General Guidelines

Ethical Guidelines

Authorship 

Authors are required to contribute meaningfully to the development of the study's concept, the design of the research, the handling of the data or the interpretation of the findings. Each author must approve the final manuscript before publication. They must also accept responsibility for the accuracy and integrity of the work. The author who submits the manuscript is responsible for overseeing the list of contributors and may appoint a corresponding author. Affiliations should indicate where the majority of the research was carried out and cannot be modified after publication. Any alterations to authorship prior to acceptance must be agreed upon by all contributors and submitted as a formal request. Requests to update an author’s name or pronouns after publication will be handled confidentially and will result in revised proofs and updated entries being sent to relevant databases. 

 

Corrections 

Socialpolicy.ch issues notices whenever the published version requires updates. These updates may concern errors or omissions that affect how the article is understood, indexed or aligned with the journal’s standards. They may also address questions or concerns about the accuracy, reliability or integrity of the research. 

The journal seeks to avoid extensive changes, major revisions, or significant additions that would alter the core argument, principal results, or overall conclusions of the original work. When an error or omission needs correcting because it affects how the article is read, understood, or interpreted, a formal correction notice will be published. 

 

Retractions 

Retractions notify readers of serious errors or breaches of research integrity. Socialpolicy.ch may retract an article if an investigation deems its results or conclusions to be unreliable. Retractions may result from honest mistakes, misconduct, or compromised peer review. Retractions may also occur if authors fail to address concerns, cannot be verified, or cannot provide raw data or evidence of the research. Authors may request a retraction, but requests can be declined if they interfere with ongoing investigations. Retraction notices clearly state the reasons and link to the original article. While authors will be informed and given the opportunity to comment, their agreement is not required. Socialpolicy.ch may publish investigation materials and notify institutions or other publishers when multiple works are affected. 

Access and storage

We pursue the goal of making scientific content freely available to everyone and thus contributing to a better worldwide exchange of knowledge. We therefore provide direct and immediate open access to all published content. Neither authors nor users incur any costs. The content can be accessed in the form of pdfs via our website www.socialpolicy.ch. We also guarantee back-up and long-term storage through our partner SOAP2. All full texts are preserved by SOAP2 in collaboration with PORTICO (www.portico.org). All issues from 2016 to 2021 are in the long-term repository rerodoc (https://doc.rero.ch/).

Copyright

By submitting manuscripts, authors accept publication under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 CC-BY International Licence. All textual content, images, photos or other files are published by sozialpolitik.ch under this licence. The content may be used freely provided the author is acknowledged. There is no exclusive transfer of exploitation rights ("copyright transfer") to socialpolicy.ch.

Submitted contributions must be original contributions that have not been published elsewhere in largely the same form or with largely the same content. Authors must also ensure that they have a licence to use or similar for any material (e.g. photos) used in a contribution.

socialpolicy.ch reserves the right to possible future publications. In this case, authors will be informed about further publication steps.