Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

(These guidelines are based on existing the Committee on Publication Ethics-COPE)

 

DUTIES OF EDITORS

 

Publication decisions

The editor of the Procedia of Multidisciplinary Research is responsible for deciding which of the articles submitted to the Procedia should be published. The editor may be guided by the policies of the Procedia's editorial board and constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. The editor may confer with other editors or reviewers in making this decision.

 

Fair play

An editor at any time evaluates manuscripts for their intellectual content without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors.

 

Confidentiality

The editor 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Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in an editor's own research without the express written consent of the author.

 

DUTIES OF REVIEWERS

 

Contribution to Editorial Decisions

Peer review assists the editor in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communications with the author may also assist the author in improving the paper.

 

Promptness

Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the editor and excuse himself from the review process.

 

Confidentiality

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

 

Standards of Objectivity

Reviews should be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Referees should express their views clearly with 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 be accompanied 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 paper 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 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 papers.

 

DUTIES OF AUTHORS

 

Reporting standards

Authors of reports 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 paper. 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.

 

Data Access and Retention

Authors are asked to provide the raw data in connection with a paper for editorial review, and should be prepared to provide public access if practicable, and should in any event be prepared to retain such data for a reasonable time after publication.

 

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.

 

Multiple, Redundant or Concurrent Publication

An author should not in general publish manuscripts describing essentially the same research in more than one journal or primary publication. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable.

 

Acknowledgement of Sources

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

 

Authorship of the Paper

Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study. 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 acknowledged or listed as contributors. The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors and no inappropriate co-authors are included on the paper, and that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.

 

Hazards and Human or Animal Subjects

If the work involves chemicals, procedures or equipment that have any unusual hazards inherent in their use, the author must clearly identify these in the manuscript.

 

Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest

All authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial or other substantive conflict of interest that might be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed.

 

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 Procedia editor or publisher and cooperate with the editor to retract or correct the paper.

 

Guidelines for Protection of Human and Animal Research Subjects

 

Protection of Human Subjects

Research involving human subjects must be performed according to the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki. All original articles must state the approval number of Institutional Review Board, related method sections, and full name of the institutional review committee. In case of individual cases or case series, informed consent for patient information or images must be clearly stated in informed consent for legally authorized representative.

 

Care and Use of Animals

All researches related to animals must be approved by an ethics committee where the studies were carried out. Manuscripts involving needless pain, distress, suffering, or lasting harm to animals, the editor keep the right to reject manuscripts on the basis of related ethics or welfare.

 

From 2019, all clinical trials, which involve assigning a health-related intervention to human subjects, submitted to the Procedia must be registered with one of the primary registers in the WHO Registry Network

(http://www.who.int/ictrp/network/primary/en) or in ClinicalTrials.gov before the first patient enrollment. The registration must contain complete information on the minimum 20-item trial registration

(https://prsinfo.clinicaltrials.gov/trainTrainer/WHO-ICMJE-ClinTrialsgov-Cross-Ref.pdf).

 

AI Tools and Authorship

 

ALPS Position Statement

ALPS joins organisations, such as COPE, World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) and the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Network among others, to state that AI tools cannot be listed as an author of a paper.

AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements.

Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in disclosing in the Research Methodology (or similar section) of the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics.

 

Generative AI Usage Key Principles

Copywriting any part of an article using a generative AI tool/LLM would not be permissible, including the generation of the abstract or the literature review, for as per the journal’s authorship criteria, the author(s) must be responsible for the work and accountable for its accuracy, integrity, and validity. In line with standard academic practice, however, the journal permits the use of examples of generative AI for illustrative purposes as part of scholarly critique and discussion, with the exception of images created by AI tools or large-scale generative models; these examples must be appropriately flagged in the text and be fully cited and referenced in accordance with formatting requirements.

The generation or reporting of results using a generative AI tool/LLM is not permissible, for as per the journal’s authorship criteria, the author(s) must be responsible for the creation and interpretation of their work and accountable for its accuracy, integrity, and validity.

The in-text reporting of statistics using a generative AI tool/LLM is not permissible due to concerns over the authenticity, integrity, and validity of the data produced, although the use of such a tool to aid in the analysis of the work would be permissible.

Copy-editing an article using a generative AI tool/LLM in order to improve its language and readability would be permissible as this mirrors standard tools already employed to improve spelling and grammar, and uses existing author-created material, rather than generating wholly new content, while the author(s) remains responsible for the original work.

The submission and publication of images created by AI tools or large-scale generative models is not permitted.