Conflict of Interest

A conflict of interest (competing interest) exists when financial, professional, or personal considerations could influence, or could reasonably be seen to influence, a person's judgment about research or its publication. Progressive Physics Journal (PPJ) requires all authors, reviewers, and editors to disclose any potential conflict. Having a conflict is not in itself wrong; failing to disclose it is.

Types of Conflict of Interest

•    Financial — employment, consultancy, honoraria, research grants, patents, shares, or paid expert testimony related to the work; for example, funding from a manufacturer of the instruments, materials, or software evaluated, or from a company whose site, field, or resource is studied in a geophysical or environmental survey.

•    Professional and institutional — close collaboration, supervision, or employment at the same institution as an author; competition with the authors' research group.

•     Personal — family relationships, friendships, or personal rivalries.

•     Intellectual or ideological — strongly held views that could prevent an objective assessment.

Authors

All authors must disclose any relationship or funding that could be seen as influencing the work. Each manuscript must include a Conflict of Interest statement before the References section. If there is none, authors should state: "The authors declare no conflict of interest." All sources of funding, including grant numbers, must be stated in the Acknowledgment section, together with the role of the funder, if any, in the study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, or the decision to publish.

Reviewers

Reviewers must decline an invitation, or inform the editor immediately, if they:

•     work at the same institution as any author or have collaborated or co-published with any author in the last three years;

•     have a close personal relationship or rivalry with any author;

•     have a financial interest in the results; or

•     are working on closely competing research.

Reviewers must not use any information from a manuscript for their own advantage before it is published.

Editors and Editorial Board Members

•     Editors do not handle manuscripts in which they have a conflict of interest; such manuscripts are reassigned to another editor.

•  Manuscripts submitted by the Editor-in-Chief, editors, or editorial board members, including those from the Physics Study Program of Universitas Mulawarman, are handled by an editor with no conflict, go through the same double-blind review, and receive no preferential treatment. The submitting editor has no access to the review records of their own manuscript.

•   Editorial decisions are based only on scientific quality and relevance, and are never influenced by the payment of the article processing charge, the authors' affiliation, or institutional interests.

Undisclosed Conflicts

If an undisclosed conflict of interest is discovered after submission or publication, it will be handled according to the COPE guidelines and may lead to rejection, a published correction, or, where the conflict affects the reliability of the work, retraction.