Publication Ethics

 Ethics in Research and Publishing

Research Ethics

Human-Subject Research

Authors of research involving human subjects, material, tissues, or data must state that they followed the Declaration of Helsinki of 1975 (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/), revised in 2013. Point 23 of this declaration requires approval from the local institutional review board (IRB) or other appropriate ethics committee.

Ethical statement: "All study participants supplied informed permission. The Declaration of Helsinki was followed, and the Ethics Committee of XXX (Project identification code) accepted the procedure."As with all human research, ethical approval from an appropriate ethics committee must be obtained before conducting non-interventional studies (e.g. surveys, questionnaires, social media research). If ethical approval is not required, authors must either provide an exempti A written informed consent for publication must be obtained from participating patients. Data relating to individual participants must be described in detail, but private information identifying participants need not be included unless the identifiable materials are of relevance to the research (for example, photographs of participants’ faces that show a particular symptom). Patients’ initials or other personal identifiers must not appear in any images. For manuscripts that include any case details, personal information, and/or images of patients, authors must obtain signed informed consent for publication from patients (or their relatives/guardians) before submitting to an IJISDD journal. Patient details must be anonymized as far as possible, e.g., do not mention specific age, ethnicity, or occupation where they are not relevant to the conclusions. A template permission form is available to download. A blank version of the form used to obtain permission (without the patient names or signature) must be uploaded with your submission. Editors reserve the right to reject any submission that does not meet these requirements.

 

For IJISDD journal publication, a consent, permission, or release form should include unlimited permission for publication in all formats (print, electronic, and online), in sublicensed and reprinted versions (including translations and derived works), and in other open access works and products. Patients' rights should be respected.

 

The editorial office will review the manuscript and request blank consent forms and ethics board discussion documents if the study involves vulnerable groups. When studies categorize groups by race, ethnicity, gender, disability, disease, etc., an explanation must be provided.

 

Research Ethical Guidelines

Editors will require that any research causing harm to animals have significant benefits compared to any cost, and that procedures followed are unlikely to offend most readers. Authors should also ensure that their research complies with the commonly accepted ' the Code of Practice for the Housing and Care of Animals Used in Scientific Procedures , American Association for Laboratory Animal Science , or European Animal Research Association .

If national legislation requires it, studies involving vertebrates or higher invertebrates must only be carried out after obtaining approval from the appropriate ethics committee. As a minimum, the project identification code, date of approval and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board should be stated in Section ‘Institutional Review Board Statement’. Research procedures must be carried out in accordance with national and institutional regulations. Statements on animal welfare should confirm that the study complied with all relevant legislation. Clinical studies involving animals and interventions outside of routine care require ethics committee oversight as per the American Veterinary Medical Association. If the study involved client-owned animals, informed client consent must be obtained and certified in the manuscript report of the research. Owners must be fully informed if there are any risks associated with the procedures and that the research will be published. If available, a high standard of veterinary care must be provided. Authors are responsible for the correctness of the statements provided in the manuscript.

If ethical approval is not required by national laws, authors must provide an exemption from the ethics committee. If an exemption is granted, the name of the ethics committee and a full explanation should be listed in Section ‘Institutional Review Board Statement’.

If no animal ethics committee is available to review applications, authors should be aware that reviewers and editors will evaluate their research's ethics. Even if they have received ethical approval, authors may be asked to provide a statement justifying the work, using the same utilitarian framework as ethics committees.

IJISDD endorses the ARRIVE guidelines (arriveguidelines.org/) for reporting experiments with live animals. Authors and reviewers must use the ARRIVE guidelines as a checklist, which can be found at https://arriveguidelines.org/sites/arrive/files/documents/ARRIVE%20Compliance%20Questionnaire.pdf. Editors may request the checklist and reject submissions that do not follow these guidelines for ethical or animal welfare reasons

Plant-related research

Researchers must follow institutional, national, and international guidelines when collecting plant material for experimental research. We recommend following the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Convention on the Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

For research manuscripts involving rare and non-model plants (other than Arabidopsis thaliana, Nicotiana benthamiana, Oryza sativa, or many other typical model plants), voucher specimens must be deposited in an accessible herbarium or museum. Future investigators may request voucher specimens to verify the identity of the material used in the study.

Editors may reject submissions that do not satisfy these conditions.

Sample ethical statements:

IJISDD respects the  IJISDD Editorial Committee (ICMJE) recommendations, which require and urge clinical trial registration in a public trials’ registry before initial patient enrollment for publication. Clinical trials include all studies that involve participant randomization and group classification in the context of the intervention under assessment, including observational studies where no registration is required. Authors should pre-register clinical trials with international clinical trials register and cite it in the Methods section. Clinicaltrials.gov, the EU Clinical Trials Register, and the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform are suitable databases. With proper citation, IJISDD can waive prospective clinical trial registration if the study protocol has been published before enrollment.

CONSORT Statement

When reporting randomized trial results, IJISDD requires a completed CONSORT 2010 checklist and flow diagram. Templates can be found here or on the CONSORT website (http://www.consort-statement.org), which also describes several CONSORT checklist extensions for different designs and types of data beyond two group parallel trials. Your article must report the content addressed by each checklist item.

Concerning Dual Use Research

IJISDD follows the practical framework defined in Guidance for Editors: Research, Audit, and Service Evaluations and introduced by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Research that could pose a significant threat to public health or national security should be clearly indicated in the manuscript, and potential dual-use research of concern should be explained in the cover letter upon submission.

Gender and Research

Our authors should follow the ‘Sex and Gender Equity in Research – SAGER – guidelines’ and include sex and gender considerations where relevant. They should also use the terms sex (biological attribute) and gender (shaped by social and cultural circumstances) carefully to avoid confusion.

Borders, territories

Authors should respect potential border and territory disputes when describing their research or in correspondence with editors. Content decisions are editorial, and the editorial team will try to resolve any issues. The IJISDD is impartial on jurisdictional claims in maps and institutional affiliations.

Publishing Ethics

IJISDD follows the Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines.

This journal's editors use a rigorous peer-review process and strict ethical standards to add high-quality scientific works to scholarly publication. Unfortunately, cases of plagiarism, data falsification, image manipulation, inappropriate authorship credit, and the like do occur. IJISDD's editors are trained to handle such cases with zero tolerance.

IJISDD article authors must follow these guidelines:

1.       Author(s) must state any potential conflicts of interest in the article before submission.

2.       Authors should correctly report their study findings and objectively analyze their importance.

3.       The report must explain data and techniques so other researchers may duplicate the results.

4.       Authors should publicly deposit raw data before submitting their manuscript and make it available to referees and journal editors if requested. They should also take steps to retain raw data in full for a reasonable time after publication.

5.       Do not submit submissions to many journals at once.

6.       The journal welcomes precise translations of previously published articles that follow our translation criteria.

7.       Please see our Updating Published Papers policy for instructions on how to notify the journal editors of mistakes and inaccuracies after publication.

8.       You must get permission from the copyright owners to publish previously published figures and pictures under the CC-BY license. See the Rights and Permissions page for more details.

9.       Plagiarism, data falsification, and picture modification are prohibited.

10.   Please avoid plagiarism in IJISDD contributions.

11.   Copying language, ideas, photos, or data from another source, even your own publications, without attribution is plagiarism.

 

12.   Copycat content must be within quotes and the source must be mentioned. Previous publications that inspired a study's design, structure, or language must be properly cited.

 

13.   The industry-standard software iThenticate checks all IJISDD submissions for plagiarism. If plagiarism is found during peer review, the manuscript may be rejected. If plagiarism is found after publication, an investigation will be conducted and action taken according to our policies.

 

14.   No manipulation of picture files should misunderstand the original image's information.

15.   Introduction, enhancement, moving, or removing features from the original image; grouping of images that should be presented separately (e.g., from different parts of the same gel, or from different gels); or modifying contrast, brightness, or color balance to obscure, eliminate, or enhance information are examples of irregular manipulation.

 

16.   We may reject or revise or withdraw the submission if irregular image alteration is found during peer review or after publication.

 

17.   When publishing with IJISDD, authors must follow the best ethical practices. Our in-house editors may contact the authors' institutions or funders if necessary to investigate publication misconduct.

 

Policy on Citations

1.       Authors should properly credit and acquire permission before using information from other sources, including their own.

 

2.       Authors should not overcite themselves.

 

3.       Authors shouldn't replicate references from other works without reading them.

 

4.       Authors should not favor their own, friends', peers', or institution's publications.

 

5.       Authors should not quote ads or advertorials.

 

6.       COPE guidelines require “original wording taken directly from publications by other researchers should appear in quotation marks with the appropriate citations.” This applies to an author's own work. COPE has a discussion document on citation manipulation with best practices.

 

Reviewers' Advice

Please suggest three potential reviewers with the appropriate expertise to review the manuscript during the submission process. The editors will not necessarily approach these referees. Please provide detailed contact information (address, homepage, phone, e-mail address). The proposed referees should neither be current collaborators of the co-authors nor have published with any of them within the last three years.

Conference papers, preprints

Preprints, drafts of papers published online before submission to a journal, are accepted by IJISDD.

After journal submission, submitted papers can be uploaded to IJISDD's Preprints server, which operates independently of the journal and does not affect peer review. See the Preprints instructions for authors for more information. If they meet the following criteria, expanded and high-quality conference papers can be considered articles: (1) they must be expanded to the size of a research article; (2) they must be cited and noted on the first page of the paper; (3) if the authors do not own the copyright, they must obtain permission from the copyright holder; and (4) they must disclose that they are conferred. Unpublished conference papers that do not match the requirements should be submitted to Proceedings Series journals.

 

Authorship

1.       Significant contributions to the work's conceptualization, design, or data collecting, analysis, or interpretation

2.       Drafting or critically assessing the work for intellectual substance

3.       The final version must be approved

4.       Acceptance of responsibility for all areas of the work including investigation and resolution of accuracy and integrity issues.

5.       An acknowledgment should mention contributors who do not qualify for authorship. The  IJISDD Editorial Committee provides more information about authorship.

 

All authors, including those removed, must approve any author list change. The corresponding author should act as a point of contact between the editor and the other authors and keep co-authors informed and involve them in major publication decisions. We reserve the right to request confirmation that all authors meet authorship conditions.

 

IJISDD ethics webpage has authorship information.

All IJISDD articles are peer-reviewed and assessed by our independent editorial boards, and IJISDD staff are not involved in manuscript acceptance decisions. When making an editorial decision, we expect the academic editor to base their decision solely on:

Conflicts of Interest

The  IJISDD Editorial Committee advises authors to avoid agreements with study sponsors, both for-profit and non-profit, that limit their access to all study data, ability to analyze and interpret it, and ability to prepare and publish manuscripts independently.All authors must disclose all financial and non-financial conflicts of interest that could inappropriately influence or bias their work.The corresponding author must include a summary statement in the manuscript in a separate section “Conflicts of Interest” just before the reference list.

 

See disclosure examples below:

Conflicts of Interest: Author A got research funds from Company A, Author B received a lecture honorarium from Company X and owns stocks in Company Y, Author C was a consultant and expert witness for Company Z, and Author D invented patent X.

In the absence of disagreements, writers should state:

The authors disclose no conflicts of interest.

Editing and Peer Review Immediately after submission, the journal's Managing Editor will do a technical pre-check: Overall manuscript appropriateness to journal/section/Special Issue; High-quality research and ethics in manuscripts; Rigor for further evaluation. The academic editor (i.e., the Editor-in-Chief for regular submissions, the Guest Editor for Special Issue submissions, or an Editorial Board member for conflict of interest and regular submissions if the Editor-in-Chief allows) will be notified of the submission and invited to perform an editorial pre-check. During the editorial pre-check, the academic editor will assess the submission's suitability.

Peer-Review

After passing the initial checks, at least two independent experts will peer-review a manuscript in a single-blind manner, with authors' identities known to reviewers. Peer review comments are confidential and will only be disclosed with the reviewer's consent.

For regular submissions, in-house assistant editors will invite experts, including academic editors, Editorial Board Members, and Guest Editors of the journal. Author-suggested reviewers may also be considered. Reviewers should not have published with any of the co-authors in the past three years or work or collaborate with any of their institutions.

Optional Open Peer Review

The journal uses optional open peer-review: Authors can choose to publish all review reports and editorial decisions with their manuscript, and reviewers can sign their reviews to identify themselves. Authors can change their choice for open review at any time before publication, but the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief will make any changes after publication.

Editorial Choice and Revision

The academic editor's decision will be communicated by the in-house editor. All IJISDD journal articles, reviews, and communications undergo peer review and get at least two reviews.

Accept after minor changes: Authors have five days to make minor modifications after the reviewer's comments.

Reconsider the following major changes:

The author must provide a point-by-point response or rebuttal if some of the reviewer's comments cannot be revised. A maximum of two rounds of major revision per manuscript is usually allowed. Authors will be asked to resubmit the revised paper within a suitable time frame, and the revised version will be returned to the reviewer for further comments.

Deny and Encourage Resubmission:

The manuscript will be rejected if more experiments are needed to substantiate the results, and the authors will be urged to resubmit it.

Reject:

A journal resubmission is not offered since the paper has substantial problems and/or no original contribution.

When disagreeing with a critic, authors must answer clearly.

 

Writer Appeal

 

Authors can appeal a rejection by emailing the journal's Editorial Office. The appeal must include a detailed justification, including point-by-point responses to the reviewers' and/or Editor's comments, and must be submitted within three months of a “reject and decline resubmission” decision.

 

Publishing and Production

After acceptance, the work will undergo expert copy-editing, English editing, author proofreading, final adjustments, pagination, and publication on www. ijisdd.com.

 

See the Editorial Process here.

Promoting IJISDD Journal Equity, Diversity, and InclusivityManaging Editors encourage Editors-in-Chief and Associate Editors to appoint diverse expert Editorial Boards, reflecting our multi-national and inclusive workplace. We are proud to create equal opportunities without regard to gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, religion, or socio-economic status. IJISDD journal editors must uphold these principles.

Initiative for Resource Identification

The Resource Identification Initiative provides unique persistent identities for antibodies, cell lines, model organisms, and tools to increase scientific reproducibility. Resource Identification Portal should be included in the manuscript's designated section. One website lists all resource kinds and has a ‘cite this’ button next to each resource with a valid citation text for the techniques section to assist authors identify the right identifiers.