According to The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), potential conflicts of interest exist when there are financial, personal, or professional interests that might influence on the opinion of the reviewer or publisher and, as a result, affect the decision of the Editorial Board as regards the publication of the article.

The journal Dostoevsky and World Culture. Philological journal implies that by submitting a paper the author states that:

• all forms of financial support are acknowledged in the contribution;

• there are no commercial, financial, personal, and professional involvements that might present an appearance of a conflict of interests related to the submitted article.

If there is a conflict of interests, upon submission of a manuscript, authors may suggest excluding any specific reviewer from the peer review of their article.

The same obligations equally apply to editors or reviewers that will handle the paper: they should declare whether they have any conflicts of interests that may influence the editorial decision on its publication. 

If there is a conflict of interests of the editor and the reviewer with the author of the article, the manuscript should be transferred, in obligatory order, to another editor or reviewer accordingly.

Articles should be evaluated fairly. The conflict of interests declared by any participant of the editing and reviewing process will not necessarily lead to rejection. The prime criterion in the manuscript’s evaluation is its research quality.

In order to avoid conflicts of interest, in accordance with the accepted ethical standards of the journal, each of the parties has the following responsibilities.

The editorial board is obliged to:

• transfer the text of the article to another reviewer for examination, if the initially selected reviewer has a conflict of interest with the author of the article being reviewed;
• make a decision on the publication of information indicated in the author's letter concerning a conflict of academic and/or financial interests, if it is not confidential and may affect the evaluation of the published work by the reader or the academic community.

The author is obliged to:

• indicate the existing and potential sources of conflict of interest or their absence in the cover letter;
• specify the author's affiliated organization (one or more) and sources of research funding.

The reviewer is obliged to:

• inform the editorial board about the existing conflict of interests;
• refuse to participate in the review of manuscripts in case of conflicts of interest due to competitive, joint and other interactions and relationships with any of the authors, companies or other organizations related to the submitted work.

The reviewer must not:

• use unpublished data obtained from submitted manuscripts in their own research without the written consent of the author;
• use information or ideas obtained during the review and related to possible benefits for personal gain.

If at least one of the authors of the article has conflicts of interest, this is indicated in the text of the article. A commission consisting of members of the editorial board may be established to resolve issues and complaints related to possible violations of the principles of editorial ethics. The commission examines complaints from authors, readers, reviewers, editors, and publishers.