1. Open Access

Business Management Review is a fully open access journal. Every article is freely available online immediately on publication, without subscription, registration, embargo or fee. Readers may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search and link to the full text of any article, and use it for any lawful purpose within the terms of the licence set out below. The journal is published by the University of Dar es Salaam Business School and hosted on University of Dar es Salaam Digital Commons.

2. Copyright and Licensing

Authors retain copyright in their articles. On acceptance, authors grant the journal a non-exclusive licence to publish the article as the version of record and to be identified as its original publisher.

Articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Under this licence anyone may copy and redistribute an article in any medium or format, provided the original authors and source are credited and a link to the licence is given. The material may not be used for commercial purposes, and where an article is remixed, transformed or built upon, the modified material may not be distributed.

Third-party material reproduced within an article remains subject to its own copyright and is excluded from the licence unless stated otherwise. It is the author’s responsibility to obtain written permission to reproduce material they do not own, for both print and electronic media, and to include the appropriate acknowledgement in the manuscript.

Each published article carries the notice: © The Author(s). Published by University of Dar es Salaam Business School under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence.

3. Peer Review

All research articles published in the journal are peer reviewed. Manuscripts are first screened by the Chief Editor or an Associate Editor for fit with the aims and scope, compliance with the Instructions for Authors, and originality; every submission is checked with Turnitin or comparable plagiarism-detection software.

Manuscripts that pass screening are sent to independent reviewers with expertise in the subject. Review is double-blind: authors’ identities are withheld from reviewers, and reviewers’ identities from authors. On the basis of the reports the handling editor recommends acceptance, minor revision, major revision or rejection, and the Chief Editor takes the final decision. Revised manuscripts may be returned to the original reviewers.

Editors and reviewers must declare any conflict of interest and withdraw from manuscripts where one exists. Submissions by members of the editorial team are handled by another editor, and the submitting editor has no access to the review process. Reviewers treat manuscripts as confidential and may not use unpublished material for their own purposes.

4. Publication Fees

The journal charges authors no fee at any stage. There is no submission fee, no article processing charge, and no page or colour charge. Publication costs are met by the University of Dar es Salaam Business School. Readers pay nothing to access articles.

5. Publication Frequency

The journal publishes two regular issues each year, together with special issues on announced themes. Accepted articles are added to the current issue as soon as they have been copyedited and approved by the authors, so an issue may grow until it is closed. Each issue carries a volume and issue number, and each article carries a persistent digital object identifier (DOI).

6. Publication Ethics

The journal upholds the best standards of publication ethics, follows the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and takes serious measures against publication malpractice.

Originality and plagiarism

Authors must submit only original work. All submissions are checked with plagiarism-detection software for plagiarism in any of its forms. Manuscripts already published, or under review elsewhere, must not be submitted. The journal reserves the right to retract published work where plagiarism or other malpractice is discovered.

Authorship

All listed authors must have contributed substantially to the work, approved the final version, and agreed to be accountable for it. Any change to authorship after submission requires the written agreement of all authors.

Conflicts of interest and funding

Authors must declare all funding sources and any financial or personal relationship that could be seen to bias the work. Editors and reviewers must declare conflicts and recuse themselves where they arise.

Data and reproducibility

Authors must retain the data underlying their article and make it available to the editors on request. Fabrication or falsification of data or results is grounds for rejection or retraction.

Duties of reviewers

Reviewers must treat manuscripts as confidential, judge them objectively on their merits, return reports within the agreed period, declare any conflict of interest, and refrain from contacting authors directly.

Duties of editors

Editors decide on merit alone, without regard to the authors’ nationality, institution, gender or seniority; make no use of unpublished material; handle manuscripts fairly and promptly; and protect the anonymity of authors and reviewers.

7. Use of Artificial Intelligence

Authors

Generative artificial intelligence and AI-assisted tools may not be listed as authors, because they cannot take responsibility for the work, declare conflicts of interest or hold copyright.

Authors who use such tools in preparing a manuscript must disclose this in a short statement placed immediately before the references, headed Declaration on the Use of AI, naming the tool and version and describing how it was used — for example language editing, code generation, literature search, data analysis or figure preparation. Tools used only for spelling, grammar and reference formatting need not be declared.

AI-generated or AI-altered images and figures are not permitted unless they are themselves the object of the research and are clearly labelled as such.

Reviewers and editors

Manuscripts under review are confidential. Reviewers and editors may not upload a manuscript, or any part of it, to a generative AI tool or any service that stores or trains on submitted text, and may not use such tools to write review reports or decision letters. A reviewer who has used an AI tool for a permitted purpose, such as checking a statistical method, should say so in the report.

The journal

The journal uses software, some of it AI-assisted, to screen submissions for text similarity and to check reference accuracy.

AI-assisted tools are also used in copyediting accepted manuscripts, to support checks on language, consistency, formatting and references. Such tools are used only with human intervention: every suggestion is reviewed and then accepted, amended or rejected by an editor, and no change is made to the substance, argument, data or findings of an article.

The copyedited manuscript is returned to the authors for approval before publication, and the version approved by the authors is the version of record. All editorial decisions are made by people. This policy is reviewed annually.

8. Sustainable Development Goals

The journal recognises the United Nations 2030 Agenda as a shared frame for research on business and organisational management, and requires every manuscript to state its contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals.

The statement appears on the title page, after the abstract, and has two parts: the relevant goals, given by official SDG number and title; and a concise statement of approximately 50 to 100 words explaining how the research contributes to achieving them.

Authors are encouraged to include the goal numbers among their keywords, for example “SDG 8”, so that the work can be found by readers and indexers searching by goal. The goals most closely tied to the journal’s scope are SDG 1 (no poverty), SDG 4 (quality education), SDG 5 (gender equality), SDG 8 (decent work and economic growth), SDG 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure), SDG 12 (responsible consumption and production), SDG 13 (climate action) and SDG 17 (partnerships for the goals), though contributions to any goal are welcome. The statement is descriptive; it does not affect the peer-review decision.

9. Corrections, Retractions and Complaints

Where an error affects the interpretation of a published article but the findings stand, the journal publishes a correction linked to the article — a corrigendum for author errors, an erratum for publisher errors. The original article is not altered except to add the link.

Where findings are unreliable because of misconduct or honest error, or an article is redundant or infringes copyright or ethical standards, the article is retracted. It remains online, clearly marked as retracted, with a notice explaining why. Where an investigation is pending, the journal may publish an expression of concern.

Authors, readers and reviewers who believe an article contains an error or breaches publication ethics should write to the Managing Editor at [email protected]. Authors may appeal an editorial decision once, in writing to the Chief Editor, setting out the grounds; the Chief Editor may seek an additional independent review, and the appeal decision is final. Complaints about the conduct of editors are considered by the Dean of the University of Dar es Salaam Business School.

10. Who May Submit

Anyone may submit an original article for consideration, provided they own the copyright in the work or are authorised by the copyright owner to submit it. Authors are the initial owners of copyright in their work; an exception may exist where authors have agreed, as a condition of employment, to transfer copyright to their employer.

11. Submission Rules

A submitted article must not have been published previously, nor be forthcoming, in an archival journal or book, in print or electronic form. Publication in a working-paper series does not constitute prior publication.

By submitting, the author confirms that the material is not currently under review at another journal and that it will not be submitted elsewhere until the editorial decision process at Business Management Review is complete. Authors with questions about these terms should contact the editors before submitting.