Publication Ethics and Malpractice statement

The ethical policy of American Journal of BioMedicine (AJBM) is based on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines and complies with AJBM Editorial Board codes of conduct. Readers, authors, reviewers, and editors should follow these ethical policies once working with American Journal of BioMedicine (AJBM). The ethical policy of AJBM is liable to determine which of the typical research papers or articles submitted to the journal should be published in the concerned issue. For information on this matter in publishing and ethical guidelines please visit (COPE).

Duties and Responsibilities of Publishers

American Journal of BioMedicine (AJBM) is committing to ensure that editorial decisions on manuscript submissions are final, American Journal of BioMedicine is promising to ensure that the decision on manuscript submissions is only made based on professional judgment and will not be affected by any commercial interests. The American Journal of BioMedicine is committing to maintaining the integrity of academic and research records.

Furthermore, American Journal of BioMedicine (AJBM) is monitoring the ethics by Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editors, Editorial Board Members, Reviewers, Authors, and Readers. AJBM is always checking the plagiarism and fraudulent data issues involved in the submitted manuscript, and it is always willing to publish corrections, clarifications, and retractions involving its publications as and when needed.

Duties and Responsibilities of Editors

  1. The Editors of the journal should have the full authority to reject/accept a manuscript.
  2. The Editors of the journal should maintain the confidentiality of submitted manuscripts under review or until they are published.
  3. The Editor-in-Chief should decide on submitted manuscripts, whether to be published or not with other editors and reviewers.
  4. The Editors of the journal should preserve the anonymity of reviewers.
  5. The Editors of the journal should disclose and try to avoid any conflict of interest.
  6. The Editors of the journal should maintain academic integrity and strive to meet the needs of readers and authors.
  7. The Editors of the journal should be willing to investigate plagiarism and fraudulent data issues and willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed.
  8. The Editors of the journal should limit themselves only to the intellectual content.
  9. The Editors of the journal must not disclose any information about submitted manuscripts to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.
  10. Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted paper will not be used by the editor or the members of the editorial board for their research purposes without the author's explicit written consent.

  Duties and Responsibilities of Reviewers

  1. The Reviewers of the journal should assist the Editors in deciding for publishing the submitted manuscripts.
  2. The Reviewers should maintain the confidentiality of the manuscripts, which they are invited to review.
  3. The Reviewers should provide comments in time that will help editors to decide on whether the submitted manuscript is to be published or not.
  4. The Reviewers are bound to treat the manuscript received for peer reviewing as confidential, and must not use the information obtained through peer review for personal advantage.
  5. The Reviewers' comments against each invited manuscript should be technical, professional, and objective.
  6. The Reviewers should not review the manuscripts in which they have found conflicts of interest with any of the authors, companies, or institutions.
  7. The Reviewers should disclose and try to avoid any conflict of interest.

Duties and Responsibilities of Authors

  1. Manuscripts must be submitted in English and should be written according to sound grammar and proper terminology.
  2. Manuscripts must be submitted with the understanding that they have not been published elsewhere, and are not currently under consideration by another journal published by or any other publisher.
  3. The submitting corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that the manuscript article's publication has been approved by all the other coauthors.
  4. To sustain the peer review system, authors should participate in a peer review process to evaluate manuscripts from others.
  5. It is also the author's responsibility to ensure that the manuscripts emanating from a particular institution are submitted with the approval of the necessary institution.
  6. It is a condition for submission of a manuscript that the authors permit editing of the paper for readability.
  7. Authors are requested to identify who provided financial support for the conduct of research and/or preparation of the manuscript and briefly describe the role of the founder/ sponsor in any part of the work.
  8. A copyright release form must be signed by the corresponding author in case of multiple authorship, before the acceptance of the manuscript, by all authors, for publication to be legally responsible towards the Journal's ethics and privacy policy.
  9. Under open access license, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their content but allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy the content as long as the original authors and source are cited properly.
  10. All authors have agreed to allow the corresponding author to serve as the correspondent with the editorial office, to review the edited manuscript and proof.
  11. When the author(s) discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her published work, the author must promptly notify the journal editor or publisher to retract or correct the manuscript.
  12. All authors must know that the submitted manuscripts under review or published with American Journal of BioMedicine (AJBM) are subject to screening using Plagiarism Prevention Software. Plagiarism is a serious violation of publication ethics.
  13. All authors must ensure that all authors have read the submission final checklist before being submitted to the American Journal of BioMedicine (AJBM).

Principles of Transparency

Peer review process:

American Journal of BioMedicine (AJBM) is a double-blind peer-reviewed electronic and print biannual publication concerned with all aspects of agricultural sciences. This process, as well as any policies related to the journal’s peer review procedures, is clearly described on the journal’s Web site ( Peer review ).

Governing Body:

American Journal of BioMedicine (AJBM) has a very strong editorial board, whose members are recognized experts in the subject areas included within the journal’s scope. The full names and affiliations of the journal’s editors are provided on the journal’s Web site ( Editorial Board ).

Contact information:

Journal provided the contact information for the editorial office of American Journal of BioMedicine (AJBM) (Contact Us).

Author fees / Access:

The Journal database is fully open access and the full text of published articles is available for everyone who can get access to the Journal website for free. There is no publication charge, publishing an article in American Journal of BioMedicine (AJBM) is described in Article processing charges.

Copyright:

Journals made clear the type of copyright under which authors' work will be published (Copyright)

Identification of and dealing with allegations of research misconduct:

Editor-in-Chief takes reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication, among others.

Web site:

A journal’s Web site American Journal of BioMedicine (AJBM) contains that care has been taken to ensure high ethical and professional standards.

Name of journal:

The Journal name of American Journal of BioMedicine (AJBM) has unique and not be one is easily confused with another journal

Conflicts of interest:

Authors are requested to be evident whether impending conflicts do or do not exist while submitting their articles to American Journal of BioMedicine (AJBM) through the Conflict of Interest Disclosure form.

Publishing schedule:

The periodicity at which a journal publishes is indicated American Journal of BioMedicine (AJBM).

Archiving:

A journal’s plan for electronic backup and preservation of access to the journal content is indicated American Journal of BioMedicine (AJBM).

Violation of Publication Ethics

Plagiarism:

Plagiarism is intentionally using someone else’s ideas or other original material as if they are one's own. Copying even one sentence from someone else’s manuscript, or even one of your own that has previously been published, without proper citation, is considered by AJBM as plagiarism. All manuscripts under review or published with AJBM are subject to screening using plagiarism-prevention software. Thus, plagiarism is a serious violation of publication ethics. The service helps editors to verify the originality of papers. Plagiarism is powered by the iThenticate. For a searchable list of all journals in the database, please visit www.ithenticate.com.

Data Fabrication and Falsification:

Data fabrication and falsification means the researcher did not carry out the study, but made up data or results and recorded or reported the fabricated information. Data falsification means the researcher did the experiment, but manipulated, changed, or omitted data or results from the research findings.

Simultaneous Submission: 

Simultaneous submission occurs when a manuscript (or substantial sections from a manuscript) is submitted to a journal when it is already under consideration by another journal.

Duplicate Publication:

Duplicate publication occurs when two or more papers, without full cross-referencing, share essentially the same hypotheses, data, discussion points, and conclusions.

Redundant Publications: 

Redundant publications involve the inappropriate division of study outcomes into several articles, most often consequent to the desire to plump academic vitae.

Improper Author Contribution or Attribution: 

All listed authors must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript and approved all its claims. Don’t forget to list everyone who made a significant scientific contribution, including students and laboratory technicians.

Citation Manipulation: Citation Manipulation is including excessive citations, in the submitted manuscript, that do not contribute to the scholarly content of the article and have been included solely to increase citations to a given author’s work, or articles published in a particular journal. This leads to misrepresenting the importance of the specific work and journal in which it appears and is thus a form of scientific misconduct.

Sanctions:

If there are documented violations of any of the above mentioned policies in any journal, regardless of whether or not the violations occurred in a journal, the following sanctions will be applied:

  1. Immediate rejection of the infringing manuscript.
  2. Immediate rejection of every other manuscript submitted to any journal published by any of the authors of the infringing manuscript.
  3. Prohibition will be imposed for a minimum of 36 months against all of the authors for any new submissions to any journal, either individually or in combination with other authors of the infringing manuscript.
  4. Prohibition against all of the authors from serving on the Editorial Board of any journal.

Handling Cases of Misconduct

Once AJBM confirms a violation against AJBM’s publication ethics, AJBM addresses ethical concerns diligently following an issue-specific standard practice as summarized below.

  1. The first action of the journal Editor is to inform the Editorial Office of AJBM by supplying copies of the relevant material and a draft letter to the corresponding author asking for an explanation in a nonjudgmental manner.
  2. If the author’s explanation is unacceptable and it seems that serious unethical conduct has taken place, the matter is referred to the Publication Committee via Editorial Office.  After deliberation, the Committee will decide whether the case is sufficiently serious to warrant a ban on future submissions.
  3. If the infraction is less severe, the Editor, upon the advice of the Publication Committee, sends the author a letter of reprimand and reminds the author of AJBM publication policies; if the manuscript has been published, the Editor may request the author to publish an apology in the journal to correct the record.
  4. Notification will be sent to the corresponding author and any work by the author responsible for the violation or any work these persons coauthored that is under review by AJBM will be rejected immediately.
  5. The authors are prohibited from serving on the AJBM editorial board and serving as a reviewer for AJBM. The AJBM reserves the right to take more action.
  6. In extreme cases, notifications will be sent to the affiliations of the authors and the authors are prohibited from submitting their work to AJBM for 4 years.
  7. In serious cases of fraud that result in the retraction of the article, a retraction notice will be published in the journal and will be linked to the article in the online version. The online version will also be marked “retracted” with the retraction date.

Retraction / Withdrawal of Article

AJBM's policy It is a general principle of scholarly communication that the editor of a learned journal is solely and independently responsible for deciding which articles submitted to the journal shall be published. In making this decision the editor is guided by the policies of the journal's editorial board and constrained by such legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement, and plagiarism. An outcome of this principle is the importance of the scholarly archive as a permanent, historic record of the transactions of scholarship. Articles that have been published shall remain extant, exact, and unaltered as far as possible. However, very occasionally circumstances may arise where an article is published that must later be retracted or even removed. Such actions must not be undertaken lightly and can only occur under exceptional circumstances. In all cases, our official archives at the Iraqi Academic Scientific Journals will retain all article versions, including retracted or otherwise removed articles.

Withdrawal of Article

AJBM recognizes the importance of the integrity and completeness of the scholarly record to researchers and librarians and attaches the highest importance to maintaining trust in the authority of its electronic archive. Only used for Articles in Press that represent early versions of articles and sometimes contain errors, or may have been accidentally submitted twice. Occasionally, but less frequently, the articles may represent infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, or the like. Articles in Press (articles that have been accepted for publication but which have not been formally published and will not yet have the complete volume/issue/page information) that include errors, or are discovered to be accidental duplicates of other published articles or are determined to violate our journal publishing ethics guidelines in the view of the editors (such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like), maybe “Withdrawn” from AJBM. Withdrawn means that the article content (HTML and PDF) is removed and replaced with an HTML page and PDF simply stating that the article has been withdrawn according to the AJBM Policy on Article in Press Withdrawal with a link to the current policy document.

Retraction of Article

 Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, or the like. Occasionally a retraction will be used to correct errors in submission or publication. The retraction of an article by its authors or the editor under the advice of members of the scholarly community has long been an occasional feature of the learned world. Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by many library and scholarly bodies, and this best practice is adopted for article retraction by AJBM:

  1. A retraction note titled “Retraction: [article title]” signed by the authors and/or the editor is published in the paginated part of a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in the contents list.
  2. In the electronic version, a link is made to the original article.
  3. The online article is preceded by a screen containing the retraction note. It is to this screen that the link resolves; the reader can then proceed to the article itself.
  4. The original article is retained unchanged save for a watermark on the .pdf indicating on each page that it is “retracted.”
  5. The HTML version of the document is removed.

Article removal: legal limitations

In an extremely limited number of cases, it may be necessary to remove an article from the online database. This will only occur where the article is defamatory or infringes others’ legal rights, or where the article is, or we have good reason to expect it will be, the subject of a court order, or where the article if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk. In these circumstances, while the metadata (Title and Authors) will be retained, the text will be replaced with a screen indicating the article has been removed for legal reasons.

Article replacement

In cases where the article, if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk, the authors of the original article may wish to retract the flawed original and replace it with a corrected version. In these circumstances, the procedures for retraction will be followed with the difference that the database retraction notice will publish a link to the corrected re-published article and a history of the document.

Expression of concern

If conclusive evidence about the reliability or integrity of a published work cannot be obtained, e.g. if authors produce conflicting accounts of the case, or authors’ institutions refuse to investigate alleged misconduct or to release the findings of such investigations, or if investigations appear not to have been carried out fairly or are taking an unreasonably long time to conclude, then the editor may issue an expression of concern rather than retracting the publication immediately.

Such expressions of concern, like retraction notices, shall be linked to the original publication, i.e. in electronic databases and by including the author and title of the original publication as a heading, and shall state the reasons for the concern. If more conclusive evidence about the publication’s reliability becomes available later, the expression of concern shall be replaced by a notice of retraction (if the article is shown to be unreliable) or by an exonerating statement linked to the expression of concern (if the article is shown to be reliable and the author is exonerated).

Publishing corrections

Corrections will be done in the following manner:

  • The title will include the words 'Erratum', ‘Corrigendum’, Addendum’, 'Retraction', or ‘Expression of concern’, as applicable.
  • It will be published as a separate document, with a unique DOI, and be included in the work’s table of contents.
  • It will cite the original publication.
  • It will enable the reader to identify and understand the correction in the context of the errors made or explain why the work is being corrected, or explain the editor's concerns about the contents of the work.
  • It will be linked electronically with the original electronic publication, wherever possible.
  • It will be in a form that enables indexing and abstracting services to identify and link corrections to their original publications.

Errata

An erratum is a correction of an important error (one that affects the publication record, the scientific integrity of the work, or the reputation of the authors or the work) that has been introduced during the production of the work, including errors of omission such as failure to make factual proof corrections requested by authors within the deadline provided by AJBM and within the AJBM policy. Errata for typing or grammatical errors will not be published, except where a simple error is significant (for example, an incorrect unit). A significant error in a figure or table is corrected by the publication of a new corrected figure or table as an erratum only if the editor considers this necessary for a reader to understand it.