Complaints and Appeals Process

If you wish to make a complaint about the Journal of Tax Administration, its staff, or its policies and processes, or wish to appeal a decision that has been made by the journal’s editors, you should provide us with full details by email. Please include any supporting evidence or relevant documentation with your email. We will endeavour to acknowledge your complaint or appeal within 10 working days. 

Your complaint or appeal will be passed on to the managing editors, who will investigate it thoroughly according to COPE’s guidelines. The timescales involved may vary due to the nature of the complaint but the editors will provide you with updates at each stage of the process.

The editors reserve the right to do the following as a result of any investigation that they make into a complaint:

• contact other journals or relevant institutions (relating to authors, editors, or reviewers);
• seek independent and legal advice;
• contact and communicate with authors’ institutions, employers, and/or funding agencies with regard to potential author misconduct and/or discipline issues.

Appeals Against Editorial Decisions

The Journal of Tax Administration’s editorial team are responsible for all decisions relating to the content that appears in the journal. Authors may appeal against decisions made by the editorial board. The journal’s sponsors (the Chartered Institute of Taxation and the University of Exeter Business School) will not become involved in complaints, appeals, or disputes between authors and the editors. 

JOTA operates a double-blind peer review process for manuscripts submitted to its Articles and Short Notes sections. This means that we are unable to disclose our reviewers’ identities to authors at any stage of the process, and will not disclose authors’ names to our reviewers until their paper has been published in the journal.

The journal’s editors are not obliged to send papers out for review. They are also not obliged to follow any recommendations made by reviewers. They may decide to reject a paper or ask authors to revise a paper at any stage of the process (including after acceptance, should they deem this to be necessary).

Removal of Papers

Should an issue arise relating to a paper (for example, concerns are raised about the integrity or originality of your work), the editors reserve the right to remove that paper from the published issue of the journal and the JOTA website as soon as concerns have been raised.

Corrections, Retractions, Clarifications, and Apologies

If you believe that work published in the Journal of Tax Administration needs to be corrected, retracted, or clarified, or that an apology is required, please email us. The editors will then investigate your concerns. If the editors uphold your complaint, they will work with the author or authors of the paper in question, and ensure that the appropriate corrections, retractions, clarifications, or apologies are made as soon as possible.