Ethical Policy of International Journal of Health Policy and Management (IJHPM)
Table of content:
Role of Authors and Contributors
Each author should have participated significantly and sufficiently in the work to take responsibility for the whole content. According to the ICMJE, authorship credit should be based only on:
1) Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work;
2) Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
3) Final approval of the version to be published; and
4) Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Conditions 1 to 4 must all be met. All who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors and their names should be included in the Title Page.
The corresponding author is required to describe the co-authors’ contributions in the Authorship Form and all contributing authors should digitally sign this form. The criteria used to determine the order of authors may vary and are to be decided collectively by the authors not editors. However, if authors request removal or addition of an author after manuscript submission (before acceptance), journal editors should seek an explanation and signed Change Authorship Form for the requested change from all listed authors and from the author to be removed or added.
Role of the Corresponding Author
The corresponding author is the individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal office during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process. The corresponding author typically ensures that all the journal’s administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, and disclosures of relationships and activities, are properly completed and reported, although these duties may be delegated to one or more coauthors.
The corresponding author will check the proof edition, if the manuscript is accepted for publication, although a copy of conversations will be sent to all co-authors. The corresponding author should be also available after publication to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information should questions about the paper arise after publication.
Disclosure of Financial and Non-financial Relationships and Activities
The potential for conflict of interest and bias exists when professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients’ welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain). Perceptions of conflict of interest are as important as actual conflicts of interest. Thus, the lead corresponding author should complete the Disclosure Form to demonstrate a commitment to transparency and helps to maintain trust in the scientific process. Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership or options, honoraria, patents, and paid expert testimony) are the most easily identifiable, the ones most often judged to represent potential conflicts of interest and thus the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and science itself.
Other interests may also represent or be perceived as conflicts, such as personal relationships or rivalries, academic competition, and intellectual beliefs. Authors should avoid entering in to agreements with study sponsors, both for-profit and nonprofit, that interfere with authors’ access to all of the study’s data or that interfere with their ability to analyze and interpret the data and to prepare and publish manuscripts independently when and where they choose. Policies that dictate where authors may publish their work violate this principle of academic freedom. Authors may be required to provide the journal with the agreements in confidence. Purposeful failure to report those relationships or activities specified on the IJHPM’s Disclosure Form is a form of misconduct.
All participants in the peer-review and publication process must consider and disclose their relationships and activities when fulfilling their roles in the process of article review and publication:
1. Authors
When authors submit a manuscript of any type or format they are responsible for disclosing all relationships and activities that might bias or be seen to bias their work. The lead corresponding author is responsible to complete and submit the Disclosure Form.
2. Peer Reviewers
Reviewers should declare if they have relationships or activities that could complicate their review. Reviewers must disclose to editors any relationships or activities that could bias their opinions of the manuscript, and should recuse themselves from reviewing specific manuscripts if the potential for bias exists. Reviewers must not use knowledge of the work they are reviewing before its publication to further their own interests.
Reporting Relationships and Activities
The lead corresponding author, on behalf of all co-authors, should declare the following items on the ICMJE Disclosure Form:
1. Authors’ relationships and activities;
2. Sources of support for the work, including sponsor names along with explanations of the role of those sources, if any, in study design; collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; writing of the report; any restrictions regarding the submission of the report for publication; or a statement declaring that the supporting source had no such involvement or restrictions regarding publication;
3. Whether the authors had access to the study data, with an explanation of the nature and extent of access, including whether access is ongoing.
1. Duplicate Submission
Authors should not submit the same manuscript, in the same or different languages, simultaneously to more than one journal. The rationale for this standard is the potential for disagreement when two (or more) journals claim the right to publish a manuscript that has been submitted simultaneously to more than one journal, and the possibility that two or more journals will unknowingly and unnecessarily undertake the work of peer review, edit the same manuscript, and publish the same article.
2. Duplicate and Prior Publication
Duplicate publication is publication of a paper that overlaps substantially with one already published, without clear, visible reference to the previous publication (Please see COPE flowcharts for more information). Prior publication may include release of information in the public domain (please see the IJHPM Pre-publication Guidelines for more information).
3. Manuscripts Based on the Same Database
If we receive manuscripts from separate research groups or from the same group analyzing the same data set (e.g., from a public database, or systematic reviews or meta-analyses of the same evidence), the manuscripts will be considered independently because they may differ in their analytic methods, conclusions, or both. If the data interpretation and conclusions are similar, it may be reasonable although not mandatory for editors to give preference to the manuscript submitted first. Editors might consider publishing more than one manuscript that overlap in this way because different analytical approaches may be complementary and equally valid. But, manuscripts based upon the same dataset should add substantially to each other to warrant consideration for publication as separate papers, with appropriate citation of previous publications from the same dataset to allow for transparency.
Secondary analyses of clinical trial data should cite any primary publication, clearly state that it contains secondary analyses/results, and use the same identifying trial registration number as the primary trial and unique, persistent dataset identifier (please find more information from ICMJE).
Any research that involves human subjects, human material, human tissues, or human data, requires ethics approval. The lead corresponding author should declare a clear statement based on the Declaration of Helsinki of 2013 rules. Please find more information from here.
Based on the Declaration of Helsinki of 2013 rule number 23, an approval from an ethics committee should have been obtained before beginning the research. If your manuscript does not include ethics approval, it will not be sent out for the peer-review. The following principles are mandatory for Original Article and Short Communications:
As IJHPM follows the guidelines of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), for more information on publication Ethics please visit COPE and ICMJE.
1. Permission to use or publish an institution data:
If you wish to publish the data/information of an institution, you should seek the institution permission and provide us with the signed permission once submitting the manuscript or in the review process stage.
2. Using online information:
Most materials on the Internet are protected by the copyright. In such case, authors need to obtain permission from the source which owns the copyright. Some online materials, however, may not be original to the website and you need to identify the right-holder and seek permission.
The IJHPM uses the Cross iThenticate Plagiarism detector to screen submitted manuscripts for originality. Using this service, we can detect if a manuscript contains passages of text that appear in other publications or resources. The duplication should not be more than 10%.
The IJHPM supports the Open Access initiative and the authors retain the copyright without restrictions. Abstracts and full texts (PDF format) of all articles published by the IJHPM are freely accessible to everyone immediately upon publication. Reusing and publishing IJHPM published articles (main text, tables, and figures) is permitted by following Creative Commons user license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Users are free to copy and redistribute the IJHPM published articles in any medium or format under the Creative commons license terms and conditions, but need to provide the appropriate bibliographic citation of the IJHPM published articles in their works.