This document is an institutional draft prepared in accordance with Section 8 & 9 of the Master Brief and COPE principles. It is subject to review by legal counsel prior to formal statutory adoption.
Editorial Independence & The Revenue Firewall
1. Statement of Principle
Bleeding Pages maintains absolute editorial independence. The decision to accept, revise, or reject a submitted manuscript rests exclusively with the Editor-in-Chief and Section Editors, guided by the recommendations of independent peer reviewers. Commercial interests, sponsorships, institutional subscriptions, reader memberships, or editorial assessments purchased by authors exert zero influence on editorial decisions.
2. The Revenue Firewall (§8)
In strict fulfillment of Section 8 of our governing brief:
Paid services and memberships must never influence acceptance. Reviewers and editors cannot see whether an author bought anything. That data is separated at the database permission level. Published scholarly articles stay openly readable; revenue comes from memberships, subscriptions, and print editions, not from paywalling the record.
Architectural Enforcement:
- Database-Level Isolation: Commercial subscription data and financial transaction logs are stored in a dedicated schema (`revenue`). Application sessions for Section Editors, Managing Editors, and Reviewers are granted zero read or select permissions on this schema via PostgreSQL Row-Level Security (RLS).
- Blinded Editorial Desks: The author dossier presented to editors displays strictly academic metadata: name, affiliation, and ORCID. No badge, indicator, or flag indicating subscriber or patron status exists within editorial software.
- No Pay-to-Publish: Bleeding Pages does not charge Article Processing Charges (APCs). Fast-track acceptance fees, expedited review fees, and paid placements are strictly prohibited.
3. Recusal and Conflicts of Interest
Any editor with a personal, academic, or financial relationship with an author—including thesis supervision within the past 5 years, co-authorship within the past 3 years, or familial relation—must formally recuse themselves from handling the submission. The manuscript is reassigned by the Managing Editor to an independent section editor.