Editorial Policy and Funding Principles of VoxUkraine

VoxUkraine’s work is grounded in the principles of objectivity, independence and transparency. What does it mean in practice?

Editorial Policy:

• is determined by the Editorial Board, which currently has 13 members. Important decisions are made collectively.
• We do not pay authors for their articles and do not impose content and tonality on them.
• Anyone can submit an article to VoxUkraine. We have published articles that reflected diametrically opposite perspectives of authors with completely different political backgrounds, e.g. Tetiana Montian and Sasha Borovik.
• All articles that are published on voxukraine.org (irrespectively of who the author is) are peer-reviewed.
• Two Editorial Board members review each article (if the article goes beyond the area of expertise of the Editorial Board members, an external expert can be involved).
• Authors are required to sign a conflict of interest statement and disclose any conflict of interest they might have.

Funding:

• VoxUkraine has no links to political parties or movements. Businesspersons, bureaucrats, and politicians have no influence on our work.
• VoxUkraine receives its funding in the form of grants, contributions from individuals, and own funds of VoxUkraine members.
• As of November 2016, the largest donors of VoxUkraine are TTF, NED, Renaissance Foundation, and PACT. Our internal financial rules foresee that in the medium and long term, one donor (fund or company) cannot contribute more than a third of the budget. Our 2015 financial report is available here. In 2016, the operating expenses of VoxUkraine will amount to about 3 mln UAH.
• Donations by individuals and companies account for about 20% of the budget. As of today, more than 500 individuals and entities have supported VoxUkraine financially, which we appreciate greatly. In order to protect our independence, we have limited the maximum size of a contribution from one source to 10% of the annual budget.
• Should any Editorial Board member have doubts regarding the origin of a donation or in relation to large contributions from individuals and entities, the ethical committee has a final say on whether to accept or reject the donation. The committee is formed by Erik Berglof, Director of the Institute of Global Affairs at the London School of Economics; Bohdan Vitvitsky, Resident Legal Advisor at the U. S. Embassy in Kyiv, and Gerard Roland, Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

The main goal of VoxUkraine is to increase the quality of economic debate in Ukraine. We also aim at providing objective information on reforms and key events in Ukraine. We focus on ideas, not personalities, and publish articles that are based on data and facts, not on rumors and guesses.