JournalGurus expects their authors, reviewers and editors to comply with the highest ethical standards when conducting research, submitting papers and throughout the peer-review process,as required by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). For further details, authors should consult the following article: International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals” New Engl J Med 1997, 336:309–315. The complete document appears at http://www.icmje.org

REDUNDANT OR DUPLICATE PUBLICATION  

We ask you to confirm that your paper is original, has not been published in its current form or a substantially similar form (in print or electronically, including on a web site), that it has not been accepted for publication elsewhere, and that it is not under consideration by another publication. The ICMJE has provided details of what is and what is not duplicate or redundant publication. If you are in doubt (particularly in the case of material that you have posted on a web site), we ask you to proceed with your submission but to include a copy of the relevant previously published work or work under consideration by other journals. Authors must draw attention to any published work that concerns the same patients or subjects as the present paper in a covering letter with their article.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

Authors must state clearly all possible conflicts of interest in the manuscript, including financial, consultant, institutional and other relationships that might lead to bias or a conflict of interest. If there is no conflict of interest, this should also be explicitly stated as none declared. All sources of funding should be acknowledged in the manuscript. 

PERMISSIONS TO REPRODUCE PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED MATERIAL

JournalGurus requires provision by authors copies of permission to reproduce material (such as illustrations) from the copyright holder. Articles cannot be published without these permissions. 

PATIENT CONSENT FORMS

The protection of a patient’s right to privacy is a must. Ensure to collect and keep copies of patients’ consent forms on which patients or other subjects of your experiments clearly grant permission for the publication of photographs or other material that might identify them. If the consent form for your research did not specifically include this, please obtain it or remove the identifying material. 

A statement to the effect that such consent had been obtained must be included in the ‘Methods’ section of your paper. If necessary, the individual journal Editor(s) may request a copy of any consent forms.

ETHICS COMMITTEE APPROVAL

All articles publishing results of researches dealing with original human or animal data must include a statement on ethics approval 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; the name of the Chairperson of the ethics committee (or the person who approved the protocol) and the date of approval by the ethics committee. 

In addition, and as stated above, for studies conducted on human participants you must state clearly that you obtained written informed consent from the study participants; please also look at the latest version of the Declaration of Helsinki. Similarly, for experiments involving animals you must state the care of animal and licensing guidelines under which the study was performed and report these in accordance with the ARRIVE (Animals in Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments) statement. If ethics clearance was not necessary, or if there was any deviation from these standard ethical requests, please state why it was not required. Please note that the editors may ask you to provide evidence of ethical approval. If you have approval from a National Drug Agency (or similar) please state this and provide details, this can be particularly useful when discussing the use of unlicensed drugs. 

ADHERENCE TO INTERNATIONAL GUIDELINES ON ADEQUATE DATA REPORTING

JournalGurus adheres strictly to the guidelines on adequate data reporting that were established by The Enhancing the Quality and Transparency Of health Research (EQUATOR) network (http://www.equator-network.org/home/). 

AUTHORSHIP

All authors must confirm that they have read and approved the paper. Second, we ask all authors to confirm that they have met the criteria for authorship as established by the ICMJE, believe that the paper represents honest work, and are able to verify the validity of the results reported.

All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship and all those who qualify should be listed. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content. One or more authors should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, from inception to published article. Authorship credit should be based only on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; 3) final approval of the version to be published. Conditions 1, 2 and 3 must all be met. Acquisition of funding, the collection of data or general supervision of the research group, by themselves, do not justify authorship. All others who contributed to the work who are not authors should be named in the Acknowledgements section.

RETRACTIONS

JournalGURUS is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and also refers to the ICMJE advice on Corrections, Retractions and “Expressions of Concern” as well as on Overlapping Publications.

ABOUT JOURNALGURUS

OUR KEY STRENGTH

Online Publishing

• Online Manuscript System
  JournalGurus is an intuitive outfit for an online manuscript management system, from manuscript submission process all through to publication and peer review system (www.journalgurus.com). Submitting articles online, rather than in hard copy, increases the speed of workflow and turnaround.
• Your journal’s website
  Each journal has its own website so that professionals working in related fields can discover your content easily.
• Quick and easy dissemination of knowledge
  All journals use the OpenURL standard, making it easy for libraries to link users directly for article repositories from citation to the full text of the article
• Global visibility
  We archive your journal(s) at a number of key places, such as open access compliant e-print repositories and sites such as Bioline International (www.bioline.org.br) and CLOCKSS (www.clockss.org.br). All the journals are searchable from a single interface on these sites. The journals are also linked from DOAJ (www.doaj.org) and PubMed through LinkOut.
• Enabling Open Access
  We are the largest international open access publisher to offer widespread free submission, processing and publication of articles.
• Enhanced international reach
  We have excellent working relationships with the major bibliographic, subscription and secondary aggregating agencies and search engines. These relationships will help to increase your journal’s international visibility and accessibility.

AUTHOR FEE POLICY

Each JOURNALGURUS journal has its own author fee policy, please use the search facility to find the policy for the particular journal you are interested in submitting to.

Some of JOURNALGURUS journals offer the ‘Platinum’ open access model. ‘Platinum’ open access means there is no Article Processing Fee (APC) charged to authors and articles are immediately available on the journal website once published. There may be charges for reproduction of colour within articles.