Publisher: Psychological Services’ Centre, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University, Igbariam Campus, Anambra State, Nigeria
Publishing-platform and DOI metadata partner: Onyitechideas Publication Services
Effective date: 31 August 2026
Last updated: 31 August 2026
1. Our commitment
OJPS is committed to maintaining high standards of research integrity, editorial independence, responsible peer review, transparency, and respect for authors, reviewers, readers, research participants, and the wider public. The Journal follows the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and will use relevant COPE guidance when handling suspected misconduct, corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions.
The Psychological Services’ Centre is the publisher and has responsibility for the Journal’s scholarly and ethical oversight. Onyitechideas Publication Services is the Centre’s appointed technical and publishing-platform partner. It may develop, host, maintain, and update the Journal website, OJS platform, publication records, and DOI metadata under the Centre’s authority, but editorial decisions remain the responsibility of the Journal’s authorised editor and editorial board.
2. Editorial board and governance
The editorial board should consist of recognised scholars and professionals whose expertise is relevant to the Journal’s scope. The Journal will publish the names, institutional affiliations, roles, and professional contact information of editorial-board members and will update this information when material changes occur.
The Journal will maintain a clear distinction between the publisher, the editorial team, peer reviewers, authors, and technical service providers. Commercial, institutional, or technical relationships must not improperly influence editorial decisions. The editor should have sufficient authority to make independent decisions about peer review, acceptance, rejection, correction, and retraction, subject to the Journal’s policies and applicable law.
3. Publication decisions
The editor is responsible for deciding which manuscripts are accepted for publication. Decisions should be based on the manuscript’s originality, scholarly quality, clarity, methodological soundness, relevance to the Journal’s aims and scope, ethical compliance, and importance to readers and the research community.
Editors must not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, nationality, citizenship, disability, political opinion, institutional affiliation, or personal characteristics unrelated to the scholarly merits of the work. Editors may reject a manuscript without external review where it falls outside the Journal’s scope, fails to meet minimum quality requirements, presents serious ethical concerns, or does not comply with the submission requirements.
Editorial decisions may be constrained by legal requirements relating to copyright, defamation, privacy, plagiarism, research ethics, or other unlawful content. Editors may consult other editors, advisers, or reviewers, while retaining responsibility for the decision.
4. Peer review
OJPS normally uses a double-anonymised peer-review process. Manuscripts are first assessed by an editor for scope, quality, originality, and ethical suitability. Suitable manuscripts may then be sent to qualified reviewers. The Journal generally seeks two substantive reviews, but the editor may vary the number where necessary and should record the reason for a significant deviation.
Reviewers should assess manuscripts objectively, promptly, and constructively. Reviews should address the quality of the research, the validity of the methods, the accuracy of the conclusions, the adequacy of citations, and the manuscript’s contribution. Personal criticism is inappropriate.
Reviewers must disclose conflicts of interest and decline an assignment where they are not sufficiently qualified, cannot provide a timely review, have a personal or professional conflict, or may be unable to assess the work impartially. Reviewers must not use, copy, disclose, or exploit unpublished information obtained through peer review.
Editors must protect the confidentiality of manuscripts and review reports. Manuscripts should be disclosed only to the corresponding author, authorised editors, reviewers, potential reviewers, editorial advisers, the publisher, and authorised service providers who require access for the publishing workflow. The Journal may disclose information where necessary to investigate suspected misconduct, comply with law, protect safety, or preserve the integrity of the scholarly record.
5. Fairness, accessibility, and confidentiality
All submissions must be evaluated fairly and consistently. The Journal will make reasonable efforts to provide accessible instructions and communication channels. Authors and reviewers should not be disadvantaged by language, geography, institutional resources, or other irrelevant factors.
The Journal will handle names, email addresses, account details, manuscripts, reviewer reports, and editorial correspondence in accordance with its Privacy Policy and applicable data-protection law. Authors should remove unnecessary identifying information from manuscripts and case materials and should not submit confidential personal data without a lawful basis and appropriate consent.
6. Conflicts of interest and disclosure
Editors, reviewers, and authors must disclose financial, personal, professional, institutional, or other relationships that could reasonably be perceived to influence their work or decisions. Editors and reviewers should recuse themselves when a conflict cannot be managed fairly.
Authors must disclose relevant employment, consultancies, grants, funding, honoraria, ownership interests, patents, paid expert work, personal relationships, or other interests. Authors must also state the role of funders in study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, writing, and the decision to submit.
If a relevant conflict is discovered after publication, the Journal may publish a correction, add a disclosure, issue an expression of concern, or take another proportionate action.
7. Responsibilities of authors
Authors must submit work that is substantially original, accurate, and not under consideration by another journal. They must not submit the same manuscript to multiple journals simultaneously. Any secondary publication, translation, reuse, or substantial extension of previously published work must be disclosed and must comply with applicable copyright and editorial requirements.
Authors must report methods and results honestly and must not fabricate, falsify, manipulate, or selectively omit data in a misleading manner. Images, figures, tables, and datasets must not be manipulated in a way that misrepresents the underlying evidence.
Authors must acknowledge the work of others accurately, cite relevant sources, distinguish quotation from paraphrase, obtain permission for copyrighted material, and disclose text recycling or reuse. The Journal may use plagiarism-detection or similarity-screening software as one part of its editorial assessment. A similarity report is not, by itself, proof of misconduct; the editor will consider the context and evidence.
Authors must obtain permission to use questionnaires, scales, software, photographs, datasets, recordings, and other third-party materials where permission is required. They must obtain appropriate ethics approval, informed consent, and institutional permissions for research involving people, animals, private data, biological material, or identifiable case information.
Authors should ensure that the author list, order, affiliations, corresponding author, and contributor roles are correct at submission. All listed authors must have made a substantial contribution, approved the submitted version, agreed to publication, and accepted responsibility for the work. Requests to add, remove, or reorder authors must be justified and approved by all affected authors. Authorship changes will generally not be accepted after acceptance except in exceptional circumstances.
Authors should disclose funding, conflicts of interest, ethics approval or exemption, informed-consent procedures, data availability, and any relevant use of artificial intelligence or automated tools in accordance with the Journal’s instructions.
8. Research involving human participants, animals, or personal data
Research involving human participants, their personal data, or biological material must comply with applicable law, institutional requirements, and recognised ethical standards. Authors should identify the approving or reviewing ethics committee, approval number where applicable, or the basis for an exemption.
Manuscripts should state whether informed consent was obtained. For case reports, photographs, interviews, or other potentially identifying material, authors must obtain written consent from the participant or an authorised parent, guardian, or representative where required. Identifying details should be removed unless disclosure is necessary, lawful, and expressly authorised.
Research involving animals must comply with applicable institutional and national requirements and should include the relevant approval or welfare statement. The editor may request supporting documentation and may reject work that does not adequately address participant welfare, privacy, consent, or research ethics.
Retrospective or secondary-data research may still require ethics review or a formal exemption. Authors should confirm the requirements of their institution and jurisdiction before submission.
9. Data access, materials, and reproducibility
Authors should describe methods and data sufficiently to enable responsible evaluation and, where practicable, replication. The Journal may request supporting data, code, records, instruments, or other documentation during peer review or after publication to assess the validity of a result.
Data should not be publicly shared where doing so would breach privacy, confidentiality, intellectual-property rights, contractual obligations, or applicable law. Authors should explain any access restrictions and should use appropriate de-identification, controlled access, or data-availability statements.
Authors should retain relevant research records for a reasonable period after publication and should preserve them securely. The Journal will not require disclosure of confidential or proprietary information where disclosure would be unlawful or inappropriate.
10. Fees and financial transparency
Where the Journal charges a submission, processing, publication, subscription, or other fee, the amount, timing, purpose, refund position, waiver policy, and payment instructions should be stated clearly on the Journal website before authors submit or make payment.
Payment of a fee must not guarantee acceptance and must not influence editorial decisions. Editors and reviewers should not know or use payment information in a way that compromises impartial editorial evaluation. Where no fee applies to a particular article or author, the relevant Journal page should state that clearly.
11. Open access, copyright, and licensing
OJPS provides open access to its published content. Unless the article’s publication agreement states otherwise, articles are intended to be published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. Under CC BY, users may copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the material, including commercially, provided that appropriate credit is given, a link to the licence is supplied, and changes are indicated.
Authors retain copyright or the rights specified in the applicable publishing agreement. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission for third-party material and for ensuring that publication does not infringe copyright, moral rights, privacy rights, confidentiality, or other rights.
12. Digital preservation, metadata, and persistent identifiers
The Journal will take reasonable steps to preserve access to published content and its bibliographic metadata. Article metadata may be deposited with DOI registration agencies, repositories, library systems, indexing services, search engines, and scholarly discovery services.
The Journal will seek to keep article titles, author names, affiliations, abstracts, references, publication dates, issue information, licences, and DOI metadata accurate and consistent. If a DOI or metadata record is corrected, the Journal may update the relevant registry and article landing page.
The Journal will not create duplicate DOI records for the same article. Existing identifiers and records will be reviewed before new metadata is deposited.
13. Misconduct and unethical behaviour
Suspected misconduct may be reported to the editor or publisher at any time by an author, reviewer, reader, institution, or other person. Reports should provide sufficient information and supporting evidence where available. Allegations will be treated seriously, confidentially, and fairly, and the person concerned will be given a reasonable opportunity to respond.
Possible concerns include plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, image manipulation, duplicate or concurrent submission, undisclosed conflicts of interest, inappropriate authorship, peer-review manipulation, breach of confidentiality, misuse of personal data, copyright infringement, unethical research, retaliation, citation manipulation, and false statements about a person or organisation.
The Journal may take one or more of the following actions, depending on the evidence and seriousness of the matter:
- seek an explanation or correction from the author, reviewer, or editor;
- request supporting data, ethics records, permissions, or authorship confirmation;
- suspend review or publication while an investigation is conducted;
- reject or withdraw a manuscript before publication;
- notify a relevant institution, funder, editor, professional body, or authority;
- publish a correction, erratum, or clarification;
- publish an expression of concern;
- retract or remove an article where justified; or
- restrict future submissions or reviewing activity for a defined period.
A retracted article will normally remain accessible as part of the scholarly record, clearly marked Retracted, with a linked notice explaining the reason for retraction. Retraction does not necessarily mean that every part of an article is invalid; the notice should identify the affected concerns as clearly as possible.
14. Corrections, retractions, and fundamental errors
Authors must promptly notify the editor if they discover a significant error or inaccuracy in a published article and must cooperate with the Journal in assessing the appropriate remedy. Readers and third parties may report a suspected error or integrity concern to the editor.
Depending on the circumstances, the Journal may publish a correction, clarification, expression of concern, or retraction. The Journal will maintain a transparent link between the original article and the relevant notice and will update metadata where practicable.
Editorial decisions should not be reversed without a substantial reason. If a decision must be reconsidered because of a serious error, undisclosed conflict, procedural failure, or new evidence, the editor should document the reason and follow a fair process.
15. Complaints and appeals
Authors may appeal an editorial decision by writing to the Journal Editor and explaining the specific grounds for the appeal. An appeal should identify a material error in the review or decision process, a relevant misunderstanding of the manuscript, or evidence that the decision was inconsistent with the Journal’s stated policy. Disagreement with a reviewer’s scholarly opinion alone is not ordinarily sufficient.
Complaints about editorial conduct, peer review, fees, conflicts, publication ethics, or technical handling should be sent to editor@psyservicesjournal.org.ng. Complaints will be acknowledged and reviewed by an appropriate person who is independent of the matter where practicable. The Journal may refer serious or unresolved concerns to the publisher, the relevant institution, or another competent body.
16. Contact
Questions about this policy, suspected misconduct, corrections, retractions, appeals, or research-integrity concerns should be sent to:
Journal Editor
Ojukwu Journal of Psychological Services
Psychological Services’ Centre
Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu University
Igbariam Campus, Anambra State, Nigeria
Email: editor@psyservicesjournal.org.ng
Additional institutional contact: ci.onyemaechi@coou.edu.ng