Publication Ethics

 

Ethical Guidelines

 Ethical Issues is obligatory section in all types of articles. If there is no ethical issue to be considered, please declare it as “not applicable” or “None to be declared”. Every experimental or clinical study may raise controversial ethical issues (e.g., Institutional Ethical Approval for working with animal or human subjects). Thus, Addiction and Health expects all authors, reviewers and editors to consider COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) and Equator Network’s reporting guidelines in medical ethics plus scientific writing. If any, authors should state related declaration(s), unless otherwise the following sentence should be given “None to be declared”. Ethical considerations must be addressed in the main body. 1- Please 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. 2- Indicate in the text that the maintenance and care of experimental animals complies with National Institutes of Health guidelines for the humane use of laboratory animals, or those of your Institute or agency.

Please take a look at the following guidelines provided by COPE for editors and reviewers that may be helpful for authors, too:

 

Allegations of publication misconduct, both before and after publication will be carefully inspected and we reserve the right to contact authors' institutions, funders, or regulatory bodies if necessary. If a conclusive evidence of misconduct is noticed, proper steps will be taken to correct the scientific record, which may include supplying a correction or retraction.

Authors are assumed that they are aware of publication ethics, specifically with regard to authorship, dual submission, plagiarism, figure manipulation, competing interests and compliance with standards of research ethics. In cases of suspected misconduct, COPE standards and practices will be followed and advice from the COPE forum will be ascertained.

 

Funding/ Support and Role of Sponsor

All contributing authors will be required to complete and disclose all funding or financial support received. All funding, material or financial support for the work should be clearly and completely described in the Acknowledgements Section of the manuscript. Role of funding organisation or sponsor in each of the following stages of the research should be clearly defined: “design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis and interpretation of data; preparation, editing or approval of the work; and confirm to publish the manuscript”.

Duplicate/ Previous Publication or Submission

Manuscripts are assumed not to be published previously in print or electronic version and are not under consideration by another publication. Copies of related or possibly duplicated materials (including those containing significantly similar content or using same data) that have been published previously or are under consideration for another publication must be provided at the time of online submission.
For more information on ethical issues, please read the following COPE’s guidelines that might be helpful for authors as well as editors:
Suspected redundant publication in a submitted manuscript (Link)
Suspected redundant publication in a published article (Link)
Suspected fabricated data in a submitted manuscript (Link)
Suspected fabricated data in a published article (Link)

 

Editorial Review and Publication

Addiction and Health’s authors will be sent notifications of the manuscript’s receipt and editorial decisions by email. During the peer-reviewing process, authors can check the status of their manuscript via the Online Manuscript Submission System.
All submissions to the Addiction and Health go through a double-blind peer-review process to ensure content quality. At the first stage, a technical editor checks format and style of manuscript to assure its compatibility with the Addiction and Health’s guide for authors. If authors have not considered the guides, the manuscript will be sent back to authors for compatibility. The manuscript will be then assigned to section editors, based on the subject area and editor-in-chief decision, for a fast pre-review screening within 5 days. Section editors check the manuscript for content quality (with a focus on methodology, originality, and contribution to knowledge and practice) and use of English. The decision at this stage is fast reject, revise and re-submit, or assign to external reviewers for detailed evaluation process. Selection of external reviewers is based on their scientific background and experience, previous works, authors’ suggestion, and expertise. Editor-in-Chief receives the reviewers’ comments and sends them along with decision letter to corresponding author.
Addiction and Health adheres to a double-blind peer-review process that is rapid, fair, and ensures the high quality of published articles. Addiction and Health’s reviewers are required to declare their conflict of interests and maintain the confidentiality about the manuscripts they review.

 

  • Reviewers' and authors' identities are kept confidential.
  • The existence of a submitted manuscript is not revealed to anyone other than the reviewers and editorial staff.
  • Reviewers are required to keep manuscripts and their information confidential.
  • They should not use knowledge of the manuscript before its publication for their personal interests.
  • The reviewers' comments should be constructive, honest, and polite.
  • Reviewers should declare their potential conflicts of interest and decline review if one exists. Knowing the author(s) should not affect their comments and decision.

  Addiction and Health decision letter determines the status of manuscript in five ways:

1. Acceptance: the manuscript could be published electronically. This process lasts between one to two weeks. Before electronic publication, corresponding author should verify a proof copy of the paper. The journal supports the Advance Access initiative by which papers that have been copy edited and typeset but not yet paginated for inclusion in an issue of the journal are appeared online upon finishing with the review process. Advance accessed papers will be in a queue to be published in one of the journal’s upcoming issues.

 

2. Minor Revision: authors will receive comments on their manuscript and will be asked to submit a revised copy (showing all changes they have made to the manuscript using Track and Change or highlighted colour) beside a response to reviewer file in which they need to respond to each and every comment of reviewer one by one (for each reviewer separately). Revisions should be submitted in 5 weeks after decision letter.

 

3. Major Revision: it means a chance to reorganize the manuscript to meet the required scientific criteria for another review process. Here also authors are asked to submit a revised copy (showing all changes they have made to the manuscript using Track and Change or highlighted colour) beside a response to reviewer file in which they need to respond to each and every comment of reviewer one by one (for each reviewer separately). Revisions should be submitted in 5 weeks after decision letter.
Revisions should be submitted in 7 weeks after decision letter. Otherwise, authors need to go through a resubmission process.

 

4. Rejection: in most cases, methodological and scientific concerns are the main origins of rejection. Causes of rejection will be sent to the authors to provide more chance for them for publication in other journals.

 

Editing

Accepted manuscripts will be edited according to the Addiction and Health’s Guide for Authors (our journal provide English language service to non-English speaking authors too) and returned to the corresponding author for final approval. All contributing authors are responsible for all statements made in their manuscript during editing and production that are authorized by the corresponding author.

 

Corrections

Requests for publishing corrections should be sent to the editorial office. Corrections will be reviewed by editors and are published immediately and linked online to the original paper.

 

Conflicts of interest

 Authors must acknowledge and declare any sources of funding and potential conflicting interest, such as receiving funds or fees by, or holding stocks and shares in an organization that may profit or lose through publication of your paper. Declaring a competing interest will not lead to automatic rejection of the paper, but we would like to be made aware of it.

 

Pay charges

 There are no charges for publication in this Journal.

 

Copyright

 Open Access agreement

Upon submitting an article, authors are asked to indicate their agreement to abide by an Open Access Creative Commons license.  Under the terms of this license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), authors retain ownership of the copyright of their articles. However, the license permits any user to download, print out, extract, reuse, archive, and distribute the article, so long as appropriate credit is given to the authors and the source of the work. The license ensures that the article will be available as widely as possible and that the article can be included in any scientific archive.

 

Peer review process

 All manuscripts are considered to be confidential. They are blind peer reviewed by at least 2 anonymous reviewers selected by the Editorial Board. The corresponding author is notified as soon as possible of the editor decision to accept, reject, or require modifications.

 

Plagiarism

Addiction and Health is committed to publish the original studies and timely reviews that have neither been published nor is under review elsewhere. this journal is powered by plagSacn and all the submitted manuscripts are Checked. Taken all, all plagiarized materials will incur the “Plagiarism Sanctions”. Submitted manuscripts, which are found to be published or under review elsewhere, will be sustained and experience the “Duplicated Publication Sanctions”. Submitted Manuscripts, which are found to include either fabricated or falsified data including the manipulation of images, will confront with the “Data Fabrication/Falsification Sanctions”.

 

Misconduct

The Addiction and Health will follow the COPE guidelines to deal with cases of potential publication misconduct.

 

Retraction

Based on the COPE guidelines, Addiction and Health will consider retracting a publication if:

  • It has clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error).
  • The findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper cross-referencing, permission or justification (i.e. cases of redundant publication) 
  • It constitutes plagiarism.
  • It reports unethical research.

 

Publication Ethics and   Malpractice Statement

Section A: Publication and Authorship

  1. All submitted papers are subject to strict peer-review process by at least two international reviewers that are experts in the area of the particular paper. Reviewers are being selected by Associate Editors and Editor in Chief. Author also can propose reviewers for some journals and article types.
  2. The factors that are taken into account in review are relevance, originality, readability, statistical validity and language.
  3. The possible decisions include acceptance, minor revisions, major revision or rejection.
  4. If authors are encouraged to revise and resubmit a submission, there is no guarantee that the revised submission will be accepted.
  5. Rejected articles will not be re-reviewed.
  6. The paper acceptance is constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism.
  7. No research can be included in more than one publication, whether within the same journal or in another journal.

Section B: Authors' Responsibilities

  1. Authors must certify that their manuscript is their original work.
  2. Authors cannot withdraw their articles within the review process or after submission, or they must pay the penalty defined by the publisher.
  3. Authors must certify that the manuscript has not previously been published elsewhere, or even submitted and been in reviewed in another journal.
  4. Authors must participate in the peer review process and follow the comments.
  5. Authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes.
  6. 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.
  7. Authors must state that all data in the paper are real and authentic.
  8. Authors must notify the Editors of any conflicts of interest.
  9. Authors must identify all sources used in the creation of their manuscript.
  10. Authors must report any errors they discover in their published paper to the Editors.
  11. Authors must not use irrelevant sources that may help other researches/journals.

Section C: Peer Review/Responsibility for the Reviewers

  1. Reviewers should keep all information regarding papers confidential and treat them as privileged information.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments in 500 to 1000 words.
  5. Reviewers may identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors.
  6. 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.
  7. Reviewers' and authors' identities are kept confidential.
  8. The existence of a submitted manuscript is not revealed to anyone other than the reviewers and editorial staff.
  9. They should not use knowledge of the manuscript before its publication for their personal interests.
  10. The reviewers' comments should be constructive, honest, and polite.

Section D: Editorial Responsibilities

  1. Editors (Associate Editors or Editor in Chief) have complete responsibility and authority to reject/accept an article.
  2. Editors must not change their decision after submitting a decision (especially after reject or accept) unless they have a serious reason.
  3. Editors are responsible for the contents and overall quality of the publication.
  4. Editors should always consider the needs of the authors and the readers when attempting to improve the publication.
  5. Editors should guarantee the quality of the papers and the integrity of the academic record.
  6. Editors should publish errata pages or make corrections when needed.
  7. Editors should have a clear picture of a research's funding sources.
  8. Editors should base their decisions solely one the papers' importance, originality, clarity and relevance to publication's scope.
  9. Editors should not reverse their decisions nor overturn the ones of previous editors without serious reason.
  10. Editors should preserve the anonymity of reviewers (in half blind peer review journals).
  11. Editors should ensure that all research material they publish conforms to international accepted ethical guidelines.
  12. Editors should only accept a paper when reasonably certain.
  13. 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.
  14. Editors should not reject papers based on suspicions; they should have proof of misconduct.
  15. Editors should not allow any conflicts of interest between staff, authors, reviewers and board members.

Section E: Publishing Ethics Issues

  1. All editorial members, reviewers and authors must confirm and obey rules defined by COPE.
  2. Any notes of plagiarism, fraudulent data or any other kinds of fraud must be reported completely to COPE.
  3. 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).
  4. Authors cannot make major changes in the article after acceptance without a serious reason.
  5. All editorial members and authors must will to publish any kind of corrections honestly and completely.

 

Retrospective Ethics Approval

If a study has not been granted ethics committee approval prior to commencing, retrospective ethics approval usually cannot be obtained and it may not be possible to consider the submission for peer review. The decision on whether to proceed to peer review in such cases is at the discretion of the journals’ editors.

 

Patient Consent and Confidentiality

 

Any item submitted to the Addiction and Health  that contains personal medical information about an identifiable living individual requires patient’s explicit consent before it can be published. Consequently; all studied patients are required to sign an informed consent form after reading the studies’ information sheet.

If consent cannot be obtained because the patient cannot be traced in a study, then publication will be possible only if the information can be sufficiently anonymized. Anonymization means that neither the person nor anyone else could identify the individual with certainty.

If the patient is dead the authors should seek permission from a relative (as a matter of courtesy and medical ethics). If the relatives are not contactable, the journal will balance the worthwhileness of the case, the likelihood of identification, and the likelihood of offence in decision to publish a submitted paper.

Images—such as x-rays, laparoscopic images, ultrasound images, pathology slides, or images of undistinctive parts of the body—may be used without consent so long as they are anonymized by the removal of any identifying marks and are not accompanied by text that could reveal the patients’ identity.

 

Trial Registration 

Based on the ICMJE recommendations a clinical trial is defined as “any research project that prospectively assigns people or a group of people to an intervention, with or without concurrent comparison or control groups, to study the cause-and-effect, relationship between a health-related intervention and a health outcome.”

As a condition of consideration for publication, Trial articles published by Addiction and Health require registration of all trials in a public registry of trials approved by the ICMJE (any registry that is a primary register of the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform www.who.int/ictrp/network/primary/en/index.html).

The trial registration number and the date of registration should be included in the last line of the submission abstract.