Ultima InfoSys: Jurnal Ilmu Sistem Informasi is committed to integrity, transparency, and objectivity in every stage of the publication process. This policy explains how conflicts of interest are defined, disclosed, and managed for authors, reviewers, and editors.

What Is a Conflict of Interest?

A conflict of interest (also called a competing interest) exists when a person involved in the publication process has a financial, professional, or personal relationship that could influence, or could reasonably be seen to influence, their judgment in conducting, reviewing, or making decisions about research. Having a conflict of interest is not in itself wrong; what matters is that it is disclosed openly so that readers, reviewers, and editors can take it into account. When in doubt, it is always better to disclose.
Conflicts of interest may be financial or non-financial. Financial interests include research grants or funding from organizations that may gain or lose from the publication, employment or consultancy with a related company, ownership of shares, patents, or licensing rights, and fees or honoraria connected to the research. In information systems research, this also includes commercial interests in software, applications, platforms, or datasets evaluated in the study, for example when an author develops, sells, or is employed by the vendor of a system being assessed. Non-financial interests include close personal or family relationships, academic rivalry or collaboration, institutional affiliations, membership of the journal’s editorial board, and personal, political, or ideological beliefs that may be relevant to the work.

Authors

All authors must disclose any financial or non-financial interests that are directly or indirectly related to the submitted work. All sources of funding, including the funder’s name and grant number, must be stated in the Acknowledgments.
Each manuscript must include a Conflict of Interest section at the end of the article, before the References. Authors may use wording such as: “The authors declare no conflict of interest.”

Editors and Editorial Board Members as Authors

Editors and editorial board members may submit manuscripts to the journal, but they must declare their editorial role as a conflict of interest upon submission. They will have no access to or involvement in the handling of their own manuscript. The review process will be managed independently by another editor, and the final published article will state that the author is a member of the editorial board but was not involved in its editorial handling.

Reviewers

Reviewers must disclose any conflict of interest before accepting a review invitation and should decline if they cannot provide an impartial assessment. Reasons to decline include working at the same institution as any of the authors, recent collaboration or co-authorship with them, a personal relationship or professional rivalry, or a financial interest in the research or its outcome. Reviewers must not use any information from manuscripts under review for their own benefit.

Failure to Disclose

If an undisclosed conflict of interest comes to light during review, the manuscript may be rejected. If it is discovered after publication, the journal may publish a correction, an expression of concern, or a retraction, in accordance with the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the journal’s Allegation of Research Misconduct policy.