CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

This policy explains how STORAGE: Jurnal Ilmiah Teknik dan Ilmu Komputer handles competing interests that could affect the reporting, the evaluation, or the publication of research in architecture, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, and computer science. The terms conflict of interest and competing interest have the same meaning in this policy.

Please read it together with the Publication Ethics and the Authorship and Contributorship policy.

1What Is a Competing Interest

A competing interest is any relationship, circumstance, or activity that could influence, or appear to influence, how research is conducted, reported, reviewed, or edited.

Disclosure is a protective step, not an accusation. Declaring an interest does not mean that bias or misconduct has occurred.

2Interests That Should Be Disclosed

Type of interest	Examples
Financial relationships	Employment, consultancy, honoraria, shares, patents, royalties, or other commercial benefits, for example from a software company, a technology vendor, an engineering consultancy, a construction company, an architecture firm, or a manufacturer of equipment or materials.
Funding and sponsorship	Research funding, paid expert work, or involvement of a sponsor in the study, for example a government office, a foundation, a company, or a university.
Personal and professional relationships	Close personal, supervisory, collaborative, or professional ties with authors, reviewers, or editors, for example a supervisor and a student, close colleagues, or recent coauthors.
Interest in the subject of the study	Having designed, developed, or sold the system, the software, the algorithm, the material, the structure, the building design, the instrument, or the product that is evaluated, or evaluating the project of one's own firm or institution in a way that may affect objectivity.
Editorial and journal ties	An editorial appointment or another tie with the journal that may require an independent handling of a manuscript.

Ordinary scholarly disagreement is not, by itself, a disqualifying conflict of interest.

3Author Responsibilities

Every author must disclose the interests that are relevant to the submitted work. The corresponding author compiles one competing interests statement for the whole manuscript. If there are no interests to declare, the statement must say so.

Statement	Content	Required
Competing interests statement	The relevant interests of all authors, or a statement that there are none.	Yes
Funding statement	The funding organizations, the grant numbers, and whether the funder had any role in the design of the study, in the collection and analysis of the data, or in the preparation of the manuscript.	Yes

Both statements are required. The funding statement does not replace the competing interests statement. The article template has no separate sections for them. Place both statements as the final paragraphs of the acknowledgments, which are subsection 3.7 of the template.

Examples of declarations

No competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.

A competing interest declared
The first author is employed by [name of the organization], which developed the software platform that was evaluated in this study. The other authors declare no competing interests.

Funding
This study was funded by [name of the funder] under grant number [number]. The funder had no role in the design of the study, in the collection and analysis of the data, or in the preparation of the manuscript.

4Editors and Peer Reviewers

Role	Responsibility
4.1 Editors	Editors disclose the relevant interests before they accept an assignment, and they report any interest that arises later without delay. An editor whose impartiality may be compromised does not decide on that manuscript. A manuscript that is submitted by an editor or by a member of the editorial team is handled by an editor who is not involved in it, and the author who is an editor takes no part in the evaluation or in the decision.
4.2 Peer reviewers	Reviewers disclose the relevant interests before they accept an invitation to review, and they report any interest that arises later without delay. A reviewer who has a disqualifying conflict declines the review or withdraws from it. Examples are a close personal or supervisory tie with an author, a recent collaboration, a competing interest in the subject of the manuscript, or recognizing the work or the authors during the double blind review. See the Peer Review Process.

Role

Responsibility

4.1 Editors

Editors disclose the relevant interests before they accept an assignment, and they report any interest that arises later without delay. An editor whose impartiality may be compromised does not decide on that manuscript. A manuscript that is submitted by an editor or by a member of the editorial team is handled by an editor who is not involved in it, and the author who is an editor takes no part in the evaluation or in the decision.

4.2 Peer reviewers

Reviewers disclose the relevant interests before they accept an invitation to review, and they report any interest that arises later without delay. A reviewer who has a disqualifying conflict declines the review or withdraws from it. Examples are a close personal or supervisory tie with an author, a recent collaboration, a competing interest in the subject of the manuscript, or recognizing the work or the authors during the double blind review. See the Peer Review Process.

When an editor or a reviewer declares a conflict, an editor who is not affected decides whether safeguards are enough or whether the assignment should be given to someone else.

5Assessment and Late Disclosure

Each declared interest is assessed for its relevance and its possible effect. Depending on the case, the journal may take one of the following steps.

Step	Description
1. Publish the disclosure	The declaration is published with the article.
2. Request an independent assessment	A person who is not connected to the interest examines the matter.
3. Replace the person involved	Another editor or reviewer takes over the manuscript.

Declarations that are missing, incomplete, or inaccurate, and interests that are disclosed after the submission or after the publication, are considered in their context. A material concern is handled under the Publication Ethics, the Allegations of Misconduct, and the Correction and Retraction policies.

6Scope of This Policy

Topic	Where to find it
Interests that relate to research and its assessment	Covered by this policy.
Author fees	Described on the Author Fees page.
Ownership and management of the journal	Described on the Ownership and Management page.

Commercial considerations, including author fees, do not influence editorial decisions, as stated in the Publication Ethics.

Related Pages and Enquiries

For the preparation of a manuscript, see the Manuscript Preparation and Author Guidelines pages. For the description of contributions, see the Authorship and Contributorship policy. Questions about this policy or about a specific disclosure can be sent to the editorial office at jurnal.storage@gmail.com.