Journal Policies

1. Open Access Statement & Submission Fees

Open Access Statement

The African Accounting and Finance Journal (AAFJ) is committed to the principle of open and equitable access to knowledge. All articles published in AAFJ are made freely and permanently available online, immediately upon publication, without subscription or access charges.

Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal the right to publish and disseminate it under Creative Commons licenses (CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, etc.). This ensures that published research can be freely read, shared, and reused by scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and the wider public, provided that proper attribution to the original work is given.

Submission Fees

There are no submission fees or article processing charges (APCs) for authors. The journal is fully open access and operates on a non-profit basis, aiming to advance the visibility and accessibility of high-quality research in accounting and finance with a focus on Africa and comparative international contexts.

By removing financial and legal barriers to access, AAFJ seeks to support the widest possible dissemination of knowledge, encourage scholarly collaboration, and contribute to the global dialogue on accounting and finance.

2. AAFJ Repository policy

The AAFJ recognizes the importance of maximizing the visibility and accessibility of scholarly research by supporting the self-archiving of its publications. As such it allows and encourages authors to share their manuscripts in their institutional repositories as well as other electronic platforms including their website during the submission process. This is aimed at generating productive exchanges between authors and other members of academic community to improve the quality of manuscripts before peer review; increasing visibility of the manuscripts by helping the authors reach broader audience; as well as increasing citations and impact because the manuscripts will become known to the academic community even before publication. Here’s an outline of AAFJ’s repository policy:

Objective: To enhance the dissemination and impact of published research by allowing authors to archive versions of their work in institutional or subject-specific repositories.

Author Rights:

  • Pre-print Version: Authors are permitted to deposit pre-peer review versions of their work in any repository of their choice. This version is the author's manuscript before formal peer review and without any editorial or peer review amendments. These pre-prints must be clearly marked “preprint” to distinguish them from published versions.
  • Post-print Version: After peer review, authors can deposit their accepted manuscripts (post-print) in institutional repositories. The post-print includes revisions made during the peer review process but does not include the journal's formatting or final PDF version provided by AAFJ.
  • Publisher's Version/PDF: Authors may be allowed to deposit the final published version (publisher’s PDF) depending on the specific terms of the licensing agreement with AAFJ.

Platforms and Services:

  • Sherpa/Romeo: The policy details, including any specific restrictions or conditions, are recorded and can be accessed on Sherpa/Romeo, which is a widely recognized database providing open access policy information of journals globally.
  • For French researchers, the following platforms can also be use
    • Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) 
    • Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR)
    • Universities and Grandes Écoles
    • Hyper Articles en Ligne (HAL)

Repository Locations:

  • Institutional Repositories: Authors are encouraged to use their institutional repositories to ensure that their research is accessible within their academic community.
  • Subject Repositories: Depending on the field of study, authors may also deposit in subject-specific repositories (e.g., PubMed Central, arXiv, SSRN) that correspond to their research area.

Conditions:

  • Licensing: AAFJ offers open-access options with specific licensing terms, such as Creative Commons licenses (CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, etc.). It is crucial to follow the terms of the license when depositing articles in repositories.
  • Acknowledgment of Publication: When archiving any version of the manuscript, authors are typically required to acknowledge the journal and publisher and provide a link to the official version of the article on the publisher’s website (such as journal’s homepage or direct URL of the published article).

Visibility and Compliance:

  • Accessibility: AAFJ aims to promote accessibility and long-term archiving of scholarly articles in order to enhance visibility, citation and impact.
  • Compliance with Funder Mandates: This policy assists authors in complying with the open access mandates of their funding bodies or institutions.

This AAFJ repository policy is designed to support broad dissemination of research, to respect the rights of authors, to observe rights and interest of the journal, to ensure accessibility to a broader audience of research works, as well as to ensure transparency of the policy to the authors.

3. Plagiarism Policy

AAFJ is committed to publication integrity. Plagiarism, presenting another person’s words, ideas, data, figures, or images as one’s own, including re-use of one’s previously published material without proper citation, constitutes unethical behaviour and will not be tolerated. Forms include verbatim copying, close paraphrasing without attribution, inappropriate reuse of visuals, and self-plagiarism/duplicate publication. 

Screening and thresholds. All submissions undergo similarity screening with recognised text-matching tools. Editors assess similarity reports qualitatively, considering overlap location, context, and citation practice. Submissions showing substantial unattributed overlap may be rejected before peer review. 

Editorial handling and investigations. Authors will be informed of concerns and invited to respond in case of suspected cases. Where needed, the Editor-in-Chief may seek an independent subject-area assessment and consult relevant sources to establish the extent and intent of overlap. 

Decisions and sanctions. Outcomes may include revision with corrections, rejection, or, if issues arise post-publication, publication of a correction or retraction. In severe cases, AAFJ may notify authors’ institutions and funders. The journal also reserves the right to withdraw accepted manuscripts if integrity problems are identified before publication. 

Author responsibilities. By submitting, authors affirm that the work is original, correctly cites prior work (including their own), and is not under consideration elsewhere. Authors must secure permissions for any third-party material and ensure accurate, complete references. 

Compliance with this policy is a condition of submission and publication in AAFJ.

4. Use of Artificial Intelligence for Authors, Reviewers, and Editors.

Although the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly widespread, its application in the field of scientific knowledge creation remains the subject of heated debate in academic circles. We are aware of the potential that AI could bring to the entire value chain of scientific activity. We are also sensitive to its risks, which we primarily identify as challenging academic integrity and therefore the credibility of the knowledge emerging from scientific activity. We maintain that AI should not be considered as an author and/or co-author of a scientific work. Conversely, AI could be used in the empirical processing of large datasets. It is this use of AI, that is as a tool to assist empirical analysis, that we support in AAFJ. Where it is used, it usage must acknowledge accordingly and for the purpose for which it used.

For Authors:

Authors who use AI in the empirical part of their article, i.e., as a data processing tool, must provide a declaration to be placed immediately before the references in their article and use the following statement format:

[For the writing of this article, the authors used an artificial intelligence called [indicate the name of the AI] for the analysis of the empirical data, which consisted of [describing the empirical analysis performed using artificial intelligence]. The authors acknowledge that the AAFJ journal does not permit any use of artificial intelligence other than to assist in the empirical analysis. The authors assume full responsibility for the results of the empirical analysis performed by artificial intelligence in their article.] 

For Reviewers, and Editors:

For reviewers and editors AAFJ does not permit the use of AI in the review of articles. Indeed, this runs the risk of breaching the integrity of the review process, which adheres to the principle of anonymity. Uploading a submitted paper in whatever AI tool can compromise that anonymity which central to the academic confidentiality.

5. Disclaimer on Policy Updates

The AAFJ reserves the right to amend, update, or revise any part of these policies, in whole or in part, at its sole discretion and at any time, without prior notification to authors, reviewers, or readers