The Journal of Prison Education and Reentry (JPER) is committed to maintaining high standards of academic integrity, ethical research, responsible authorship, transparent editorial decision-making, and fair peer review. The journal expects authors, reviewers, editors, and other participants in the publication process to act honestly, responsibly, and professionally. JPER’s publication practices are guided by internationally recognized principles of scholarly publishing and research ethics. These standards apply to researcher-written articles, practitioner contributions, reviews, and other materials published by the journal, while recognizing that different article types may follow different editorial and review procedures.
Responsibilities of Authors
Authors are responsible for the accuracy, originality, integrity, and ethical conduct of the work they submit. A manuscript should present an honest account of the research, practice, analysis, or experience being reported and should not contain fabricated, falsified, manipulated, or intentionally misleading information.
Authors should ensure that all data, quotations, references, tables, figures, and other materials are accurately presented and appropriately attributed. Relevant methods should be described with sufficient clarity to allow readers to understand how the work was conducted and, where applicable, how the findings were generated.
Submission of a manuscript to JPER indicates that the authors have read and accepted the journal’s publication ethics requirements and that they take responsibility for the integrity of the submitted work.
Originality and Plagiarism
All submissions must be original. Authors must properly acknowledge the ideas, words, data, images, and other intellectual contributions of others.
Plagiarism in any form is unacceptable. This includes copying text without attribution, presenting another person’s ideas or findings as one’s own, inappropriate paraphrasing, reproducing previously published material without acknowledgment, or using another person’s unpublished work without authorization.
Authors should also avoid excessive reuse of their own previously published material without appropriate citation. Where material from an author’s earlier publication is necessary, the previous work should be clearly acknowledged and the new manuscript should provide a distinct scholarly contribution.
The journal may use appropriate methods or software to evaluate manuscripts for textual overlap or other publication-integrity concerns.
Duplicate and Simultaneous Submission
A manuscript submitted to JPER should not be under consideration by another journal at the same time. Authors should not submit substantially the same manuscript simultaneously to multiple publications.
Previously published work should not normally be submitted as an original article. If a manuscript is based on material that has appeared previously in another form, such as a conference paper, report, thesis, preprint, or institutional publication, the authors should disclose this information to the editorial office and clearly explain the relationship between the earlier material and the submitted manuscript.
Duplicate or redundant publication that gives the misleading impression that the same research represents separate independent studies is not acceptable.
Authorship and Contributorship
Authorship should be limited to individuals who have made a meaningful intellectual contribution to the work and who are willing to take responsibility for the published article.
All listed authors should have participated sufficiently in the development of the manuscript to justify authorship. Each author should review and approve the final version before publication.
Individuals who contributed to the work but do not meet the requirements for authorship may be acknowledged appropriately. Honorary, guest, gifted, or ghost authorship is not acceptable.
Authors are responsible for ensuring that the author list, order of authors, affiliations, and corresponding-author details are correct at the time of submission. Requests to add, remove, or reorder authors after submission should be explained to the editorial office and may require the written agreement of all affected authors.
Research Involving Human Participants
Research involving human participants must be conducted according to internationally recognized ethical principles and applicable institutional or national requirements.
Authors should clearly state whether appropriate ethics or institutional review approval was obtained when such approval was required. The manuscript should identify the approving body where appropriate and provide relevant approval information if requested by the journal.
Participation in research should be voluntary and based on informed consent. Participants should receive sufficient information about the purpose of the research, what participation involves, foreseeable risks or burdens, confidentiality arrangements, and their right to decline or withdraw where applicable.
Research Involving Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Participants
Because JPER publishes research concerning prison education and reentry, particular attention must be given to the ethical treatment of incarcerated individuals and other potentially vulnerable participants.
Authors should carefully consider the power relationships that may exist within correctional environments. Participation should not be obtained through coercion, pressure, inappropriate inducement, or circumstances in which individuals may reasonably believe that participation could affect their sentence, treatment, privileges, educational opportunities, parole prospects, institutional status, or access to services.
Where incarcerated individuals participate in research, authors should describe the safeguards used to protect voluntariness, privacy, confidentiality, dignity, and welfare. Researchers should minimize the collection of unnecessary identifying information and should consider whether publication of contextual details could indirectly identify participants.
The interests and safety of participants should take priority over research convenience or publication objectives.
Informed Consent and Privacy
Authors are responsible for obtaining informed consent where required. Consent should be appropriate to the nature of the study and the population involved.
Personally identifiable or sensitive information should not be published unless there is a legitimate scholarly reason, appropriate ethical authorization, and valid consent for disclosure.
Pseudonyms, anonymization, aggregation, or other privacy-protective methods should be used when necessary. Authors should be particularly cautious when reporting information about small prison populations, specific institutions, rare experiences, or other circumstances in which participants could potentially be identified even if their names are removed.
Research Data and Integrity of Results
Research findings must be reported accurately. Fabrication, falsification, selective manipulation of data, or intentional misrepresentation of results constitutes serious research misconduct.
Authors should retain research records and supporting data in accordance with applicable ethical, institutional, legal, and disciplinary requirements. Where appropriate and ethically permissible, authors should be prepared to provide information necessary for editors or reviewers to evaluate the reliability of the reported findings.
Statistical analyses, qualitative interpretations, and other forms of evidence should be presented honestly. Authors should not omit material findings solely because they are inconsistent with expectations or hypotheses.
Tables, figures, photographs, and other visual materials should accurately represent the underlying information. Images must not be manipulated in a manner that changes their scientific or evidentiary meaning.
Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence and Automated Tools
Authors remain fully responsible for the originality, accuracy, integrity, and ethical compliance of their manuscripts, regardless of whether artificial intelligence or automated tools have been used during preparation.
Artificial intelligence systems should not be listed as authors because they cannot accept responsibility for the work, approve publication, disclose conflicts of interest, or respond to questions concerning research integrity.
Where generative artificial intelligence has been used substantially in preparing, analyzing, translating, or editing a manuscript, authors should disclose its use when relevant to transparency and reproducibility. Authors must independently verify any text, references, interpretations, data, or other information generated by such systems.
The use of artificial intelligence must not compromise confidentiality, research-participant privacy, copyright, data protection, or the integrity of peer review.
Conflicts of Interest
Authors should disclose financial, professional, institutional, personal, or other relationships that could reasonably be perceived as influencing the research, interpretation, or presentation of the work.
Funding sources and the role of funders should be disclosed where applicable. Authors should state whether a sponsor had any role in study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, manuscript preparation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewers and editors must likewise disclose potential conflicts of interest and should decline involvement when a conflict could compromise, or reasonably appear to compromise, impartiality.
Peer Review Ethics
Researcher-written manuscripts submitted to JPER undergo blind peer review and are normally evaluated by three reviewers with relevant expertise. Identifying information is removed from manuscripts before review in order to support impartial assessment.
Reviewers are expected to evaluate manuscripts objectively, constructively, confidentially, and within their areas of expertise. They should not use unpublished information obtained through peer review for personal, professional, academic, or commercial advantage.
Reviewers should not attempt to identify authors or contact them directly regarding a manuscript under review. Concerns about research integrity, plagiarism, duplicate publication, ethical approval, data reliability, or other serious matters should be communicated privately to the editor.
Practitioner papers follow a different editorial process and are generally reviewed by one reviewer or designated editor. Practitioner contributions are assessed according to their clarity, coherence, significance, relevance, practical value, and contribution to prison education and reentry. They should not be represented as formally peer-reviewed research unless they have undergone the journal’s research peer-review process.
Responsibilities of Editors
Editors are responsible for evaluating submissions fairly and making publication decisions on the basis of scholarly quality, relevance, originality, methodological soundness, ethical compliance, and contribution to the journal’s field.
Editorial decisions should not be influenced by an author’s nationality, institutional affiliation, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, political position, personal relationships, or other characteristics unrelated to the scholarly merits of the submission.
Editors should protect the confidentiality of manuscripts, reviewer reports, and unpublished information. They should disclose relevant conflicts of interest and withdraw from editorial handling when impartiality may reasonably be questioned.
The final decision regarding publication rests with the appropriate editor, who considers reviewer reports together with the manuscript’s overall quality and compliance with journal policies.
Reviewer Confidentiality
Manuscripts under review are confidential documents. Reviewers must not share manuscripts with colleagues, students, institutions, or other individuals without prior authorization from the editorial office.
Information, arguments, data, methods, or ideas obtained through peer review must not be used before publication for the reviewer’s own research or professional advantage.
Where a reviewer believes that specialist advice is required, the reviewer should contact the editor rather than independently forwarding the manuscript to another person.
Citation Practices
Authors should cite relevant sources accurately and fairly. References should support the claims for which they are cited and should not be included solely to increase citation counts or satisfy inappropriate requests.
Citation manipulation, including coordinated or coercive attempts to artificially increase citations to particular authors, journals, institutions, or publications, is contrary to JPER’s ethical standards.
Reviewers should recommend additional references only where they genuinely improve the scholarly foundation of the manuscript. Reviewers should not require authors to cite the reviewer’s own publications unless those works are directly relevant and necessary.
Practitioner Contributions
Practitioner papers are intended to represent experiences, reflections, instructional practices, ethical challenges, case studies, action research, artistic work, and other forms of knowledge arising from prison education practice.
Although practitioner papers are generally less formal than empirical research manuscripts, the same fundamental standards of honesty, attribution, privacy, and ethical responsibility apply.
Practitioner authors should take particular care when describing students, incarcerated individuals, colleagues, correctional institutions, or specific events. Information that could identify individuals or expose them to harm should not be included without an appropriate ethical basis and necessary permission.
Copyrighted and Third-Party Material
Authors are responsible for ensuring that they have the right to include photographs, illustrations, tables, figures, artworks, extensive quotations, assessment instruments, or other third-party materials in their manuscripts.
Where permission is required, authors should obtain it before publication and provide appropriate attribution.
The fact that JPER publishes under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license does not automatically give authors the right to relicense copyrighted third-party material. Any material excluded from the article’s CC BY 4.0 license should be clearly identified through an appropriate credit line.
Corrections and Amendments
JPER recognizes its responsibility to maintain an accurate scholarly record. When a significant error is discovered in a published article, the journal may publish a correction, amendment, or other appropriate notice.
Minor errors that do not affect the interpretation, reliability, or scholarly record may be corrected according to editorial policy. Significant errors involving authorship, data, interpretation, or other substantive matters should be addressed transparently.
Correction notices should clearly identify the original article and describe the nature of the correction so that readers can understand what has changed.
Retractions and Expressions of Concern
Retraction may be considered when there is reliable evidence that a published article contains seriously unreliable findings, fabricated or falsified data, substantial plagiarism, unauthorized publication, serious ethical violations, duplicate publication, or other misconduct that undermines confidence in the article.
A retraction is intended to correct the scholarly record rather than to punish authors.
Where serious concerns have been raised but an investigation has not yet been completed, the journal may publish an expression of concern when this is necessary to alert readers.
Retraction, correction, or expression-of-concern notices should remain clearly linked to the affected article.
Allegations of Research or Publication Misconduct
JPER takes allegations of research and publication misconduct seriously. Concerns may involve plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, duplicate publication, unethical research, authorship disputes, peer-review manipulation, undeclared conflicts of interest, inappropriate image manipulation, or other violations of publication ethics.
When credible concerns are raised, the editorial office may request an explanation or supporting documentation from the authors and may seek information from reviewers, institutions, publishers, or other relevant parties where appropriate.
Investigations should be conducted fairly and confidentially. The journal should avoid making conclusions before sufficient information has been considered.
Depending on the findings, appropriate action may include correction, rejection, withdrawal, retraction, an expression of concern, notification of relevant institutions, or other measures necessary to protect the scholarly record.
Complaints and Appeals
Authors, reviewers, readers, or other interested parties may contact the editorial office with concerns regarding editorial procedures, publication ethics, corrections, peer review, or published content.
Authors may appeal an editorial decision when they believe that a significant factual or procedural error affected the outcome. An appeal should provide a clear scholarly explanation rather than simply expressing disagreement with the decision.
Where appropriate, an appeal may be considered by an editor who was not directly responsible for the original decision. Submission of an appeal does not guarantee that the editorial decision will be changed.
Editorial Independence
Editorial decisions are made independently on the basis of scholarly and ethical considerations. Financial, institutional, commercial, or personal interests should not determine whether a manuscript is accepted or rejected.
The journal’s Diamond Open Access model means that authors are not required to pay article processing charges and readers are not charged to access published articles. Publication decisions should therefore remain independent of an author’s ability to pay.
Post-Publication Responsibility
Publication does not end the journal’s responsibility for the scholarly record. Authors are expected to cooperate with reasonable post-publication questions concerning their work and to notify the journal promptly if they discover a significant error after publication.
Readers and researchers are encouraged to communicate substantive concerns about published articles to the editorial office. Such concerns will be considered according to their seriousness and the available evidence.
Commitment to Ethical Publishing
The Journal of Prison Education and Reentry (JPER) seeks to provide a trustworthy forum for researchers, educators, practitioners, policymakers, and others concerned with prison education and successful reentry. Ethical publishing requires shared responsibility among authors, reviewers, editors, institutions, and readers. JPER is therefore committed to protecting research participants, maintaining the integrity of peer review, correcting the scholarly record when necessary, respecting intellectual property, promoting transparency, and ensuring that publication decisions are based on the quality and relevance of the work rather than inappropriate external influence.