STATEMENT ON PUBLICATION ETHICS AND PUBLICATION MALPRACTICE

QJVMS has adopted an ethical policy that complies with the commitments of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and the codes of conduct approved by the Editorial Board of QJVMS. Readers, authors, reviewers, and editors who work with QJVMS must comply with these ethical policies. The ethical policy of the QJVMS is also responsible for selecting from all the study articles considered the best suited for publication in certain issues. For further information about the publishing of QJVMS, such as the principles of ethics, please visit the website http://publicationethics.org. 

 

Roles and Obligations of Publishers

• QJVMS insists that editorial decisions concerning manuscripts must be ‘sound and definitive’.
• QJVMS evaluations are free of all connections to unlawful or unethical interests, and based simply on expert judgment.
• QJVMS is dedicated to safeguarding the credibility of academic and research documentation.
• QJVMS governs the ethical conduct of all journal professionals, reviewers, and authors.
• QJVMS consistently and intensively monitors for plagiarism and fraudulent data in submitted manuscripts.
• QJVMS ensures that it will issue corrections, clarifications or retractions for any of its papers as fast as possible.

 

Roles and Obligations of Editors

• The Editors of QJVMS must have the final and absolute right to reject or accept manuscripts.
• The Correspondence to the Editors of QJVMS undertake to retain the anonymity of submitted manuscripts throughout the review process, and till their eventual publication.    
• The Editor-in-Chief, together with other editors and reviewers make the final decisions regarding the rejection or acceptance of submitted manuscripts, published or unpublished.
• The Editors of QJVMS must maintain the confidentiality of the reviewers.
• QJVMS transparency and conflicts of interest will be clear to all readers and authors, and we are committed to protect against conflicts of interest. The QJVMS Editors must declare everything that can be perceived as conflicts of interest. We take this obligation seriously and do everything in our power to protects against conflicts of interest.
• Their role was to maintain the ‘academic integrity’ of the QJVMS, even going so far as to attempt to satisfy the demands of both authors and Journal readers.
• For their part, the editors of the QJVMS must demonstrate a readiness to thoroughly deliberate claims of plagiarism and fraudulent data, and to publish corrections, explanations, retractions and apologies as needed.
• The Editors of QJVMS should restrict themselves solely to the scientific material.
• The Journal editors cannot disclose any information about submitted manuscripts to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as it is necessary.
• The members of the Editorial Board will not use any material from a submitted manuscript for their own purposes without the author’s explicit and personal and written consent.

 

Responsibilities performed by Reviewers

• Judgement on Manuscript: Reviewers must assess the quality, relevance, originality, and significance of submitted manuscripts or research papers.
• Provision with Constructive Feedback: Offer detailed comments and suggestions to help authors improve their work.
• Ensuring Accuracy: The accuracy of facts, data, and references cited within the manuscript must be verified.
• Protection against Conflicts of Interest and Personal Interests: The reviewers must not place any influence to push the review procedure according to personal interests.
• Respect Confidentiality: Any details must not be shared by the reviewers of the review procedure with anyone.
• Adherence to Guidelines: Adhere to QJVMS guidelines and standards must be done by reviewers.
• Provision with Recommendations: Recommendations, such as acceptance, revision, or rejection must be established by the reviewers of the manuscript according to its characteristics.
• Timely Response: Reviews must be submitted to the QJVMS within the agreed timelines.
• Detection of Plagiarism or other Violations of Ethical Standards: Scientific theft or any ethical violations must be checked and detected by the reviewers.

 

 Responsibilities performed by Authors

• Conducting Research: Ethical research must be performed by authors and accurately presented for any data that enhance the work conclusions.
• Writing Manuscripts: Manuscripts must be written clearly, concisely, and understandably.
• Adherence to Guidelines: This means that the author must follow the submission, formatting, and style guidelines provided by the journal. This includes employing the journal’s style of citation, word limit, and formatting.
• Originality: Authors must confirm that their written document is unique and has not been previously published anywhere or submitted for consideration elsewhere.
• Ethical Approval: The study protocol must have been conducted using the world standard guidelines for animal care and use, and this must have been examined and approved by the institution that the work was conducted in its facilities. It must be accompanied by an approval date and number, and documentation (when requested) issued by that institution's specialized committee. In cases of zoonotic studies, if humans or their samples are involved, written consent must be accompanied with the submission, indicating that an individual who participates or gives samples knows before participating or giving the samples that they or their samples will be used in a research study. The consent must be clear and have the individual signature, personal legal information, and governmental ID (copy); otherwise, the submission will be rejected.   
• Citations: Authors should adequately cite all sources that are influential in the creation of their document.
• Plagiarism and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Writing: The text must not have been plagiarized or written utilizing AI, especially if AI is detected at high rates, and QJVMS strongly protects against these research misconducts. Authors are clearly notified that their submitted work is checked for these misconducts using special online tools.
• Permissions: Authors are responsible for clearing all copyright permissions and obtaining permission to reuse any previously published work.
• Keywords and Categories: While writing their manuscript, authors sometimes need to determine the right keywords and categories to identify the content of their work and make it properly indexed and online-discovered.
• Reviewing and Editing: Authors should make sure that the manuscript is worded correctly, free of grammatical errors, clear, accurate and coherent before submitting.
• Author Information: Authors are requested to provide complete and accurate author information (affiliations and name of corresponding author) for insertion into the manuscript.
• Conflicts of Interest: Authors should disclose all financial or other conflicts of interest that might be construed to influence the interpretation of research results or the opinions expressed by authors.
• Confidentiality: Authors must adhere to protect the privacy of individuals who do not wish to identified in the scientific report and should ensure that their anonymity is preserved.
• Author Contributions: All authors should indicate their contributions in terms of conception and design, acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation of data, drafting the article, critical revision for important intellectual content, and administrative and technical support. All those who have made significant contributions should be named authors while those who have participated in certain parts of the research should be acknowledged. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding does not justify authorship.
• Supplementary Material: The journal preserves the right to ask authors to provide supplementary material, such as data sets, code, or figures.
• Proofs: The authors normally have the opportunity to review the proofs of the manuscript before it is sent to the publisher to spot any errors or typos that may have been made through the initial review process and to ensure proper formatting in the final version.
• Promoting Work of Authors: Authors are encouraged to amplify the signal of their published research, potentially to an audience wider than their traditional academic networks, by leveraging channels like social media, specialized networks, workshops, or conferences.
• Funding: Funding agencies or sources should clearly be demonstrated.
• Agreements: All authors should agree for a specific author to be the corresponding author, and all should agree for submitting a manuscript.

Principles of Transparency

• Peer review process: QJVMS is a double-blind peer-reviewed journal with electronic two issues published per a year. This process and related principles are fully demonstrated in the following QJVMS-website (https://qjvms.qu.edu.iq/journal/process).
• The editorial board of QJVMS is composed of experts in topic areas that Journal covers. For details of the editor and address of the journal, access the QJVMS website: (https://qjvms.qu.edu.iq/journal/editorial.board).
•  The journal has been provided with contact details for the editorial office of JVMS, at (https://qjvms.qu.edu.iq/journal/contact.us) .
•  Journal is a fully open access database, which means that there is no payable entry to its contents. Everybody who comes to the Journal web-page can take a look at the whole material of the published articles free of charge. Besides, the authors pay for the article to be published.
•  The Editor-in-Chief takes specific actions for reports of any complaints of research misconduct to prevent publication of a paper that he/she believes has been affected by misconduct (e.g., plagiarism, citation manipulation, fabrication/falsification of data). These precautions are clearly stated at (https://qjvms.qu.edu.iq/journal/process?ethics).
•  The journal is called Al-Qadisiyah Journal of Veterinary Medicine Sciences (QJVMS) with a unique and characteristic name.
•  Authors are requested to declare any possible conflicts of interests on submission of a paper using the Conflict-of-Interest Disclosure form.
• The publication timetable of the QJVMS is fully stated on the website (https://qjvms.qu.edu.iq) .
•  QJVMS strategy for electronically archiving and maintaining access can be found at QJVMS website, https://qjvms.qu.edu.iq.

 

Violation of Publication Ethics

• Plagiarism: Plagiarism is the deliberate use of someone else’s ideas or original material without paraphrasing and/or acknowledging of its source. Plagiarism is one of the most serious breaches in publication ethics.
• Data fabrication and falsification: These are the action of a researcher making up data (results) and subsequently reporting this data (results) without carrying out the study, or experiment, in the first place. The difference between the two is that in the case of data fabrication, the researcher is making up all the data, while in the case of falsification, the researcher is manipulating, ‘modifying’ and/or editing the data or the results from a study/experiment, which the researcher had obtained.
• Simultaneous submission: It is the practice of submitting a manuscript, or major portions of a manuscript, to a journal while it is under consideration by another journal.
• Duplicate publication: It is where two or more papers contain the same hypotheses, data, discussion, and conclusions and are not cross-referenced. Multiple articles publishing the same or nearly the same research findings in different ways can be an example of redundant publications. These result from illegitimately ‘splitting’ the findings to make them seem more impressive to one’s professional colleagues.
• Insufficient Acknowledgement of Author Contribution: It is the responsibility of the authors of a paper to ensure that all listed authors have made a substantial scientific contribution to the work and have read and agreed on the claims that have been made in the paper. This includes also acknowledging the contribution made by students and other laboratory personnel.
• Citation misconduct: It includes the adding of excess citations to the manuscript without enhancing scholarly contribution to the article which is done solely for the purpose of boosting the number of citations to the individual’s own work or published in the articles of a specific journal. It distorts the importance of a particular research and importance of the journal in which it is published, and is a form of misconduct in science.
• Sanctions: Any instance of policy violation discovered will trigger sanctions. Here is the nature of the sanctions: (i) the violating manuscript will be rejected forthwith; (ii) any other manuscript submitted any time in the future by any of the authors of the violating manuscript will be forthwith rejected; (iii) all authors will be banned from submission to any journal for a minimum of 36 months, individually or jointly with other authors of the violating manuscript; and (iv) all authors will be blocked from the Editorial Board of any journal.

 

Misconduct Handling

What is done? When QJVMS identifies an ethical concern, QJVMS will follow the standard procedure below:

• The first step is to inform the Editorial Office of QJVMS. When the journal Editor raises a concern, he/she forwards copies of all the relevant material and a letter to the corresponding author for details regarding the misconduct.
• If the explanation is deemed unsatisfactory, and there is evidence of serious unethical behavior, the matter is referred to the Publication Committee by the Editorial Office. The Committee will decide in a considered manner whether the case warrants prohibition of future submissions.
• For a minor infraction, the Editor with assistance from the Publication Committee will then send the author a letter of reprimand and guidance on QJVMS publication policies. For a manuscript already published, the Editor may request the author to publish a retraction in QJVMS to correct the infraction.
• An email will be sent to the author corresponding to the submission if the submission is currently under peer review in QJVMS, informing them of rejection of the submission immediately.
• Neither are the authors permitted to be on the QJVMS editorial board or a reviewer for QJVMS Journal. However; the QJVMS has the prerogative to take further actions.
• Commonly in severe cases of misconducts, the particular paper will be banned from QJVMS, and a notification will be sent to the author affiliations and banned from publishing their work in QJVMS for a period of five years.
• In the event of serious fraud, as when an article is withdrawn, a notice of retraction is published in the journal and linked to the article online, as is the date of retraction, and the online version of the article is marked ‘retracted’.