The rules FPR publishes under.

Corrections and retractions

A published piece is fixed. Its address, its citation and its paragraph numbers do not change. We alter the text for one reason only: to correct an error.

What counts as an error

A wrong fact, date, name or citation; a quotation that does not match its source; a holding attributed to the wrong case or the wrong court; a statute or provision that is misdescribed. A view you disagree with is not an error. For that, leave a comment on the piece, or write a reply if it is FP Research.

What we do

1. An editor checks the report against the primary source and tells the author.
2. If the piece is wrong, the text is corrected in place. A correction never adds or removes a paragraph.
3. A dated note goes under History at the foot of the piece. It says which paragraph was wrong, what it said, and what it says now.
4. The same note is added to the public corrections log.

Slips of spelling or formatting that do not change the meaning are fixed without a note. Nothing else is.

When the law changes

That is not an error, and the piece is not edited. The author or another writer publishes a linked afterword that says what changed. The original stays as a record of the law on the day it was published.

Retraction

We retract a piece if it turns out to be plagiarised, to rely on sources that do not exist, to have been published elsewhere first without our knowing, or to contain an error so serious that its conclusion cannot stand. The author is asked to respond before we decide. A retracted piece stays at its address under a notice that gives the date and the reason, and it keeps its citation, so that anyone who cited it can see what happened. It is removed from search indexes and from the feed.

Report an error.

Copyright and licence

The author keeps the copyright. By submitting, the author gives FPR a non-exclusive licence, without a time limit, to publish the piece, keep it online, include it in a volume and archive it. FPR does not pay for this and does not charge for it.

Readers may copy, share and adapt a published piece for non-commercial purposes if they credit the author and FPR and link to the piece. This is the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0). For commercial use, ask the author.

The author may republish the piece anywhere: on SSRN, in a college repository, in a book. We ask only that the later version says it was first published in FPR and gives the FPR citation.

Editorial drafts are written by the editors, and Iura holds the copyright in them, under the same licence. A student who reworks a draft holds the copyright in what they add, and the piece carries the credit “Revised from an FPR editorial draft”. The scope notes in the catalogue are under the same licence.

A piece sent to FPR must not have been published before, and must not be under consideration anywhere else while we are reading it.

Academic integrity

When you submit, you declare three things:

1. The piece is your own work and that of the co-authors you name, and nobody who contributed has been left out.
2. Every source you used is cited, including your own earlier writing.
3. The piece has not been published and is not being considered elsewhere.

Before a piece is reviewed, an editor runs it through a text-similarity check and reads the passages it flags against their sources. The result is recorded with the submission. For FP Research this happens before the piece goes to the blind reviewers. A similarity score is only a prompt to read closely: quotations and case names are meant to match.

Plagiarism is using someone else’s words, structure or ideas without credit. It includes close paraphrase, and it includes reusing your own published work without saying so. Fabrication is citing a case, a passage or a provision that does not exist or does not say what you claim. A citation invented by an AI tool is still a fabrication, and the author is responsible for it.

If an editor finds a problem before publication, the author is told and asked to explain. A missing or careless citation is fixed in revision. Where a piece is copied or its sources are invented, it is returned and not read again, and the editors may decline later submissions from the same author. If the problem is found after publication, the piece is retracted as described above.

Artificial intelligence

Authors may use AI tools to find and search sources. The prose must be the author’s own. Every author says how they used any tool when they submit, and that disclosure is printed with the piece. Editorial drafts are the one exception, and they are labelled: a student who builds on one is credited as revising it.

Review and conflicts of interest

Most forms are read by one editor. FP Research is reviewed double-blind by two peers and read by a faculty or practitioner referee. Reviewers do not know who wrote the piece, and the author does not know who reviewed it. A reviewer keeps the piece confidential and does not use it before it is published.

An editor or reviewer does not handle a piece written by a relative, by a student they teach or supervise, or by someone they have written with in the last three years, and says so if asked to. Editors and campus editors may write for FPR. Their pieces are handled by a different editor and go through the same review as anyone else’s.

Permanence and archiving

Every published piece has a permanent address and a stable citation in the form (2027) 1 FPR 14. Paragraphs are numbered, so a single paragraph can be cited as (2027) 1 FPR 14, ¶ 12. Each piece can be saved as a PDF from its page, and new pieces are announced in the feed.

Authors are encouraged to deposit a copy on SSRN or in their college repository, which the licence allows. FPR does not have an ISSN yet. We will apply for one once the first volume is under way, and this page will say so when it is assigned. FPR does not issue DOIs.

Complaints

If you think a piece, an author or an editor has broken any of these rules, write to the editors. We reply within two weeks. An editor who is the subject of a complaint takes no part in deciding it.