Publication Ethics

Ethics summary

This journal follows International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)‘s Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals. If research misconduct, fraud or plagiarism is suspected, editors will follow the COPE guidelines and reserve the rights to inform authors or their institution. Therefor we genuinely recommend and appreciate it if authors read these recommendations prior to their manuscript submission. 

 

Conflict-of-Interest Statement

According to ICMJE, conflict of interest occurred when a financial or personal relationship exist between any participant in the peer review and publication process – authors, reviewers, editors, or editorial board members of journals – and might bias or be seen to bias fulfilling their role. At first any conflict of interest in a given manuscript should be report by submitting ICMJE form for Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest on “Reviews in Clinical Medicine” website. Then we utilize COPE workflow to transparently handle it.

Conflicts of interest are those that could not always be clear and that could affect the opinion of the author, the reviewers, and the editors. It has been said that they are those that, if discovered afterwards, would cause a logical reader to feel mislead or duped. They might be financial, scholarly, political, commercial, or personal. Employment, research funding, stock or share ownership, remuneration for lectures or travel, consulting work, and employee benefits are all examples of "financial" interests.

 

Authorship

We stick to ICMJE definition of author and contributor based on its four criteria as follow:  

  • “Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND “
  • “Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND”
  • “Final approval of the version to be published; AND”
  • “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.”
  • We required the authors to understand and accept the ethical policy especially:  
  • Declaration of interests — it is important to declare the funding that made the research possible.
  • Registering clinical trials — clinical trials should be registered in publicly accessible registries.
  • Respecting confidentiality — protecting patients from being recognized if used in research and in publication.
  • Protecting research subjects, patients and experimental animals.

 


Regulation for Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Section A: Publication and authorship 
  • All submitted papers are subject to strict peer-review process by at least two reviewers that are experts in the area of the particular paper. Deputy Editors and Editor-in-Chief select reviewers.
  • The factors that are taken into account in review are relevance, originality, readability, statistical validity and language.
  • The possible decisions include acceptance, minor revisions, major revision or rejection.
  • If authors are encouraged to revise and resubmit a submission, there is no guarantee that the revised submission will be accepted.
  • Rejected articles will not be re-reviewed.
  • The paper acceptance is constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism.
  • No research can be included in more than one publication, whether within the same journal or in another journal.

 

Section B: Authors' responsibilities 
  • Authors must certify that their manuscript is their original work.
  • Authors must certify that the manuscript has not previously been published elsewhere, or even submitted and been in reviewed in another journal.
  • Authors must participate in the peer review process and follow the comments.
  • Authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes.
  • All Authors mentioned in the paper must have significantly contributed to the research. Level of their contribution also must be defined in the “Authors’ Contributions” section of the article.
  • Authors must state that all data in the paper are real and authentic.
  • Authors must notify the Editors of any conflicts of interest.
  • Authors must identify all sources used in the creation of their manuscript.
  • Authors must report any errors they discover in their published paper to the Editors.
  • Authors must state that informed consent was obtained from all human adult participants and from the parents or legal guardians of minors. Include the name of the appropriate institutional review board that approved the project.
  • The authors should follow WMA Declaration of Helsinki – Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects and clearly state this in their manuscripts.
  • Authors are recommended to conform to the Animal Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments (ARRIVE) guidelines for reporting animal studies.

 

Section C: Peer review/responsibility for the reviewers 
  • Reviewers should keep all information regarding papers confidential and treat them as privileged information.
  • Reviews should be conducted objectively, with no personal criticism of the author. No self-knowledge of the author(s) must affect their comments and decision.
  • Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments in 500 to 1000 words.
  • Reviewers may identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors.
  • Reviewers should also call to the Editor-in-Chief's attention any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which they have personal knowledge.
  • Reviewers should not review manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.

 

Section D: Editorial responsibilities 
  • Editors (Deputy Editors or Editor-in-Chief) have complete responsibility and authority to reject/accept an article.
  • Editors are responsible for the contents and overall quality of the publication.
  • Editors should always consider the needs of the authors and the readers when attempting to improve the publication.
  • Editors should guarantee the quality of the papers and the integrity of the academic record.
  • Editors should not publish errata pages or make corrections when needed.
  • Editors should have a clear picture of a research's funding sources.
  • Editors should base their decisions solely one the papers' importance, originality, clarity and relevance to publication's scope.
  • Editors should not reverse their decisions nor overturn the ones of previous editors without serious reason.
  • Editors should preserve the anonymity of reviewers
  • Editors should ensure that all research material they publish conforms to international accepted ethical guidelines.
  • Editors should only accept a paper when reasonably certain.
  • Editors should act if they suspect misconduct, whether a paper is published or unpublished, and make all reasonable attempts to persist in obtaining a resolution to the problem.
  • Editors should not reject papers based on suspicions; they should have proof of misconduct.
  • Editors should not allow any conflicts of interest between staff, authors, reviewers and board members.
  • Editors must not change their decision after submitting a decision (especially after reject or accept) unless they have a serious reason.

 

Section E: Publishing Ethics Issues
  • All editorial members, reviewers and authors must confirm and obey rules defined by ICMJE.
  • Corresponding author is the main owner of the article so she/he can withdraw the article when it is incomplete (before entering the review process or when a revision is asked for).
  • Authors cannot make major changes in the article after acceptance without a serious reason.
  • All editorial members and authors must will to publish any kind of corrections honestly and completely.

Archiving

The plan for electronic backup and preservation of access to journal's content (https://rcm.mums.ac.ir/) is clearly indicated. This policy sets out the ways in which the authors of RCM can archive copies of their work on their own web pages, corporate web pages, and various other subject repositories. 

    • RCM is an open access license, articles can be made available immediately according to the terms of their specific Creative Common license. 
    • Authors may also reuse the Abstract and Citation information (e.g. Title, Author name, Publication dates) of their article anywhere at any time including social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs and Twitter, providing that where possible a link is included back to the article on the RCM site. Preferably the link should be, or include, the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which can be found in the Citation information about the article online. The accepted version may be placed on: the author's personal website and/or the author's company/institutional repository or archive. 
    • In addition to indexing database, this journal utilizes digital archive via Eprint Repository to guarantee long-term digital preservation and restoration.
    • RCM is now formally archived at the National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI).

The Principles of Transparency

Study design and ethical approval
  • Good research should be well justified, well planned, appropriately designed, and ethically approved. To conduct research to a lower standard may constitute misconduct. The authors are responsible for the whole scientific content as well as the accuracy of the bibliographic information
Peer-review

This journal uses Double-blind peer review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process. To facilitate this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give their identity. No article is rejected unless negative comments are received from at least two reviewers. This process, as well as any policies related to the journal’s peer review procedures, is clearly described on the journal’s Web site (https://rcm.mums.ac.ir/journal/process).

Publishing schedule

RCM is published four issues per year. All the content from the beginning to the end will be available for ever on RCM exclusive website (https://rcm.mums.ac.ir/). 

Privacy and Confidentiality

All manuscripts must be reviewed with the utmost regard for the authors' confidentiality. When submitting manuscripts for review, authors entrust editors with the results of their creative and scientific labour, and their reputation and career may be on the line. It may be a breach of the author's rights to divulge private information while the author's manuscript is being reviewed. Editors must respect the reviewers' right to confidentially. Confidentiality may need to be broken if there is a suspicion of fraud or dishonesty, but it must be upheld otherwise. Editors are not permitted to reveal information about manuscripts to anybody but the authors and reviewers (including their receipt, content, status in the reviewing process, reviewer criticism, or ultimate fate). 

Reviewers should be informed by editors that submitted papers are privileged communications and the authors' private property. Therefore, before the document is published, reviewers and editorial staff must respect the authors' rights by abstaining from publicly debating or exploiting the authors' work. Reviewers should only be permitted to share the manuscript with others if the editor gives them permission. They should not be permitted to make copies of the document for their personal files. Reviewers should return or shred copies of the papers after providing their reviews. Copies of manuscripts that have been rejected shouldn't be kept by editors. Reviewer comments should not be published or otherwise made public without the author, editor, and reviewer's consent.

Ownership and management

Mashhad University of Medical Sciences

 

Copyright and Licensing

To make freely public accessibility to research with the aim of greater global exchange of knowledge, this journal provides open access to its published articles. RCM is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0). Licensees may copy, distribute, display and make derivative works only if they cite the original published article. 

In accordance with the open access principle, the RCM is made accessible to the general public. The approved articles can be read, downloaded, copied, distributed, and shared free as long as the author(s) are attributed. Once the manuscript has been approved, RCM will request the signature of each author on a copyright agreement form to give the required publication rights. Because the author(s) publish their work as open access, some rights, like patents, trademarks, and designs, retain with the author(s), while other copyright is given to the RCM. 

Copyright and License agreement
Copyright
Copyright of the open-access article in the Reviews in Clinical Medicine is retained by the author(s).
Authors grant RCM and Mashhad University of Medical Sciences a license to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher.
Authors also grant any third party the right to use the article for any non-commercial use, as long as its integrity is maintained and its original authors, citation details and publisher are identified.
The Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) formalizes these and other terms and conditions of publishing articles.
License agreement
In submitting an article to the Reviews in Clinical Medicine I certify that:
 
I am authorized by my co-authors to enter into these arrangements.
I warrant, on behalf of myself and my co-authors, that:
the article is original, has not been formally published in any other peer-reviewed journal, is not under consideration by any other journal and does not infringe any existing copyright or any other third party rights;
I am/we are the sole author(s) of the article and have full authority to enter into this agreement and in granting rights to Mashhad University of Medical Sciences are not in breach of any other obligation;
the article contains nothing that is unlawful, libellous, or which would, if published, constitute a breach of contract or of confidence or of commitment given to secrecy;
I/we have taken due care to ensure the integrity of the article. To my/our - and currently accepted scientific - knowledge all statements contained in it purporting to be facts are true and any formula or instruction contained in the article will not, if followed accurately, cause any injury, illness or damage to the user.
I, and all co-authors, agree that the article, if editorially accepted for publication, shall be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0.
I, and all co-authors, agree that, if the article is editorially accepted for publication in Reviews in Clinical Medicine, data included in the article shall be made available under the Creative Commons 1.0 Public Domain Dedication waiver, unless otherwise stated. 
Author self-archiving policy
This policy sets out the ways in which Reviews in Clinical Medicine authors may self-archive versions of their work on their own webpages, on institutional webpages, and in other repositories.
 
Abstract and Citation information
Authors may reuse the Abstract and Citation information (e.g. Title, Author name, Publication dates) of their article anywhere at any time including social media such as Facebook, blogs and Twitter, providing that where possible a link is included back to the article on the RCM site. Preferably the link should be, or include, the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which can be found in the Citation information about your article online.
 
Author’s Original Version
The Author’s Original Version (AOV) is defined here as the un-refereed author version of an article completed before submission of the article to the journal. This is sometimes referred to as the “preprint” version. The author accepts full responsibility for the article, and the content and layout is set out by the author. 
 
Authors may make their AOV available anywhere at any time. This includes posting on their own personal websites, institutional or non-commercial subject based repositories, commercial platforms websites or repositories, or social media, provided that, upon acceptance, they acknowledge that the article has been accepted for publication as follows: 
 
This article has been accepted for publication in Reviews in Clinical Medicine Published by Mashhad University of Medical Sciences. 
 
After publication we would also ask authors to update their AOV with the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), and include a link to the Version of Record.
 
Accepted Manuscript
The accepted manuscript (AM) is the final draft author manuscript, as accepted for publication by a journal, including modifications based on referees’ suggestions, before it has undergone copyediting, typesetting and proof correction. This is sometimes referred to as the post-print version.
 
Immediately upon publication authors may:
 
Immediately upload their AM to their own personal webpage
Immediately upload their AM to their institutional or other subject based repositories and make them available publicly.
Published Article
Authors under the CC-BY licence may share and distribute their article on websites and repositories immediately upon publication.
 
 
Advertising

The policy of the journal is not to have advertising.


Process for identification of and dealing with allegations of research misconduct

  1. The journal editor's initial step is to notify the RCM Editorial Office by sending copies of the pertinent documents and a draft letter to the related author that requests an explanation in an objective manner.
  2. The topic is referred to the Publication Committee through the Editorial Office if the author's answer is unacceptably inadequate and it appears that substantial unethical behavior has occurred.The Committee will decide if the situation is bad enough to justify prohibiting future submissions after considering it.
  3. If the violation is less serious, the Editor may, at the Publication Committee's recommendation, write the author a letter of reprimand and a reminder of the RCM publication regulations; If the paper has already been published, the editor may ask the author to retract their statement and issue an apology in the journal.
  4. A notification will be provided to the relevant author, and any work by the offending author or any work that they coauthored and is now being reviewed by the RCM journal will be rejected without delay.
  5. The writers are not allowed to serve on the RCM editorial board or as a journal reviewer for the RCM Journal. Additional steps may be taken, according to RCM.
  6. An article will be retracted in cases of substantial fraud when a retraction notice is published in the journal and linked to the article in the online edition. Additionally, the online version will include a "retracted" label with the retraction date.

 

Complaints and Appeals Proccess 

We encourage sincere appeals to editor decisions. However, in order to address the editor's and reviewers' comments  you will need to offer strong support or fresh data/information. Editors rarely overturn their first judgments and don't anticipate many appeals. Therefore, you are highly encouraged to submit to another journal if your work is rejected. The Editorial Board's final judgments are usually final and cannot be changed because they are based on the reviewers' unbiased opinions. However, if you disagree with the publication's final judgment and believe you have grounds for an appeal, proceed as follows:

  • Explain your justifiable objections and why you do not concur with this conclusion.
    Give the publication's editors any new information or information that you would like taken into account during the review process.
  • If you think the reviewers erred in their assessment of your paper, explain why and include appropriate proof.
  • Give evidence if you believe there was a conflict of interest during the arbitration procedure.

For each article, the editors only consider one appeal. The editors may consult the referees and editors who reviewed the article after receiving the appeal. The editors' and editorial board's decisions regarding appeals are final, and they may include rejecting the manuscript, requesting additional peer review, or asking for submission a revised version of the manuscript.


COPE’s Guidelines & Flowcharts 

RCM is committed to follow and apply guidelines and flowcharts of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) in its reviewing and publishing process and issues. For more information on COPE’s Guidelines & Flowcharts please see:

(https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts-new/translations)

(https://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors_Mar11.pdf)

(https://publicationethics.org/files/2008%20Code%20of%20Conduct.pdf)