Article Policies
Publication of any material in JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES denotes that all its authors have agreed to its content and have ensured that JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES’s policies have been fully adhered to; adherence to sections 1-4 is compulsory for documents; sections 5 and 6 are strongly encouraged as they present good scientific practice and publishing standards.
We seek to ensure that the documents we publish and for which we provide a platform are responsible and have been selected and produced without bias. We respect the intellectual property rights of our contributors and seek to avoid unethical publishing behaviors such as plagiarism, defamation and cultural misappropriation.
Our Publication Terms and Conditions set out the publishing standards by which we operate. We require that all work sets out to be fair and accurate, differentiates between fact and opinion, is obtained by straightforward and ethical means, and is promptly corrected where inaccurate or misleading. The acceptability of any document shall be decided by JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES at its discretion. JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES reserves the right, at its discretion, to not proceed with publication at any time or to remove the document following publication if there are legal or ethical concerns.
1. Originality
We are happy to publish documents those that are unpublished.
Authors of documents must ensure that they do not breach copyright with any content they post. Authors who wish to reproduce a figure or table from a previous copyrighted publication are responsible for obtaining the permission of copyright holders and for clearly referencing the original source. Figures that were previously published under a creative commons license may be reused under the condition of the specific license that applies to those figures.
2. Authorship on Documents
Any documents whose author’s affiliation is a recognized research centre or clinical institution or organization clearly related to academic research can be posted. At least one author on document must meet this key criterion.
Documents always relate to specific gateways and usually only researchers who are directly affiliated with a gateway and have been invited by the gateway advisers will be able to publish documents.
3. Competing interests
Authors must include a ‘Competing interests’ statement. A competing interest will not preclude publication, but it provides full transparency for readers. If there are no competing interests to declare, the following standard statement is added: ‘No competing interests were disclosed’.
A competing interest may be of non-financial or financial nature. Examples of competing interests include (but are not limited to):
• individuals receiving funding, salary or other forms of payment from an organization, or holding stocks or shares from a company, that might benefit (or lose) financially from the publication of the findings;
• individuals or their funding organization or employer holding (or applying for) related patents;
• official affiliations and memberships with interest groups relating to the content of the publication;
• political, religious, or ideological competing interests.
Authors from pharmaceutical companies, or other commercial organizations that sponsor clinical trials, should declare these as competing interests on submission. The relationship of each author to such an organization should be explained in the ‘Competing interests’ section. Publications in JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES must not contain content advertising any commercial products.
The International Society for Medical Publication Professionals provides good practice guidelines, which are aimed at ensuring that “clinical trials sponsored by pharmaceutical companies are published in a responsible and ethical manner”.
If an undisclosed competing interest is brought to the attention of the editorial office after publication, JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES will follow the COPE guidelines (https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Guidelines)
4. Ethical Policies
JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES adheres to the COPE guidelines (https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Guidelines) relating to ethical oversight.
4.1 Research involving humans
4.1.1 Ethics approval
All studies involving humans (individuals, human data or material) must have been conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval must have been obtained for all protocols from the authors’ institutional or other relevant ethics committee to ensure that they meet national and international guidelines. Details of this approval should be provided in the document, including the institution, review board name, and permit number(s).
Human studies categorized by race/ethnicity, age, disease/disabilities, religion, sex/gender, sexual orientation, or other socially constructed groupings, should include a justification of the choice of definitions and categories, including whether any rules of human categorization were required by the relevant funding agencies. Appropriate non-stigmatizing language should be used when describing different groups.
Ethics approval must be obtained before the research is conducted; retrospective approval can usually not be obtained and it may not be possible to publish the study.
4.1.2 Patient privacy and informed consent for publication
As stated in the Recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors: “Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that the patient be shown the manuscript to be published. When informed consent has been obtained it should be indicated in the published article.”
Consent to participate: For all studies involving human participants, informed written consent to take part in the research must have been obtained, and this should be stated in the document in a section entitled ‘Consent’. If only oral consent was obtained (rather than written), the reasons need to be explained, confirmation of IRB approval that oral consent was adequate must be provided, and a statement of how it was documented included in the Consent section.
Consent for publication of identifiable data: For any documents that include information that could potentially identify an individual, please ensure that you have obtained written, informed consent from all patients or healthy participants (or their legal guardians for minors, or next of kin if the participant is deceased), confirming that the results and any images can be published. This includes large clinical datasets with direct or indirect identifiers (see this article for information), specific details about individuals, images and so on.
If your document contains any identifiable images of individuals, you must include a statement confirming that you have permission to publish these images. If your document contains any clinical images or identifiable data then you must include an explicit consent statement under a separate heading of the ‘Consent’ section (we suggest: “We confirm we have permission to use [images/data] from the participants/patients/individuals included in this presentation [conditions under which the permission was obtained]”).
Alternatively, if no consent for publication was required (e.g. the data has been anonymised), then this should be clearly stated and a note should be added confirming that such alterations have not distorted scientific meaning.
Signed consent forms should be made available to the JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES editorial office if requested.
4.2 Research involving animals
Authors describing studies involving animals must have consulted the ‘Animal Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments’ (ARRIVE) 2.0 guidelines, developed by the NC3Rs to improve standards of reporting, ensuring that the data from animal experiments can be fully scrutinized and utilized. Studies reporting in vivo experiments must adhere to the ARRIVE Essential 10 checklist as a minimum, and we encourage authors to use the full ARRIVE 2.0 checklist.
Experiments involving vertebrates or regulated invertebrates must be carried out within the ethical guidelines provided by the authors’ institution and national or international regulations. Where applicable, a statement of ethics permission granted or animal licenses should be included. If animals were used but ethical approval was not required, a clear statement should be included stating why this approval was unnecessary.
In all cases, a statement should be made to confirm that all efforts were made to ameliorate any suffering of animals and details of how this was achieved should be provided.
Authors should comply with the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Convention on the Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
4.3 Research involving plants
Studies on plants must be carried out within the guidelines provided by the authors’ institution and national or international regulations. Where applicable, a statement of permissions granted or licenses should be included. Authors should comply with the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Convention on the Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.
5. Registration of trials and systematic reviews
5.1 Trial registration
JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES uses the WHO definition of a clinical trial to decide what constitutes a clinical trial:
“A clinical trial is any research study that prospectively assigns human participants or groups of humans to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects on health outcomes. Interventions include (but are not restricted to) drugs, cells and other biological products, surgical procedures, radiologic procedures, devices, behavioural treatments, process-of-care changes, preventive care, etc”.
Trials should be registered prospectively and the trial registration number and registration date must be included in the document. Further information can be found at the ICMJE faq on trial registration and the WHO provides a list of approved registries.
Although prospective trial registration is preferable, several initiatives (such as the AllTrials campaign) have recognized that retrospective trial registration will encourage publication of both positive and negative results.
5.2 Systematic reviews registration
We encourage authors to register their systematic reviews in PROSPERO or another registry for systematic reviews. The registration number should be included in the document.
6. Standards of reporting
For articles in the life sciences there are standards of reporting guidelines devised to help authors to ensure that they have provided a comprehensive description of their research, making it easier for others to assess and reproduce the work; for more detail and a comprehensive overview, see the FAIRSharing initiative. Comprehensive lists of available reporting guidelines can be found on the EQUATOR network website for health research.
For example, reports of clinical trials should adhere to the CONSORT reporting guidelines. Any deviation from the original trial protocol should be explained.
7. Licenses
Most JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES documents are published under a CC BY license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and leaves the copyright of the documentwith the current copyright holder (usually the author or his/her institution). However, in some cases other Creative Commons licenses may apply. The specific license is listed for each document and document.
8. Permanency of content
All documents published in JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES receive a DOI and are permanently published, so they cannot be withdrawn once a DOI has been issued.
In order to maintain the integrity and completeness of the scholarly record, we will apply the following policies when published content needs to be corrected; these policies take into account current best practice in the scholarly publishing and library communities:
8.1 Correction to Document
All ocuments may contain errors; authors and readers can point out such mistakes via the Comment system. In the rare instance that a documentneeds to be formally corrected, for example, if a change needs to be made to the author list, a Correction statement will be added.
8.2 Retraction
This action is reserved for documents that are seriously flawed. They may be retracted for several reasons, including:
• honest errors reported by the authors (for example, errors due to the mixing up of samples or use of a scientific tool or equipment that is found subsequently to be faulty)
• research misconduct (data fabrication)
• duplicate or overlapping publication
• fraudulent use of data
• clear plagiarism
• unethical research
For any retracted document, the reason for retraction and who is instigating the retraction will be clearly stated in the Retraction notice. A publication is usually only retracted at the authors’ request or by the publisher because serious misconduct has been brought to our attention.
8.3 Removal
The removal of a document would only be undertaken where legal limitations have been placed upon the publisher, copyright holder or author(s), for example, if the documentis clearly defamatory or infringes others’ legal rights. The bibliographic information for a removed documentwill be retained on the site along with information regarding the circumstances that led to its removal.
9. Allegations of misconduct
JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and provides an ethical publishing framework in accordance with COPE’s codes of conduct for editors and publishers.
All documents are not peer-reviewed or checked before being posted in JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES; publication of such shared content in JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES does not imply endorsement of its content, methods or ethical standards.
If a case of suspected research or publication misconduct is brought to our attention, we will follow guidelines. This may involve contacting the authors’ research institution, an ethics committee or other third parties.
Research misconduct includes data fabrication or falsification, or cases where research involving animals or humans has not been carried out within an appropriate ethical framework. Publication misconduct includes duplicate publication of articles or plagiarism. Honest errors or differences of opinion are not considered ‘misconduct’.
If you suspect potential misconduct in an article published on JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES, please contact the editorial office (editor-in-chief@eu.edu.ge).
10. Appeals and complaints
JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND MEDICAL SCIENCES follows the COPE guidelines (https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Guidelines)
in relation to complaints and appeals. If you wish to make an appeal or complaint you should contact the editorial office
(editor-in-chief@eu.edu.ge). In the instance that your issue cannot be resolved by the editorial office, the Publishing Director should be contacted.
11. Policy for Comments on Documents
We encourage unsolicited open scientific discussion on all research outputs. Such contributions are published through our Comment system. To ensure that comments contribute to, and focus on, the scholarly debate, we usually only allow comments from readers who have a formal affiliation with a research institution, or other relevant organization. Alternatively, we may also allow comments from readers who have demonstrable expertise in a relevant area of research. Consistent with our commitment to full transparency, the reader’s full name and affiliation appear on their public comment.
Comments should focus on the scholarly content presented in the documents with which they are associated.
Comments that appear to be advertising, are potentially libelous or legally problematic (including comments revealing patient information) are not permitted. We will not accept Comments that are offensive, indecent or contain negative comments of a personal, racial, ethnic, sexual orientation, or religious character.
All Comments must be written in good English; a Comment may be rejected if it is deemed unintelligible.
Readers who wish to comment are asked to declare any competing interests. Competing interests can be of a financial nature (e.g. holding a patent or receiving fees from a company that may lose or gain financially from the publication of the Comment), or they can be personal, religious, political or other non-financial interests. When completing your declaration, please consider the issues summarized in the Declaration of Competing Interests.
While we welcome open scientific debate and discussion, we will not tolerate abusive behaviour towards our authors and reviewers via our Comment system or via social media. In extreme cases we will consider contacting the affiliated institution to report the abusive behaviour of individuals.