Research ethics policy

PiscoMed Publishing requests all members involved in the journal publishing process to adhere the “Code of Conduct for Editors” and “Core Practices for Publishers” as stipulated by COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics). The guidelines define the best practice in the ethics of scholarly publishing as described in the Publishing Ethics Resource Kit (PERK), aiding the journals and publishers to achieve this.

The publisher strictly adheres to the guidelines and best practices as followed:

• the recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals from the International Committee of Medical Journals Editors (ICMJE)

• the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing developed by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME).

The publisher journal editors take all possible misconducts seriously, and adopt a zero-tolerance policy concerning any academic misconducts and ethical violations in research and publication. The violations include plagiarism, falsification of research, data fabrication, submitting manuscripts of others as one’s own, duplicate Submission at the same time and breached intellectual property rights, etc. The concerns or complaints on the possible allegations submitted to the journal (editorial@piscomed.com) will be dealt with promptly and appropriately according to the procedure set out in the COPE flowchart on complaints and in PERK. If the allegation is supported by evidence, the submitted manuscript in question will be declined for consideration in the journal and all authors will be informed in this regard.   

Human and Animal Rights Statement

Humans: When the submitted manuscript involves experiments performed on human subjects, including healthy volunteers, authors should adhere to the Declaration of Helsinki principles of 1975, as revised in 2000 and 2008 and indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the author's Institutional Review Board or Research Ethics Committee. Any possible adverse consequences of the work for ecosystems, populations or individual organisms must be weighed against the possible gains in knowledge and its practical applications.

Animals: When reporting experiments involving animals, authors should indicate whether relevant international, national, and/or institutional guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals were conducted accordingly. All animal work must specifically require authors to include details of animal welfare (such as species, number, gender, age, weight, housing conditions, welfare, training and the fate of the animals at the end of the experiment) and relevant details of steps taken to ameliorate suffering in all work. For studies involving client-owned animals, author(s) must possess (and attach) a document of informed client consent and adhere to a high standard (best practise) of veterinary care.  These details should be included in the Materials and methods section of the article.