A Conflict of Interest (COI) or competing interest exists when professional judgment regarding research conduct, manuscript evaluation, editorial decision-making, or scientific publication is influenced or could reasonably be perceived to be influenced by secondary interests. These secondary interests include financial gain, personal relationships, or professional rivalries.
All authors submitting manuscripts to JBPT are required to declare any financial or non-financial competing interests that could influence the originality, interpretation, or presentation of their research. The corresponding author must submit this declaration on behalf of all co-authors during initial submission.
Disclosures must detail all sources of funding and clarify the explicit role of the funding bodies in the study design, data collection, data analysis, and manuscript preparation.
All competing interests must be formally logged within the OJS submission system and declared in a dedicated section at the end of the manuscript text file entitled “Competing Interests”.
* Standard Mandate: If no conflict of interest exists, authors must explicitly state: “The authors declare that they have no competing interests.”
Confidentiality Restrictions: If authors are bound by binding confidentiality agreements with funders or institutional sponsors, they must provide a formal declaration confirming that they cannot disclose specific proprietary details while ensuring complete scientific transparency is maintained within valid ethical limits.
The strict mandate for transparency applies equally to all peer reviewers, handling editors, and editorial staff. Competed interests are evaluated rigorously to ensure absolute impartiality in decision-making tracks.
Reviewers must disclose potential conflicts immediately and decline an evaluation invitation if they:
Editors must recuse themselves entirely from processing a manuscript if they have any personal or professional relationship, institutional link, or financial stake in the study results.
Firewall Protection: Affected manuscripts are immediately re-routed and reassigned to an independent, un-involved editor who has absolutely zero conflicts of interest.
Our parent publishing body, MSAR Institute, guarantees that it exercises no commercial or operational influence over independent editorial assessments. Publication fee waiver structures, corporate management tracks, and financial operations are kept entirely separate from all peer-review loops and acceptance outcomes.
Guest Editors and Special Issues: Assigned Guest Editors must formally complete a full COI declaration prior to taking office. Guest Editors are strictly prohibited from handling, review-selecting, or deciding on any submissions tracing back to their own current colleagues, students, or institutional collaborators.
If an undisclosed or hidden conflict of interest is discovered either during the live peer-review track or post-publication, the journal will immediately initiate an investigation following standard COPE flowcharts.
Depending on the severity and outcome of the investigation, the journal reserves the right to execute the following administrative actions:
