Pacific Arts Ethics Statement
Publication Ethics Statement
Our ethics statements are based on COPE’s Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors and Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing
Editors’ Responsibilities
Journal management
Executive editors are selected by the executive committee of the Pacific Arts Association. The editorial board of Pacific Arts is selected by the executive editors on a rolling basis with the aim of representing the diverse areas of study within the expansive field of Pacific Studies. Board members with doctoral degrees and/or the equivalent research training and experience are preferred but not required. Board members are specifically chosen who come from different training, cultural, and institutional backgrounds, in order to best review the multidisciplinary, intergenerational, and multicultural nature of the scholarship we aim to publish. The editorial board is responsible for peer reviewing submissions the journal receives, as well as recruiting possible submissions, assisting with public outreach, and ensuring the continuing quality of the journal.
Pacific Arts is an open access journal that uses a CC BY NC-ND license. All content is freely available without charge to the user or their institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. The decision to make Pacific Arts open access was based on the journal’s mission to reach a broader audience and to promote wider engagement with the field of Pacific visual studies. This is in keeping with the goals of the Pacific Arts Association (PAA), an international organization devoted to the study of the arts of Oceania. Pacific Arts is the affiliate journal of the PAA established in 1990 and was formerly circulated to paying members only. Back issues are stored on JSTOR, with a new series beginning in 2006. In 2020, the journal moved to eScholarship, the open access scholarly publishing program of the University of California/California Digital Library (CDL). eScholarship is a service of the Publishing, Archives, and Digitization group of the California Digital Library.
The journal receives most of its funding from donations to the Pacific Visual Studies Fund and from the Clare M. Wedding Oceania Endowment Fund (both housed at the University of California Santa Cruz). Funds support editorial assistants (who are trained by the executive editors to complete both administrative and editorial tasks) and a professional copy editor. All other journal operations (administration, editorial, outreach, formatting, etc.) are done on a voluntary basis by the executive editors.
Journal operations are managed using software from Google Drive and Microsoft Office. All files are restricted to the executive editors, current editorial assistants, and guest editors (who only see the files relevant to their special issue). The executive editors save backups of the drive contents to their personal computers and all materials submitted to eScholarship are automatically deposited in CDL's Merritt Preservation Repository for long-term preservation.
Publication Decisions
The Pacific Arts editorial board is solely and independently responsible for deciding which of the articles submitted to the journal should be published. Members of the board confer and refer to reviewer recommendations in making this decision, constrained by legal requirements related to libel, copyright infringement, and plagiarism. We welcome contributions regardless of nationality, ethnicity, political beliefs, race, or religion of the authors. Editorial decisions are not affected by the origins of the manuscript or its author.
Confidentiality
The editorial board will not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, and any other editorial advisors, as appropriate.
Declaring Conflicts of Interest
Any potential editorial conflicts of interest should be declared to the publisher prior to the editing process. Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in an editor’s, reviewer’s, or any other reader’s own research without written consent from the author. Privileged information obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal gain.
Allegations of Misconduct
The editor should safeguard the integrity of the Pacific Arts by reviewing and assessing reported or suspected misconduct (research, publication, reviewer, and editorial) in cooperation with the publisher. Such measures include contacting the author of the manuscript and giving consideration to the respective claims made, but may also include additional communications to the relevant institutions. An editor presented with evidence of misconduct should coordinate with the publisher to arrange the prompt publication of the correction, retraction, expression of concern, or other corrective action, as may be relevant.
Reviewers’ Responsibilities
Peer review
The executive editors and editorial team conduct an initial review of each submitted research article. If needed, they provide feedback for revision to meet the journal’s research and writing standards prior to being submitted to peer review. Once a submission is deemed acceptable for peer review, the journal undertakes a double anonymous peer-review process, inviting at least one external reviewer to assess and provide comment on the submission. Reviewers are asked to provide their feedback on a peer review form supplied by the journal within four weeks. This feedback is then conveyed to the author(s). If the executive editors and editorial team find that the submission does not meet journal standards, either in the initial internal review or the peer review, they will notify the author(s) that the submission has been rejected.
For other types of submissions (e.g. artist’s statements, reviews, curatorial statements), the editorial team typically conducts an internal review.
Contribution to Editorial Decisions
The double anonymous peer-review process assists the editor(s) 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.
Promptness
Any invited referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should immediately notify the editors and decline the invitation to review so that alternative reviewers can be contacted in a timely manner.
Confidentiality
Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential data. Privileged information, ideas, or images obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage. Any and all materials submitted to the peer reviewer (e.g., text, images, notes) are restricted; these may not be shared, forwarded, or distributed to others in any form or manner, with the exception of the journal’s executive editor(s). This applies also to invited reviewers who decline the review invitation.
Acknowledgement of Sources
Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors. Any statement that an observation, derivation, or argument had been previously reported 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.
Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest & Standards of Objectivity
Reviews should be done objectively. Reviewers should be aware of any personal bias they may have and take this into account when reviewing. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate and unacceptable. Reviewers are required to reveal any conflicts of interest regarding any given manuscript and will not be considered for review of those articles. This includes any connection to authors, companies, and institutions associated with the submission. If the reviewing results are contradictory, an additional opinion will be sought.
Authors’ Responsibilities
Reporting Standards & Data
Authors of reports of original research should present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion of its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately in the paper. Review articles should be objective, comprehensive, and accurate accounts of the state of the art. Authors should be prepared to provide public access to raw data in connection with a paper and retain such data for at least two years after publication. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable.
Research Ethics, Originality, Plagiarism, and Concurrent Publication
Authors should ensure their work is entirely original and that any work and/or words of others have been appropriately acknowledged. Also, sources that influenced the nature of the reported work should be cited as well. Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable. Submitting essentially the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable.
Authorship of the Paper
Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study. All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors. Where there are others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research project, they should be acknowledged or listed as contributors. The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors and no inappropriate co-authors are included on the paper, and that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication by signing an author agreement provided by the journal editors.
Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest
Authors should—at the earliest stage possible—disclose any conflicts of interest that might be construed to influence the results or their interpretation in the manuscript. All sources of financial support for the work should be disclosed.
Fundamental Errors in Published Work & Post-publication review
When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in their own published work, it is the author’s obligation to immediately notify the journal editor and work with the editor to retract or correct the paper.