Publication Ethics
We are committed to meeting and upholding standards of ethical behavior at all stages of the publication process. We adhere to the rules and principles of associations, such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME).
Unethical issues including plagiarism of any kind, double submissions, copyright infringements, conflicts of interest, false, manipulated, and fabricated data, false statistical analysis, and false figures will be investigated by the editors. If an article has to be retracted, the publisher is obliged to inform all indexing and abstracting databases that include the journal's contents. The author (s) should guarantee the research data availability. Any financial and nonfinancial support received for the research project should be acknowledged.
Conflicts of interest
Conflict of interest policy requires that each author reveal any financial or non-financial interests or connections, direct or indirect, or other situations that might raise the question of bias in the reported work. In addition, all editors and reviewers have to disclose their conflict of interest which might influence an unbiased evaluation.
Plagiarism
Reported unethical issues including plagiarism of any kind, double submissions, copyright infringements, conflicts of interest, false, manipulated, and fabricated data or figures, statistical analysis, false figures and ghost and false authorship will be investigated by the editors and publisher using the plagiarism checker engines (iThenticate).
Essential and legal actions against cases proven to be misconduct will be taken by editors, even if these relate to previously published manuscripts that might later be retracted or revised. Decisions are made by the editors based on COPE principles and circumstances.
If an article has to be retracted, the publisher is obliged to inform all indexing and abstracting databases that include the journal's contents.
The similarity of the content of articles and their data will be checked by Plagiarism software and also by editor-in-chief’s examinations.
Copyright:
Authors retain the copyright of their published articles. All authors have to the copyright letter. Authors are free to post and distribute the links of their articles anywhere immediately upon publication. They are allowed to upload their article PDF(designed by the journal) to different sources and pages such as Research gate, Linked in, Academica, etc.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This license lets others including authors distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.
Ethics committee approval
In the case of human studies, the author(s) must include a written statement which clarifies the study is approved by the local/national or international ethical committee (ethical code). For those without formal ethics review committees, the principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki should be followed. In the case of animal studies, all institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals should be followed. Ethics committee approval must be mentioned at the beginning of the Methods section. This paragraph must contain the following information: the name and address of the ethics committee responsible; the protocol number that was attributed by this ethics committee; and the date of approval by the ethics committee. If ethics clearance was not necessary, please state why it was not required.
Patient consent forms
The protection of a patient's right to privacy is essential. Please collect and keep copies of patients’ consent forms on which patients or other subjects of your experiments. Permission is needed for the publication of photographs or other material that might identify them, ( for example hiding patients' faces). A statement to the effect that such consent had been obtained must be included in the ‘Methods’ section of your paper. If necessary the Editors may request a copy of any consent forms.
If the researcher cannot find or track the patient(s) to receive consent, articles that are sufficiently anonymized will be considered for publication.
Regarding dead patients or subjects, the permission of relatives is necessary.
X-Ray images, laboratory tests, different types of scans, and images of body parts can be used without permission only if the information of authors will not be marked or revealed
HOW ABOUT ANIMALS?
Reviewer's responsibilities
Reviewers maintain the confidentiality of the research papers, they have no right to share and publish the contents of manuscripts. They must send their comments during the deadlines after accepting editors’ invitations; if they are not able to meet the deadlines due to any reason, they have to contact editors as soon as possible. Reviewers are expected to review the papers unbiasedly and respect the journal's policies.
Authors’ responsibilities
All authors of every manuscript must contribute to composing the manuscript or research. Avoid adding the name of authors (Gift authorship) who do not play any role in the research process.
Authors are responsible for the veracity, originality, and accuracy of article content.
Authors must adjust their manuscript based on the journal format in Author Guide. Manuscripts that do not adhere to the format will not be sent to the peer review process.
The corresponding author is responsible for the correctness and modification of the authors’ information submitted on the website
All authors who contributed to the research work should approve the final manuscript, so it is obligatory that all authors sign the copyright letter.
Article submission in this journal means that authors are obliged not to submit this paper in other sources or they have strongly confirmed that this article is not under consideration of other sources at the same time
Authors may contact the journal Email Office Address() if they face any issue
Authors must determine their affiliations clearly and the journal is not responsible for any errors in authors’ information, especially after publication.
The authors may check the whole manuscript after proofreading and layout before publication.
If editors or reviewers suggest any changes or revisions in the title or main body of the manuscript(s) during the peer-reviewing or proofreading process, the authors may accept or decline the changes.
Authors are obliged to present the raw data and research information to the editor-in-chief or editors if they ask, in order to investigate the accuracy and reliability of data and statistical analyses.
Authors especially corresponding authors are responsible to show adequate and on-time feedback to the journal emails, reviewers’ comments, revision submission and proofreading; otherwise, the journal is not responsible for a long peer review process, in case authors ignore the deadlines
Note: If one of the editors such as the editor-in-chief, managing editor or publisher’s staff tends to submit a paper to the journal, their paper will be managed or peer-reviewed without the authors’ interference and unbiasedly by reviewers assigned by other editors. In addition, these authors (EIC, editors, staff) must declare their (personal or professional) relations to the journal in conflict of interest.
Publisher's Responsibilities
The publisher is committed to keeping all content and history of manuscripts confidential. The publisher will back up and store the data archive of all manuscripts. The publisher must publish articles after proofreading and authors’ approval with appropriate proofreading and layout. The publisher shall solve any possible technical and non-technical problems regarding the journal management systems.
Archiving
The content of the website and article process is preserved by everyday backup which the owner of the server is committed to providing to the publisher every day.
Part of the important files is stored in INTERNET ARCHIVE and the National Library of Iran and part of the journal office document archive is saved on a Hard disk.
The journal follows Sherpa/Romeo's green archiving policy.