Competing Interests

The Open Library of Humanities is committed to transparent and bias-free research. To ensure that all publications are as open as possible, all authors, reviewers, and editors are required to declare any interests that could appear to compromise, conflict, or influence the validity of the publication. This process is designed to reinforce the readers' trust in the research data.

Please declare any competing interests that you have at the point of submission. A conflict of interest must be declared if there is any reason why the information or the interpretation of information being produced may be influenced by a personal or financial relationship with other organizations or individuals, or if these relationships could be reasonably perceived from other people as influencing objective data or decision-making. Everyone involved in the submission, editorial processing, peer review, and publication should declare any competing interests that they may have as early as possible.

Competing interests can take the form of financial and/or non-financial relationships. The declaration of such relationships helps to ensure that academic rigour is maintained and that publications cannot be accused of undue bias or misinformation.

Examples of competing interests:

  • receipt of payment, in any form, from an organization or individual related to the subject matter
  • ownership of stocks or shares in organizations directly related to the subject matter
  • receipt of grants or funding
  • membership of relevant boards
  • related patents/applied for patents
  • gifts
  • known relationships that will hinder impartiality (e.g., colleagues, family, mentor, previous supervisor/student)
  • political, religious, ideological interests
  • commercial

Competing interests should generally be declared to cover at least the previous five years (e.g., if a reviewer supervised the author's PhD, then their professional relationship should have ended over five years ago). This is a minimum requirement. Individuals must declare if they have had a previous relationship with someone/an organization relevant to the submission that could be deemed to influence decision-making.

For authors

Please place a competing interests statement at the end of the manuscript, immediately before the reference list. Use author initials to denote differing competing interests. For example:

  • TW completed paid consultancy work from [company name] as part of the data acquisition for this study. BH has minority shares in [company name], which part funded the research grant for this project. SM is a member of the editorial board for [journal name], which is on a voluntary basis. All other authors have no competing interests.

If there are no competing interests for any author, please add the following statement:

  • The authors have no competing interests to declare.

For reviewers

If you have any competing interests, please list them in the text box available on your reviewer page. For example:

  • I was previously employed by the laboratory that collected this data.

 If you do not have competing interests, please add the following statement:

  • I have no competing interests to declare.