Conflict of Interest Policy

When carrying out their journal duties, the Editor (EIC) and the Associate Editors (AEs) may receive submissions from authors with whom they have close relationships. This includes, for example, former students, recent collaborators, and colleagues from the same department. In these situations, a potential conflict of interest arises. Of course, the journal recognizes that the EIC and the AEs are senior people in the field with many collaborators and former Ph.D. students. If every former collaborator is a potential conflict of interest, the journal will soon run out of reviewers for a particular paper. Thus, our objective is to ensure that potential conflict of interest is well managed without sacrificing the quality of the review process or significantly increasing its complexity.

Potential conflict of interest occurs when an Editor (either the EIC or an AE) receives a submission from:

1. Authors who collaborated with the Editor in the three years prior to submission.
2. Current or former PhD students who were advised by the Editor and who graduated within the past five years.
3. Colleagues from their own department or school.
4. Other authors whose relationship to the Editor could reasonably be expected to prevent the Editor from judging the paper fairly.

The EIC will attempt to assign papers to AEs so as to avoid any potential conflict of interest. However, due to limited awareness of relationships, occasionally assignments will occur for which there is a potential conflict of interest for an AE. In such cases, the AE should notify the EIC, and the EIC will decide the most appropriate action. This would typically entail reassigning the paper to a different AE or possibly handling the paper directly.

Whenever there is a potential conflict of interest for the EIC, the EIC will ask an experienced AE from the Editorial Board to serve as the proxy EIC for this submission. The proxy EIC will then handle the entire review process; select an AE, receive reports and recommendations from the AE, and then make a decision and communicate this back directly to the authors. The proxy EIC would continue to manage the review process for any revisions until the paper is accepted, rejected, or withdrawn.

To the extent possible, Editors should also attempt to avoid potential conflicts of interest in selecting referees. Even though the authors' names and affiliations are removed from the paper, it is often not difficult for a referee to guess their identity.

NOTE: This is an adaptation of the Operations Research Policy on Potential Conflict of Interest, prepard by David Simchi-Levi, Editor-in-Chief. I thank David for his permission to use this.