The Journal of Mekong Societies is committed to upholding the standards of ethical behavior at all stages of the publication process. All concerned parties, particularly the editors, reviewers, and authors must adhere to the following ethical guidelines.

The Editors
Editors must give prompt and unbiased consideration to all manuscripts submitted for publication.

The editors’ judgement must be based on merit without regard to race, gender, religious belief, ethnic origin, nationality, or political ideology of the authors. Intellectual independence of the authors must be respected.

The editors and the editorial staff must not disclose any information about a manuscript under consideration to anyone other than the reviewers and potential reviewers.

Editors must ensure a timely double-blind peer review by qualified reviewers who have no conflict of interest with the authors.

The Reviewers
Reviewers must keep all information about the authors and the manuscripts confidential.

Reviewers must inform the editor-in-chief of any conflict of interest resulting from direct competition, collaboration or relationship with any of the authors, and withdraw their services for the manuscript.

Reviews must be conducted objectively based on the quality of the manuscript. Reviewers must provide clear, constructive and timely feedback to the editors.

Reviewers must inform the editor-in-chief of any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under review and any other published papers, and of any suspected malpractice, such as falsification or fabrication of data.

The Authors
Authors must ensure that all work in their submitted manuscript is original. Any part of the submitted manuscript derived from prior published work, including work by the same author, must be properly cited. All forms of plagiarism, including self-plagiarism, are prohibited.

Authors must not submit a manuscript that has already been published or that is being submitted to other journals.

All authors mentioned in the paper must have significantly contributed to the research and the manuscript production.

Authors must declare all sources of research grants.

Authors must strictly follow the Journal’s Author Guidelines. Authors whose native language is not English must have the manuscript edited by a native speaker of English.