Ethics in Publishing

As IJBSM follows the guidelines of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), for information on this matter in publishing and ethical guidelines please visit COPE.

Please note that any submission that has data collected from human subjects requires ethics approval. In this case, a clear statement to this effect must be made in any submitted manuscript presenting such research, specifying that the free and informed consent of the subjects was obtained. If your manuscript does not include ethics approval, your article will not be sent out for review. For qualitative articles it is mandatory that the following general principles be considered when submitting your manuscript.

• Details of formal ethical approval should be stated in the main body of the article. If authors were not required to obtain ethical approval (as is the case in some countries) or unable to obtain attain ethical approval (as sometimes occurs in resource-poor settings) they should explain this. Please anonymize this information as appropriate in the manuscript, and give the information when asked during submission.
• Procedures for securing informed consent should be provided.

- Responsibilities of authors:

Permission to use or publish an institution data: If you wish to publish the data/information of an institution, you should seek the institution permission and provide us with the signed permission once we ask for this. During submission you should inform us if you have obtained such permission.

Using Website information: Most materials on the Internet are protected by copyright. In such case you need to obtain permission from the website which owns the copyright. Some website materials, however, may not be original to the website and you need to identify the right-holder and seek permission.

- Informed consent

According to ICMJE guidelines patients or, in general research, participants have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information, including patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives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 a patient who is identifiable be shown the manuscript to be published. Authors should identify individuals who provide writing assistance and disclose the funding source for this assistance.

- Conflict of interest

According to ICMJE guidelines, a conflict of interest may exist when an author (or the author’s institution), reviewer or editor has personal or financial relationships that influence (bias) inappropriately his/her action (such relationships are also known as dual commitments, competing interests, or competing loyalties). These relationships vary from those with negligible potential to those with great potential to influence judgment, and not all relationships represent true conflict of interest. The potential for conflict of interest can exist whether or not an individual believes that the relationship affects his or her scientific judgment. Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony) are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and of science itself. However, conflicts can occur for other reasons, such as personal relationships, academic competition, and intellectual passion.

Authors must make sure that they have declared any actual or potential conflicts of interest in their manuscript when submitting their work (if any). The corresponding author is responsible for confirming with the co-authors whether they have any conflicts to be declared or not (For further information please visit ICMJE).

-Plagiarism

IJBSM uses the Cross iThenticate Plagiarism detector to screen submitted manuscripts for originality. Using this service, we can detect if a manuscript contains passages of text that appear in other publications or resources.