Editorial Policies

Editorial Policies

Authorship

As stated in the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals, credit for authorship requires: 1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND 2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND 3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND 4. 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. All authors must attest that they fulfill the authorship criteria. There should be a statement in manuscript explaining contribution of each author to the work. Those contributors who did not fulfill authorship criteria should be listed in acknowledgments. Any change in authorship after submission must be approved in writing by all authors. All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship. The order of authorship should be a joint decision of the co-authors. Assurance that all authors of the paper have fulfilled these criteria for authorship should be given in the covering letter.

Affiliations

All authors are required to list their relevant affiliations based on the institution where their research or scholarly work has been approved and/or supported and/or carried out. For non-research articles, your current institutional affiliation should be listed. In case of changing your institution before publication of your article, the institution where the study has been conducted should be listed in affiliation and it is necessary to add a complementary note for mentioning your current affiliation. In case of not having an institutional affiliation, an independent status should be declared.

Citations

Research and non-research articles must cite relevant, timely, and verified literature (peer-reviewed, where appropriate) to support any claims made in the article. You must avoid excessive and inappropriate self-citation or prearrangements among author groups to inappropriately cite each other’s work, as this can be considered a form of misconduct called citation manipulation. Read the COPE guidance on citation manipulation. If you’re the author of a non-research article (e.g. a Review or Opinion) you should ensure the references you cite are relevant and provide a fair and balanced overview of the current state of research or scholarly work on the topic. Your references should not be unfairly biased towards a particular research group, organization or journal. If you are unsure about whether to cite a source you should contact the journal editorial office for advice.

Competing interests

Addiction & Health requires authors to declare all competing interests in their work. Authors are requested to disclose their interests that are directly or indirectly related to the work submitted for publication. All submissions must include a " Competing Interests/Conflict interest" section at the end of the article listing all competing interests (financial and non-financial). interests to be considered and disclosed but not limited to:

Employment: Recent employment (during a research project), current or anticipated employment by any organization that may have a financial gain or loss through the publication of this manuscript. This includes multiple affiliations (if any).

Funding: Research grants from funding agencies (please mention research funder and grant number) and / or research grants (including salaries, equipment, supplies, refunds for symposia and other expenses) By organizations that may gain or lose through publication.

Financial interests: stocks and shares in companies that may have a financial gain or loss through the publication of this letter. Consulting costs or other forms of rewards from organizations that may be financially profitable or unprofitable. Inventions or patent applications whose value may be affected by the publication of this manuscript.

Non-financial interests: In addition, authors are asked to disclose interests that go beyond financial interests that could lead to bias in the work presented for publication, such as professional interests, personal relationships, or personal beliefs.

Early research papers require a disclosure statement. Review articles provide a synthesis mix of evidence and may be considered as a valid work on a subject. Therefore, review articles need a disclosure statement. Other types of articles such as editorials, book reviews, comments (among others) may require a disclosure statement depending on their content.

Corrections

A correction notice will be issued when it is necessary to correct an error or omission which can impact the interpretation of the article, but where the scholarly integrity of the article remains intact. Examples include mislabeling of a figure, missing key information on funding or competing interests of the authors.
Addiction & Health distinguishes between major and minor errors. For correction notices, major errors or omissions are considered to be any changes which impacts the interpretation of the article, but where the scholarly integrity of the article remains intact.

Expression of Concern

In some cases, an Expression of Concern notice may be considered where concerns of a major nature have been raised (e.g. serious research or publication misconduct), but where the outcome of the investigation is inconclusive or where due to various complexities the investigation will not be complete for a considerable time.

When the investigation has been completed a Retraction or Correction notice may follow the Expression of Concern, and alongside the original article, all will remain part of the permanent published record.

Publication of an expression of concern notice will be considered if:

  • There is inconclusive evidence of research or publication misconduct by the authors, but the nature of the concerns warrant notifying the readers.

  • There are well-founded concerns that the findings are unreliable or that misconduct may have occurred, but there is limited cooperation from the authors’ institution(s) in investigating the concerns raised.

  • There is an investigation into alleged misconduct related to the publication that has not been, or would not be, fair and impartial or conclusive.

  • An investigation is underway, but a judgement will not be available for a considerable time and the nature of the concerns warrant notifying the readers.

Retractions

A retraction notice will be issued where a major error (e.g. in the analysis or methods) invalidates the conclusions in the article, or where research misconduct or publication misconduct has taken place (e.g. research without required ethical approvals, fabricated data, manipulated images, plagiarism, duplicate publication etc.). The decision to issue a retraction for an article will be made in accordance with COPE guidelines, and will involve an investigation by the editorial staff in collaboration with the editor. Authors and institutions may request a retraction of their articles if their reasons meet the criteria for retraction. The COPE retraction guidelines can be found on the COPE website.

Designations of territories

Addiction & Health respects its authors’ decisions regarding the designations of territories in its published material. Addiction & Health’s policy is to take a neutral stance in relation to territorial disputes or jurisdictional claims in its published content, including in maps and institutional affiliations. Where a journal is owned by and published on behalf of a society or other third party, Addiction & Health will take into account that Society’s policy on this issue to the extent it differs from Addiction & Health’s own.
Using third party material

As a warranty in the Journal Author Publishing Agreement you make with us, you must obtain the necessary written permission to include material in your article that is owned and held in copyright by a third party, including – but not limited to – any proprietary text, illustration, table, or other material, including data, audio, video, film stills, screenshots, musical notation, and any supplemental material.

Misconduct

Addiction & Health takes all forms of misconduct seriously and will take all necessary action, in accordance with COPE guidelines, to protect the integrity of the scholarly record.

Examples of misconduct include (but are not limited to):

  • Affiliation misrepresentation

  • Breaches in copyright/use of third-party material without appropriate permissions

  • Citation manipulation

  • Duplicate submission/publication

  • “Ethics dumping”

  • Image or data manipulation/fabrication

  • Peer review manipulation

  • Plagiarism

  • Text-recycling/self-plagiarism

  • Undisclosed competing interests

  • Unethical research

Peer review

Articles published in Addiction & Health (including its imprints) undergo thorough peer review and AHJ endorse COPE guidelines for reviewers. See Addiction & Health's Peer Review Process Section.

It is a requirement to maintain confidentiality and integrity of the peer review and editorial decision-making process at all stages, complying with data protection regulations (including GDPR). The invited reviewer should declare any competing interest before submitting their report to the journal. If they wish to involve a colleague as a co-reviewer for an article, they should ask the journal editorial office before sharing the manuscript and include their names, affiliation and any relevant competing interests in the comments for Editors when they return their report.

In the process of investigating an ethical query, the submitted manuscript, author, reviewer, and any other person (including whistleblowers) involved will be treated in confidence. During an investigation it may be necessary for the Editor to share information with third parties, such as the ethics committee and/or the authors’ institution.

Further peer review policies and guidance

Plagiarism

The manuscript should not contain the verbatim text of previously published papers or manuscripts submitted elsewhere. Hence, we evaluate all submitted manuscripts by the iThenticate plagiarism checker, which based on the detected plagiarism of the submitted manuscripts, we will ask the authors to rephrase the manuscript. COPE's flowcharts and guidelines would be used to handle plagiarism. Plagiarisms will be reported to the Vice-Chancellor for Research and Technology of relevant universities and organizations through official correspondence.

Open Access Agreement

This Journal is a Platinum Open Access journal and provides immediate open access to the content published in the journal. Upon submitting an article, authors are asked to indicate their agreement to abide by an open-access Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC 4.0). Under the terms of this license, 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. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Complaint’s policy

Our editors, staff, and editor in chief will respond promptly to any complaints, regardless of our writers, academics, or readers, and will do their utmost to resolve the matter to the full satisfaction of the person. At the same time, we do not consider every statement to be a complaint, but if the criticism is sound, we thank that person and try to upgrade our system.