Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
he publication of an article in the peer-reviewed journal SJUOZ is to support the standard and respected knowledge transfer network. Our publication ethics and publication malpractice statement is mainly based on the Code of Conduct and Best-Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors (Committee on Publication Ethics, 2011) that includes;
- General duties and responsibilities of editors.
- Relations with readers.
- Relations with authors.
- Relations with editors.
- Relations with editorial board members.
- Relations with journal owners and publishers.
- Editorial and peer review processes.
- Protecting individual data.
- Encouraging ethical research (e.g. research involving humans or animals).
- Dealing with possible misconduct.
- Ensuring the integrity of the academic record.
- Intellectual property.
- Encouraging debate.
- Complaints.
- Conflicts of interest.
Rigorous peer review is conducted by professional peer reviewers who are experts on the field. In addition, strict ethical standards and policies are enforced to ensure high quality scientific papers are added to the field of interest. Before processing the manuscript to the peer review, all manuscripts are checked for plagiarism, authership credit and data falsification. The similarity rate is checked with Turnitin software. Manuscripts with less than 20% similarity rate are passed to the peer review process.
Author's responsibilities;
1- Author warrant that the research is their original work.
2- The manuscript must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere.
3- Parallel submision to another journal is not allowed.
4- The manuscript must not contain any unlawful statement that violate a third party.
5- The author should accuratly present the findings and include objective discussion for his/her findings.
6- The authors must include all authors who have significant contribution to the research work. The authors are expected to follow the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.
7- Present the material and methods in enough details that if another researcher do the same experiment should obtain nearly the same results.
8- The authors must obtain the permission from the copyright holder for any previously published image, figure etc.
9- Any changes in the list of author must be during the editorial process before the acceptance of the paper for publication.
10- The authors must follow the international guidlines for research involving humans, animals and plants such as Declaration of Helsinki 1975, Code of Practise for the Housing and Care of Animals Used in Scientific Procedures and Convention on Biological Diversity for plant
11- The authors must give citation for all image, figure etc. which are already published.
12- The authors must provide an ethics statement as part of their methods section detailing full information as to their approval (including the name of the granting organization, and the approval reference numbers). If an approval reference number is not provided, written approval must be provided as a confidential supplemental information file.
13- For research conducted on regulated animals (which includes all live vertebrates and/or higher invertebrates), appropriate approval must have been obtained according to either international or local laws and regulations. Before conducting the research, approval must have been obtained from the relevant body (in most cases an Institutional Review Board, or Ethics Committee). . Research on non-human primates is subject to specific guidelines from the Weatherall (2006) report (The Use of Non-Human Primates in Research).
14- Experimental animals should have been handled according to the highest standards dictated by the author’s institution.
15- We strongly encourage all authors to comply with the 'Animal Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments' (ARRIVE) guidelines, developed by NC3Rs.
Editors and reviewers's responsibilities;
1- Reviewers are expected to provide written competent feedback in a timely manner
2- The editor must choose reviewers who are expert in the field.
3- It is the responsibility of the editor and the reviewer to accept the research which fits the scope of the journal.
4- The reviewers must alert the handling editor for any violation of ethical standards
5- Reviewers and editors must not have any conflict of interest with the research work.
6- Personel criticism of the author by the reviewers is inappropriate. The reviewers should give their views based on evidence in the literature.
7- The editors and reviewers must consider all the documents as confidential.
8- Evaluation of the research works must be free from any religion, gender, sexual, racial, political, ethnic biases.
9- The editors and reviewers must check the research work for ethical approval for research invloving human, animal and plant.
Informed Consent
Obtaining informed consent is a basic ethical obligation and a legal requirement for researchers. An informed consent document is typically used to provide subjects with the information they need to make a decision to volunteer for a research study. This information is most often presented subjects in the form of a written document, but may also be offered verbally by a member of the study team or in some other format understandable to the subject. Regulations and policy require that certain information be provided as part of the consent process. For the research papers that include volunteer as a part of the research (e.g. medical research papers), Authors must provide documents that clearly indicate the informed consent issue.
