas of others should be accompanied by the relevant citation. A reviewer should also call to the editor's attention any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which they have personal knowledge.

Submissions

All authors of research papers submitted to the journal should make a substantial contribution to the process of paper development and will be accountable for the paper in its published form. Authors should define the incremental contribution of the paper by referencing relevant work on which the paper is based. Submitting a paper that is substantially the same as a previously published paper is considered a serious breach of professional ethics and may result in the editor informing officials at the authors' institutions of this breach. Papers that are improved versions of working papers or published in conference proceedings are also considered for review.
Submissions that have previously appeared as preprints are eligible for consideration. Once a manuscript enters the review process at EBR, authors must refrain from revising or updating the preprint to incorporate reviewer feedback, editorial input, or any other modifications resulting from the peer review process conducted by the EBR. Once an article has been accepted for publication in EBR, it must not be uploaded or re-uploaded as a preprint. Authors are required to disclose the existence of any preprint at the time of submission and are encouraged to update the preprint record with a formal citation and a link to the final published version upon publication.

Resubmissions

Manuscripts that have been rejected are not eligible for further consideration by the EBR journal. If a resubmission is allowed, it is explicitly stated as such in the editor's decision.

Concurrent reviews

An article that is concurrently reviewed in another journal can not be in a review process at EBR.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors and reviewers are required to inform the editors of the conflict of interest. The authors are explicitly requested to declare any conflict of interest at the submission of a revised manuscript. The reviewers are obliged to inform the subject editor or Editor-in-Chief of any conflict of interest as soon as the such situation is manifested. Descriptions of potential situations of conflict of interest are provided in the Publication Ethics policies.

Economic and Business Review is an open-access journal. No publication charges or author fees are made. All articles are permanently free for everyone to read, download, copy and distribute. For articles published before 2025, permitted reuse is defined by the following user license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND).

For articles published in 2025 and thereafter, permitted reuse is defined by the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, which allows sharing and adaptation with appropriate credit, a link to the license, and an indication of whether changes were made.

The authors retain the copyright in addition to the scholarly usage rights and the University of Ljubljana, School of Economics and Business receives the publication and distribution rights.

Advertising

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