SVU-International Journal of Medical Sciences (SVUIJM) - Publication Ethics

For all parties involved in the act of publishing (the author, the journal editor(s), the peer reviewer and the publisher) in the SVU-International Journal of Medical Sciences (SVU-IJMS), it is necessary to agree upon standards of expected ethical behavior. The ethics statements for our journal are based on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors

Research Integrity

-The integrity of any research based on the achievement of the following principles:

• Honesty in all aspects of research;
• Scrupulous care, thoroughness and excellence in research practice;
• Transparency and open communication;
• Care and respect for all participants in and subjects of research.
• Accountability both for one’s own research integrity and that of others when behaviour falls short of our standards.

Anyone who believes that research published by SVU-International Journal of Medical Sciences (SVU-IJMS) has not been carried out in line with these Academic Research Publishing Ethics Guidelines, or the above principles, should raise their concern with the relevant editor or email ali.abdelrahman@med.svu.edu.eg; mohammedhosnyhassaan@med.svu.edu.eg. Concerns will be addressed by following COPE guidelines where possible and/or by escalating the matter to our Publishing Ethics Committee if necessary.

Duties of the Editors-in-Chief

Fair play

We do not discriminate against authors, editors or peer reviewers based on personal characteristics or identity. We are committed to embedding diversity, removing barriers to inclusion, and promoting equity at every stage of our publishing process. We actively seek and encourage submissions from scholars of diverse backgrounds, including race and ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, and disability.

 Confidentiality

The Editor-in-Chief and any editorial staff must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.

Disclosure and conflicts of interest

Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in an Editor's own research without the explicit written consent of the author(s).

Publication decisions

• The handling Editor-in-Chief of the journal is responsible for deciding which of the submitted articles should be published. The Editor-in-Chief may be guided by the policies of the journal's Editorial Board and constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. The Editor-in-Chief may confer with other editors or reviewers in making this decision.
• Editorial decisions on manuscripts submitted to our journals are made by external academic editors and based on independent peer review reports.
• We do not tolerate abusive behaviour or correspondence towards our staff and others involved in the publishing process on our behalf. If anyone involved in this process engages in such behaviour we have the right to take action to protect others from this abuse. This may include, for example, withdrawal of a manuscript from consideration, or challenging clearly abusive peer review comments.

Duties of Peer Reviewers

Contribution to editorial decisions

Peer review is critical to maintaining the standards of our publications and assists the Editor-in-Chief in making editorial decisions and, through the editorial communication with the author, may also assist the author in improving the manuscript. We support our editorial board and peer reviewers in investigating and acting on any suspected cases of manipulated or fraudulent peer review;  protect the confidentiality of participants in the peer review process where anonymity forms part of that publication’s peer review process. We also expect our publishing partners, authors and peer reviewers to uphold any relevant confidentiality arrangements for our journal and to provide necessary information to support this.

 

Promptness

 Any invited referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its timely review will be impossible should immediately notify the Editor-in-Chief so that alternative reviewers can be contacted.

Confidentiality

Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. They must not be shown to or discussed with others except if authorized by the Editor- in-Chief.

Standards of objectivity

Reviews should be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inacceptable. Referees should express their views clearly with appropriate supporting arguments. Acknowledgement of sources

Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors. Any statement that an observation, derivation, or argument had been previously reported should beaccompanied by the relevant citation. A reviewer should also call to the Editor's attention any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published data of which they have personal knowledge.

Disclosure and conflict of interest

Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage. Reviewers should not consider evaluating 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 submission.

Duties of authors

Reporting standards

Authors reporting results of original research should present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion of its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately in the manuscript. A paper should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to replicate the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable.

 Originality and Plagiarism

• The authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works, and if the authors have used the work and/or words of others that this has been appropriately cited or quoted.
  • Plagiarism is defined as ‘using someone else’s ideas, words, data, or other material produced by them without acknowledgement’. Plagiarism can occur in respect to all types of sources and media, including: text, illustrations, musical quotations, extended mathematical derivations, computer code, etc.; material downloaded from websites or drawn from manuscripts or other media; published and unpublished material, including lectures, presentations and grey literature.
  • We do not tolerate plagiarism in any of our publications, and we reserve the right to check all submissions through appropriate plagiarism checking tools (iThencate). Submissions containing suspected plagiarism, in whole or part, will be rejected. If plagiarism is discovered postpublication, we will follow our guidance outlined in the Retractions, Corrections and Expressions of Concern section of these guidelines. We expect our readers, reviewers and editors to raise any suspicions of plagiarism, either by contacting the relevant editor or by emailing ali.abdelrahman@med.svu.edu.eg; mohammedhosnyhassaan@med.svu.edu.eg

 Duplicate, redundant or concurrent publication

• Duplicate or redundant publication, or ‘self-plagiarism’, occurs when a work, or substantial parts of a work, is published more than once by the author(s) of the work without appropriate cross-referencing or justification for the overlap. This can be in the same or a different language. We do not support substantial overlap between publications, unless: it is felt that editorially this will strengthen the academic discourse; and we have clear approval from the original publication; and we include citation of the original source.
• We expect our readers, reviewers and editors to raise any suspicions of duplicate or redundant publication, either by contacting the relevant editor or by emailing ali.abdelrahman@med.svu.edu.eg; mohammedhosnyhassaan@med.svu.edu.eg.
• When authors submit manuscripts to our journals, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless a journal is explicit that it does not have an exclusive submission policy. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow COPE Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
• An author should not in general publish manuscripts describing essentially the same research in more than one journal or primary publication. Parallel submission of the same manuscript to more than one journal constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable.
• Any manuscript based on a thesis should be a reworking of the material in the thesis and written to conform to the journal’s style guide or relevant book guidance. When quoting from the thesis or reusing figures, authors should avoid self-plagiarism by citing and referencing any extracts copied or adapted from the thesis appropriately. If a thesis was published by a publisher and is publicly accessible, permission may be required from the thesis publisher before submitting to a journal. The relevant editor should be informed that the manuscript draws on a thesis in the cover letter.

 Acknowledgement of sources

Proper acknowledgment of the work of others must always be given. Authors should also cite publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work.

Authorship and Contributorship

• Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study, drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and/or Final approval of the version to be published; and Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work and to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
• All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co- authors. Where there are others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research project, they should be named in an Acknowledgement section. The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors (according to the above definition) and no inappropriate co-authors are included in the author list of the manuscript, and that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication. All co-authors must be clearly indicated as of the moment of manuscript submission. Adding co-authors at a later stage will not be accepted.
• We encourage authors to list anyone who does not meet the criteria for authorship in an Acknowledgments section in their publication with permission, for example to recognize the contributions of anyone who provided research or writing assistance.
• We integrate with established and emerging industry standards to increase transparency in authorship (for example, ORCID). We support initiatives that enable transparency in authorship and contributorship such as CRediT taxonomy.

The corresponding author’s specific responsibilities include:

• Manuscript correction and proofreading. Handling the revisions and re-submission of revised manuscripts up to the acceptance of the manuscripts.
• Agreeing to and signing the Author Publishing Agreement on behalf of relevant co-authors and/or arranging for any third-party copyright owners’ signature;
• Arranging for payment of an APC (article processing charge) where one is required. The affiliation of the corresponding author is used to determine eligibility for discounted or waived APCs under Open Access Agreements.
• Acting on behalf of all co-authors in responding to queries from all sources post-publication, including questions relating to publishing ethics, reuse of content, or the availability of data, materials, resources etc.

Affiliations

• Any article affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.

Research with Humans or Animals

Research involving humans or animals should be approved by relevant ethics committee(s) and should conform to international ethical and legal standards for research. We also expect authors to respect human participants’ right to privacy, and to gain any necessary consent to publish before submitting to us. For information on whether authors are required to submit or include evidence regarding the above, please consult individual journal submission guidelines or contact the relevant book or journal editor.

Ethical conduct of research

Work involving humans should comply with the principles laid down in the Declaration of Helsinki, as revised in 2013. At the end of the main text, the manuscript should contain a statement that the study has been approved by the Ethical Committee of the institution where the study was performed, and that the study subjects, or their legal guardians, gave informed consent for participation in the study. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether institutional and national standards for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed. Please note the Journal´s Author Statement Information for further details and orientation in formulation.

Competing Interests and Funding

• Authors are required to declare any potential competing interests that could interfere with the objectivity or integrity of a publication. Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the presentation, review or publication of a piece of work. These may be financial, non-financial, professional, contractual or personal in nature. We also expect that anyone who suspects an undisclosed competing interests regarding a work published or under consideration by SVU-IJMS should inform the relevant editor or email ali.abdelrahman@med.svu.edu.eg; mohammedhosnyhassaan@med.svu.edu.eg
• At the end of the main text, all authors should include in their manuscript a funding declaration in addition to a competing interest declaration
•  All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed. Please note the Journal´s Author Statement Information for further details and orientation in formulation.
• We also participate in Crossmark; a multi-publisher initiative to provide a standard way for readers to locate the current version of a piece of content, view any changes that have occurred, and access additional information about that publication record.

Fundamental errors in published works

• When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal’s Editor-in-Chief or publisher and cooperate with them to either retract the paper or to publish an appropriate erratum.
• Where research data are collected or presented as images, modifying these images can sometimes misrepresent the results obtained or their significance. We recognise that there can be legitimate reasons for modifying images, but we expect authors to avoid modifying images where this leads to the falsification, fabrication, or misrepresentation of their results.
• Where we are made aware of fraudulent research or research misconduct by an author, our first concern is the integrity of content we have published. We work with the relevant editor(s), COPE, and other appropriate institutions or organisations, to investigate. Any publication found to include fraudulent results will be retracted, or an appropriate correction or expression of concern will be issued.

Transparency

We strive to follow COPE’s Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing and encourage our publishing partners to uphold these same principles.

Data and Supporting Evidence

• We support transparency and openness around data, code, and other materials associated with research. We expect authors to maintain accurate records of supporting evidence necessary to allow others to understand, verify, and replicate new findings, and to supply or provide access to this supporting evidence, on reasonable request. Where appropriate and where allowed by their employer, funding body or others who might have an interest, we encourage authors to deposit evidence in a suitable repository or storage location, for sharing and further use by others; and describe where the evidence may be found in a Data Availability Statement which authors should include in their publication.
• Many of our publications also permit authors to submit and publish supplementary materials that are not essential for inclusion or that cannot be accommodated in the main text, but that would be of benefit to the reader. Unless otherwise stated, it should be assumed that data, code, and other materials or supplementary files will not be peer-reviewed.

Integrity of Record

We maintain a record of the existence of everything we publish with information (metadata) describing each publication. If our content is deemed not to comply with the laws of a sovereign nation, we make every effort to ensure the metadata remain accessible within that jurisdiction. Where we are obliged to alter the publication record in any way, such as in the case of research misconduct leading to retraction of a publication, we preserve the academic record as far possible.

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Fees

• All articles submitted for July-December Issue 2021 onwards and subsequently accepted, will be subjected to a competitively priced Article Publishing Charge (APC) of 1500 Egyptian pounds for Egyptian authors (up to 10 pages and 20 Egyptian pounds for each additional page) and the Publishing fee is one hundred fifty dollars (150 $ USD) for non-Egyptian authors ( up to 10 pages and 10  $ USD for each additional page). The corresponding author of the accepted article will be responsible for payment and will be informed of the requested fees and payment method via email. If the author needs printed copies of his/her manuscript, he/she will pay extra charges for each copy. Such articles will be published as open access content and be covered by Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.
• To encourage publishing in our peer-reviewed journal, no submission, processing or publishing charges will be requested from foreign authors for specific period of time.

Publisher's confirmation

Publisher: South Valley University, Faculty of Medicine
Address: South Valley University, Faculty of Medicine, Qena, Egypt
Email: ali.abdelrahman@med.svu.edu.eg; mohammedhosnyhassaan@med.svu.edu.eg