Editorial & Publishing Policies

1 · Peer review

Every submission undergoes editorial screening followed by external peer review by two to three vetted subject-matter reviewers. Review Slave operates open peer review: reviews are signed and published alongside the accepted article as a permanent, citable record, with an anonymous option available where candour requires it. Reviewers assess originality, methodological soundness, statistical validity, reproducibility, ethical compliance, and clarity, and return a structured report with an explicit recommendation. Authors revise through a documented, point-by-point response loop; all rounds become public with the editorial decision. Editorial decisions rest solely with the handling editor on the evidence of the reviews — never with the publisher, advertisers, or patrons. Every completed review receives its own citable identifier.

2 · Publication ethics & malpractice

We follow COPE guidance for suspected misconduct. Fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, image manipulation, undisclosed conflicts, duplicate or redundant publication, authorship disputes, and citation manipulation are investigated and, where substantiated, result in rejection, correction, or retraction with a public note on the record. Authors must confirm the work is original, not under consideration elsewhere, and that all listed authors meet authorship criteria and have approved submission. Reviewers and editors must recuse themselves from any work where they hold a conflict. Allegations may be raised in confidence at conduct@thereviewslave.com and are handled per our complaints process.

3 · Copyright & licensing

Authors retain copyright in their work. Articles are published under a Creative Commons licence chosen by the author, with CC BY 4.0 as the default; CC BY-SA, CC BY-NC, and CC0 are also offered. Readers are free to share and adapt published work under the terms of its licence, with attribution. Peer-review reports are published under the same open terms and are citable scholarly objects in their own right. No transfer of copyright to the publisher is required or accepted.

4 · Author fees & funding

Review Slave charges no fees of any kind: no submission fee, no article-processing charge, no page or colour charges, no membership requirement to publish or to read. This is a permanent commitment. The platform is funded exclusively by voluntary patronage from researchers whose work succeeded here; patronage confers public gratitude only and never any editorial advantage. We do not sell advertising or reader data. Should patronage prove insufficient, the platform reduces its scope — it does not introduce charges.

5 · Archiving & preservation

Published articles, their versions, and their review records are retained indefinitely. Content is stored redundantly with content integrity checks, and all works are openly licensed and machine-harvestable so that third parties may mirror and preserve them. We are enrolling in a recognised distributed digital-preservation service (such as CLOCKSS, Portico, or the PKP Preservation Network) to guarantee long-term survival of the record independent of the publisher. Persistent identifiers (DOIs) ensure durable citation.

6 · Corrections & retractions

The scholarly record is corrected in the open. Honest errors are addressed with a linked correction (erratum/corrigendum) that never overwrites the original. Where findings are invalidated or misconduct is confirmed, articles are retracted following COPE retraction guidelines, with a clearly labelled, permanently linked retraction notice stating the reason; the original remains accessible and stamped. Expressions of concern are issued where an investigation is ongoing.

7 · Complaints & appeals

Authors may appeal an editorial decision by writing to admin@thereviewslave.com with a substantive, point-by-point rationale; an editor not involved in the original decision reviews the appeal. Complaints about process, ethics, or conduct go to conduct@thereviewslave.com, are acknowledged within seven days, handled confidentially, and escalated to the editor-in-chief where needed. We follow COPE guidance for unresolved disputes.

8 · Conflicts of interest

Every author, reviewer, and editor must disclose financial and non-financial competing interests — funding, employment, patents, personal relationships, and institutional or intellectual rivalries. Author disclosures are published with the article. Reviewers and editors with a conflict must decline the assignment. Undisclosed conflicts discovered after publication are treated as misconduct.

9 · Research ethics & data

Research involving human participants, human data or tissue, or animals must carry a statement of approval from the relevant ethics/IRB/IACUC body and its reference number; submissions that require such approval are blocked at intake without it. Authors must confirm informed consent where applicable. We encourage open data and code: data-availability statements are required, and supporting data should be deposited in an appropriate repository under an open licence wherever ethics and law permit.

Narrow exemption, publicly justified (added 19 July 2026). A limited class of work falls genuinely outside prospective ethics review — principally retrospective reports of routine, consented clinical care, where no experimental protocol was applied to any patient or animal for research purposes, because IRB/IACUC frameworks govern research protocols rather than documentation of care already given. Such submissions may proceed only with a written justification, which is published in full on the paper's own page, verified by the handling editor, and open to challenge by reviewers and readers. An exemption is a disclosure, never a shortcut: if the work was in fact conducted under a protocol designed to evaluate an intervention, it is prospective research, requires approval, and is blocked without it. Editors may reject any exemption they judge to be misapplied.

10 · Plagiarism & originality

Submissions must be original and appropriately attributed. Text, figures, and data reused from any source — including the authors' own prior work — must be cited and, where required, permissioned. Suspected plagiarism or self-plagiarism is screened editorially and during review and, if confirmed, handled per our ethics policy.

11 · Use of generative AI

Generative AI tools cannot be listed as authors and cannot bear responsibility for a work. Authors must disclose any substantive use of generative AI in producing the manuscript, its analysis, or its figures, and remain fully accountable for accuracy, integrity, and the absence of fabrication. Reviewers must not upload confidential manuscripts to non-confidential AI services.