1. What counts as a conflict of interest

A conflict of interest exists where a secondary interest could reasonably be thought to influence judgement about the work — whether or not it actually does. The test is not whether the person feels impartial, but whether an informed reader would want to know about the interest.

Financial interests

• Employment, consultancy, honoraria, speaker or proctoring fees, membership of a speaker bureau or advisory board, and paid expert-witness work.
• Research funding, grants and contracts, including funding that paid for part of the study, the drugs, the disposables, or the statistical analysis.
• Supply in kind by a party with a commercial interest in what is studied — anaesthetic agents, analgesics, neuromuscular blocking drugs, monitors, airway devices, ultrasound machines, infusion or target-controlled infusion pumps, regional-anaesthesia kits, disposables, or reference standards provided free or at a discount.
• Patents, patent applications or royalties relating to a drug, device, technique, dosing regimen or monitoring method reported in the manuscript.
• Ownership of shares or any equity in a company that manufactures or distributes a product examined, or a competing product.
• A financial interest in a hospital, clinic, day-surgery unit, pain practice or training provider that stands to benefit from the findings.
• Payment for writing, editorial, statistical or language assistance, and any involvement of a medical-writing agency.

Non-financial interests

• Unpaid roles: office in a professional society, membership of a guideline, formulary, standards or accreditation committee, or a regulatory advisory body relevant to the subject.
• Clinical dual roles. Recruiting the author’s own patients, or patients under the care of the author’s department, where the clinical relationship could affect a patient’s freedom to decline. State who sought consent, and when relative to the anaesthetic or procedure.
• A declared professional position on a contested question — for example regional versus general anaesthesia, a particular airway algorithm, or an opioid-sparing strategy — that the manuscript supports or contradicts.
• Academic competition with the authors of work under discussion, and institutional interest in validating a local protocol, a departmental technique, or a hospital’s flagship service.
• Personal, family or close professional relationships with the authors, reviewers or editors concerned.

2. The period to be declared

Declare every relevant interest held during the conduct of the work and in the 36 months before submission, following the ICMJE recommendation. Interests arising while the manuscript is under consideration must be reported as soon as they arise. An interest that predates that period but remains material — a patent still in force, continuing royalties, an equity holding, a continuing advisory role — is declared regardless of when it began.

3. Obligations of authors

• Every author completes a declaration at submission, in the manuscript and in the cover letter. The corresponding author collects the declarations of all co-authors and confirms that each has been consulted.
• A nil declaration is still a declaration. Where no author has anything to declare, the manuscript states: “The authors declare no conflict of interest.” Silence is not accepted.
• All funding is named: funder, programme, and grant or contract number, or a statement that the work received no external funding. Where a funder manufactures or sells a product examined, state its role — or lack of role — in design, conduct, analysis, interpretation, writing and the decision to submit, and whether it held any right to review or approve the manuscript.
• Trials and device studies. Where the study evaluates a drug, device or technique, state who supplied it, whether it was supplied free or at a discount, who held the data, who performed the analysis, and whether the investigators had unrestricted access to the full dataset.
• Off-label use of a drug or device is identified as such in the manuscript, with the source of supply declared.
• Where there is doubt, declare it and let the editor decide. No manuscript has ever been declined for declaring too much.

4. Obligations of reviewers

• A reviewer examines the manuscript for conflicts before accepting the invitation and declines where an interest exists that would make the assessment, or its appearance, unsound.
• Grounds for declining include: work in direct competition on the same drug, device, technique or indication; a current or recent collaboration, co-authorship, supervisory relationship or shared department with any author; a paid or unpaid relationship with a manufacturer whose product is examined or displaced; and any personal relationship that would make a dispassionate reading difficult.
• Where an interest is real but may be manageable, the reviewer discloses it to the editor and lets the editor decide, rather than deciding alone.
• A reviewer must not use the manuscript, its data, its protocol or its technique for any purpose of their own, and must not delay a review to gain advantage for competing work.
• Reviewers do not contact the authors directly about the manuscript and do not use the review to press for citation of their own work; coercive citation is itself misconduct, as set out in Similarity and Plagiarism Policy.

5. Obligations of editors and the editorial board

• An editor with any interest in a manuscript recuses from it entirely: the Editor-in-Chief reassigns it to an editor with no interest, and the recused editor has no access to the reviewer identities, the reports or the decision.
• Editors do not handle manuscripts from their own institution or department, their current or recent collaborators, their trainees or supervisors, or their family members.
• Editors may not use information obtained while handling a manuscript — unpublished data, a protocol, a device design, a hypothesis — in their own work, or share it with anyone.
• Editors and board members declare their own interests to the journal on appointment and update the declaration when it changes.
• Editorial decisions rest on scholarly and ethical grounds alone. Neither the publisher, nor the collaborating institution, nor APC revenue, nor any sponsor influences a decision; see Ownership and Management Information and Publisher and Editorial Governance.

6. Submissions from editors, board members and reviewers

Members of the editorial team and the reviewer panel may submit their own work to JACR, and it is assessed by the same standard as any other manuscript. The following safeguards apply and are recorded in the submission file:

• The submission is assigned to an editor independent of the author, who was not involved in appointing them.
• The Editor-in-Chief’s own submissions are handled in full by another senior editor, who takes the final decision.
• Reviewers are selected from outside the author’s institution and immediate collaborative circle.
• The author has no access, at any point, to the reviewers’ identities or to the editorial correspondence concerning their manuscript.

7. Publication of declarations

The conflict-of-interest statement and the funding statement are published in every article, in full, as part of the version of record. A reader who finds a declaration unclear or incomplete may write to journalanesthesiology@gmail.com; the journal will seek clarification from the authors and, where necessary, publish a correction.

8. Undeclared interests

An interest that emerges after submission, acceptance or publication is examined under the procedure in Publication Ethics, following the applicable COPE flowchart. The authors are asked for an explanation and given the opportunity to respond before any finding is recorded. Depending on the evidence and the stage, the journal may require the declaration to be completed before the manuscript proceeds; decline the manuscript; publish a correction amending the declaration, which is the ordinary outcome where the omission was an oversight; publish an expression of concern while an institutional inquiry is unresolved; retract the article where the undeclared interest is material to the findings; or notify the authors’ institution and funder and decline further submissions from those responsible. The mechanisms are set out in Corrections, Retractions, and Post-publication Updates.

The response is proportionate. An honest omission is corrected; deliberate concealment of a material interest is not treated as an oversight.

9. Standards followed

This policy applies the ICMJE Recommendations on disclosure of financial and non-financial relationships, the COPE Core Practices, and the requirements of Indonesian national journal accreditation. It is reviewed at least once a year.

Read together with Publication Ethics, Authorship, Peer Review Policy, Similarity and Plagiarism Policy, AI Tools Policy and Ownership and Management Information.