Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement

Research and Publication Ethics

i) Journal policies on authorship and contributorship.

Authorship 

According to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (ICMJE Recommendations 2013), JRACR requires that all those designated as authors should meet all four ICMJE criteria for authorship, and all who meet the following four criteria should be identified as authors. 

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
  • Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
  • Final approval of the version to be published; AND
  • Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work he or she has done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work. In addition, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co-authors.

Each of our articles includes only one corresponding author. Any further contribution details (e.g. equal contribution) must be included in the contributions section at the end of the article. In addition, the colleagues who have contributed to the experiment and writing part of the paper but not be included as authors must be included in the acknowledgements section at the end of the article.

JRACR recognize only natural persons as authors. The individual performing the work is responsible for determining who meets these criteria, preferably when planning the work, and making appropriate changes as the work progresses. The corresponding author is mainly responsible for communicating with the journal in the process of manuscript submission, peer review and publication, and usually ensuring all management requirements of the journal.

When a large multi author team completes this work, ideally, the team should decide who is the author before the work begins and confirm who is the author before submitting the manuscript for publication. All members of the group named authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, including the approval of the final manuscript. They should be able to take public responsibility for their work and have confidence in the accuracy and completeness of the work of other authors on the group. They will also fill out the conflict-of-interest disclosure form as individuals.

Contributorship

JRACR lists contributors in three ways as follows:

1) JRACR publish a list of authors' names at the beginning of the article.

2) JRACR list contributors at the end of the article, giving details of who did what in planning, conducting, and reporting the work. If the corresponding author does not provide contribution details, we believe that the contribution of all authors is equal.

3) JRACR list acknowledgements at the end of the article, giving details of who did what in planning, conducting, and reporting the work but not be included as authors. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged. If the corresponding author does not fill in the acknowledgements section, we believe that there are no such colleagues.

ii) How the journal will handle complaints and appeals.

The policy of JRACR is mainly aimed at protecting the authors, reviewers, editors and publishers of JRACR. If not stated below, the process of handling complaints and appeals follows the guidelines of the Committee of Publication Ethics available from: https://publicationethics.org/appeals.

1) Who complains or makes an appeal?

Submitters, authors, reviewers, and readers may register complaints and appeals in a variety of cases as follows: falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, duplicate publication, authorship dispute, conflict of interest, ethical treatment of animals, informed consent, bias or unfair inappropriate competitive acts, copyright, stolen data, defamation, and legal problem. If any individuals or institutions want to inform the cases, they can send a letter to editor. For the complaints or appeals, concrete data with answers to all factual questions (who, when, where, what, how, why) should be provided.

2) Who is responsible to resolve and handle complaints and appeals?

The Editor or Editorial Board of JRACR is responsible for them.

3) What may be the consequence of remedy?

It depends on the type or degree of misconduct. The consequence of resolution will follow the guidelines of the Committee of Publication Ethics.

In addition, the author can appeal the refusal by sending an email to the editorial department of JRACR. The appeal must provide detailed reasons, including a point-by-point response to the reviewer's and/or editorial comments. The Managing Editor of JRACR will forward the manuscript and relevant information (including the identity of the referee) to the Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editor, or Editorial Board member. The academic Editor consulted will be asked to provide advice on the manuscript and may recommend acceptance, further peer-review or support the initial rejection decision. The rejection decision at this stage is final and cannot be revoked.

iii) Journal policies on conflicts of interest / competing interests.

According to our author guidelines, a competing interest exists when professional judgment concerning the validity of research is influenced by a secondary interest, such as financial gain. So, we require that the authors reveal all possible conflicts of interest in their submitted manuscripts. If there is no conflict of interests, authors should state that “The authors declare no conflict of interest.” Otherwise, they should state the conflict of interests under this section. In addition, if the funders do not play any role in the research, authors should state that “The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.” Otherwise, they should state any role of the funders under this section.

iv) Journal policies on data sharing and reproducibility.

JRACR is committed to a more open research field to promote faster and more effective research findings by achieving the reproducibility and verification of data, methods and reporting standards. We encourage authors who publish articles in JRACR to share their research data, including but not limited to: raw data, processing data, software, algorithms, protocols, methods and materials.

"JRACR encourages authors to share data and other artifacts that support the results of their papers by archiving them in an appropriate public repository. Authors can provide a statement of data availability, including links to the repository they use, in order to publish this statement in their papers. Shared data should be cited." All accepted manuscripts may choose to issue a data availability statement to confirm the existence of shared data. If you have shared data, this statement describes how to access the data and includes a persistent identifier (for example, the DOI or login number of the data) from the repository where the data is shared.

In order to improve transparency, we encourage authors to explain the availability of their data in your submission. This may be required by your funding agency or organization. If the data is inaccessible or unsuitable for publication, the author will have the opportunity to explain the reasons during the submission process, for example, that the research data is confidential.

v) Journal’s policy on ethical oversight.

All manuscripts submitted to JRACR should strictly comply with the Ethical oversight guidelines recommended by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) (https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Guidelines?classification=2776).

Any study that includes human subjects or human data must be reviewed and approved by the responsible institutional review board (IRB). For all investigations involving human materials, please refer to the principles embodied in the Declaration of Helsinki (http://www.wma.net/e/policy/b3.htm).

Animal experiments should also be reviewed by the appropriate animal care and use committee (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, IACUC) to protect and use animals. In addition, pathogen research requiring a high degree of biosafety should be reviewed by the relevant committee (Institutional Biosafety Committee, IBC). The editors of JRACR always require the submission of copies of informed consent or IRB approval documents of subjects in clinical studies.

vi) Journal’s policy on intellectual property.

All articles on the journal are “gold” open access and therefore freely available in perpetuity from the moment of publication with a Creative Commons (CC) end-user license attached. No fees will be charged for articles and no surcharges will apply for the length of an article, for illustrations and figures (including color figures), and for supplementary data unless noted otherwise (refer to a publication’s Author Guidelines for further details).

Authors who publish in the Journal of Risk Analysis and Crisis Response are requested to sign a Journal Publishing Agreement upon acceptance of their article. This agreement states that the copyright of all articles which are published in the journal remains with the Authors, i.e. Authors retain full ownership of their published work, and that the Authors grant the Publisher an exclusive license to publish and distribute the article, including for commercial purposes, as well as the right to license others to do the same. Permitted third-party reuse of the open access articles is subsequently defined by the applicable Creative Commons (CC) end-user license. All articles in the Journal of Risk Analysis and Crisis Response are published under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license, meaning that end users can freely share an article (i.e. copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt it (i.e. remix, transform and build upon the material) on the condition that proper attribution is given (i.e. appropriate credit, a link to the applicable license and an indication if any changes were made; all in such a way that does not suggest that the licensor endorses the user or the use) and the material is only used for non-commercial purposes. 

Hence submitting a paper to JRACR, means it is authorized to publish exclusively. At the same time, the author must ensure the originality of the paper, and that it does not infringe on the copyright of any third party. The author is also responsible for preventing the multi-contribution or simultaneous publication of the same manuscript.

Redundant publication is defined as “reporting (publishing or attempting to publish) substantially the same work more than once, without attribution of the original source(s)”. Characteristics of reports that are substantially similar include the following: (a) “at least one of the authors must be common to all reports (if there are no common authors, it is more likely plagiarism than redundant publication),” (b) “the subject or study populations are often the same or similar,” (c) “the methodology is typically identical or nearly so,” and (d) “the results and their interpretation generally vary little, if at all.”

When submitting a manuscript, authors should include a letter informing the editor of any potential overlap with other already published material or material being evaluated for publication and should also state how the manuscript submitted to JRACR differs substantially from this other material. If all or part of your material was previously reported, this should be mentioned in the Materials and Methods, with citation of the appropriate reference(s).

vii) Journal’s options for post-publication discussions and corrections.

Editors should consider withdrawing publications if there is clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, whether due to misconduct (such as data production) or honest errors (such as computational or experimental errors); The survey results were previously published elsewhere without appropriate cross reference, permission or reason (i.e. repeated publication); Constitute plagiarism; It reports unethical research.

As far as possible, the withdrawal notice should be linked to the withdrawn items (i.e. all electronic versions); Clearly identify withdrawn articles (for example, by including the title and author in the withdrawn title); Timely release to minimize the harmful impact of misleading publications.

If a small part of a reliable publication proves to be misleading (especially due to honest errors), editors should consider issuing corrections; The list of authors / contributors is incorrect (i.e. a qualified author is omitted or some people who do not meet the criteria of authorship are included).

Process for Managing Research and Publication Misconduct

When the JRACR faces suspected cases of research and publishing misconduct, such as redundant (duplicate) publications, plagiarism, falsification of data, author change, undisclosed conflicts of interest, ethical issues found in submitted manuscripts, reviewers who steal author ideas or data, complaints against editors, and other issues, the resolution process will follow the flow chart provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). The editorial board of JRACR will discuss the suspected cases and reach a decision.