Editorial Policies

Contents of this page:

Overview

Authorship
Competing Interests
Ethical Approval of Research/Publication Ethics
Patient Consent and Confidentiality
Research Reporting Guidelines
Clinical Trial Registration
Plagiarism Detection
Peer-Review Policy
Permissions
Fees, Copyright and Licensing
Open Access Agreement
Advertising

Overview

TUOMS PRESS adheres to the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. The journals published by TUOMS PRESS (including Advanced Pharmaceutical Bulletin, APB) endorse the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) Policy Statement on Geopolitical Intrusion on Editorial Decisions, the Council of Science Editors’ White Paper on Promoting Integrity in Scientific Journal Publications and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.

Submitting a manuscript to a journal published by TUOMS PRESS implies that all contributors listed as authors have read and agreed to the content of the submitted work and that the submission observes the policies of the journal.

Advanced Pharmaceutical Bulletin (APB) follows the "Editorial Policies" adopted by scholarly journals published by Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. APB Editors follow "the international standards for editors" recommended by COPE.

Authorship

The ICMJE recommends the authorship to be based on the following 4 criteria:
1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data.
2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content.
3. Final approval of the version published.
4. 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 coauthors. All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. Those who do not meet all four criteria should be listed in an Acknowledgements section. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding, the gathering of data, technical help, writing assistance, and general supervision of the research group does not warrant authorship. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged. Please guarantee that anyone stated in the Acknowledgements section has granted its clearance for permission to be listed. Authors should meet "the international standards for authors" recommended by COPE.

Acknowledgements
Recognize individuals who provided assistance to the project. Report all sources of grant and other support for the project or study, including funds received from contributors, institutions and commercial sources. Consultancies and funds paid directly to investigators must also be listed.
Authorship Changes
Any change in authorship (ie, order, addition, and deletion of authors) after initial submission must be approved by all authors. Authors should determine the order of authorship among themselves. In addition, any alterations must be clarified to the Editor/Editor-in-chief.

Competing interests
A competing interest exists when professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients’ welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain - employment, consultancies, stock ownership or options, honoraria, patents, and paid expert- testimony or personal relationship). There is nothing unethical about a competing interest but it should be acknowledged and clearly stated. All authors must declare all competing interests in their covering letter and in “Competing Interests” section at the end of the manuscript file (before the references). Authors with no competing interests to declare should obviously state that.
The policy of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences is that none of the editors should have any financial relationship with any biomedical company.

Ethical approval of research/Publication Ethics
APB follows the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and aims to adhere to its Best Practice Guidelines.
We strongly consider allegations of publication misconduct, both before and after publication, and we reserve the right to contact authors' institutions, funders, or regulatory bodies if needed. If we find conclusive evidence of misconduct, we will take steps to correct the scientific record, which may include supplying a correction or retraction.
Authors are expected to be aware of publication ethics, specifically with regard to authorship, dual submission, plagiarism, figure manipulation, competing interests, and compliance with standards of research ethics. In cases of suspected misconduct, we will follow COPE standards and practices and may seek advice from the COPE forum if needed. 

Intentionally falsifying information, for example, suggesting reviewers with a false name or email address, will result in rejection of the manuscript and may lead to further investigation in line with our misconduct policy.

Statement of Ethics Approval
We require every research article submitted to include a statement that the study obtained ethics approval (or a statement that it was not required and why), including the name of the ethics committee(s) or institutional review board(s), the number/ID of the approval(s), and a statement that participants gave informed consent before taking part. Even when a study has been approved by a research ethics committee or institutional review board, editors may ask authors for more detailed information about the ethics of the work.

Patient consent and confidentiality
Any article that contains personal medical information about an identifiable living individual requires the patient’s explicit consent before we can publish it. We would like the patient to sign our consent form, which requires the patient to have read the article.
If consent cannot be obtained because the patient cannot be traced then publication will be possible only if the information can be sufficiently anonymized. Anonymization means that neither the patient nor anyone else could identify the patient with certainty.
If the patient is dead the authors should seek permission from a relative (as a matter of courtesy and medical ethics). If the relatives are not contactable we will balance the worthwhileness of the case, the likelihood of identification, and the likelihood of offense if identified in making a decision on whether we should publish without a relative’s consent.
Our policy on obtaining consent for publication of pictures of patients is a subset of our general policy on patient confidentiality. If there is any chance that a patient may be identified from a photograph or other image or from its legend or accompanying text we need the patient’s written consent to publication by Tabriz University of Medical Sciences.
Images – such as x rays, laparoscopic images, ultrasound images, pathology slides, or images of undistinctive parts of the body – may be used without consent so long as they are anonymized by the removal of any identifying marks and are not accompanied by text that could reveal the patient’s identity through clinical or personal detail.

Research reporting guidelines
Authors are encouraged to use the relevant research reporting guidelines for the study type provided by the EQUATOR Network. This will ensure that you provide enough information for editors, peer reviewers and readers to understand how the research was performed and to judge whether the findings are likely to be reliable.
The key reporting guidelines are:
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs): CONSORT guidelines
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses: PRISMA guidelines and MOOSE guidelines
Observational studies in epidemiology: STROBE guidelines and MOOSE guidelines
Diagnostic accuracy studies: STARD guidelines
Quality improvement studies: SQUIRE guidelines

Clinical trial registration
Based on ICMJE recommendations, a clinical trial defines as “any research project that prospectively assigns people or a group of people to an intervention, with or without concurrent comparison or control groups, to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a health-related intervention and a health outcome”.
In agreement with the ICMJE, APB will not consider reports of clinical trials unless they were registered prospectively before recruitment of any participants.

Trial Registration
As a condition of consideration for publication, journals published by TUOMS PRESS require registration of all trials in a public trials registry that is acceptable to the ICMJE (any registry that is a primary register of the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform or in ClinicalTrials.gov, which is a data provider to the WHO ICTRP).

 
Plagiarism detection
APB is powered by the iThenticate software, which is a plagiarism detector service that verifies the originality of content submitted before publication. If plagiarism is identified, we will follow COPE guidelines.

Plagiarism includes but is not limited to:

• Directly copying text from other sources
• Copying ideas, images, or data from other sources
• Reusing text from your own previous publications (text recycling, also referred to as self-plagiarism)
• Using an idea from another source with slightly modified language

If plagiarism is detected during the peer review process, the manuscript may be rejected. If plagiarism is detected after publication, we reserve the right to issue a correction or retract the paper, as appropriate. We reserve the right to inform authors' institutions about plagiarism detected either before or after publication.

Peer review policy
- APB reviews all manuscript submissions, internally and externally.

- APB follows a double-blind peer-review process for all the submitted manuscripts. All the submitted manuscripts are subjected to an anonymous handling process.

- Original research articles authored by a member of a journal’s editorial team are independently peer reviewed; an editor will have no input or influence on the peer review process or publication decision for their own article. Editorials and obituaries written by the journal’s editor do not undergo external peer review.

- Editorial Board Members of APB (Just like all journals published by TUOMS Press) are required to declare any interests that might influence, or be perceived to influence, their editorial activities. In particular, they should exclude themselves from handling manuscripts in cases where there is a conflict of interest, financial or otherwise. This may include – but is not limited to – having previously published with one or more of the authors, and sharing the same institution as one or more of the authors.

- Editorial Board Members are welcome to submit papers to the journal. These submissions are not given any priority over other manuscripts, and Editorial Board Member status has no bearing on editorial consideration. When an Editorial Board Member is an author on a submission, they will have no involvement in the editorial review of the manuscript, no access to confidential information on the editorial process, and no input into the decision to publish the article.

Peer Review Procedures
All manuscripts submitted to APB are subject to rigorous review. This review consists of the following steps:
a) Initial submissions are reviewed by internal staff to ensure adherence to policies of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, including ethical requirements for human and animal experimentation.
b) Submissions are then assigned to an Editor for evaluation.
c) The Academic Editor decides whether reviews from additional experts are needed to evaluate the manuscript. The majority of submissions are evaluated by three external reviewers, but it is up to the Editor to determine the number of reviews required.
d) After evaluation, the Editor chooses between the following decisions:

1. Accept
2. Minor Revision
3. Major Revision
4. Reject

e) If the decision is Minor Revision or Major Revision, authors have 30 days to resubmit the revised manuscript. Authors may contact the journal office by email if they require an extension.
f) Upon resubmission, the Editor may choose to send the manuscript back to external reviewers or may render a decision based on personal expertise.

Peer Review and Acceptance for In-house submissions
In-house submissions, i.e. papers authored by Editors or Editorial Board members of the title, will be sent to Editors unaffiliated with the author or institution and monitored carefully to ensure there is no peer review bias. After receipt of a manuscript by the Editor-in-Chief, it may be sent to an Associate Editor who sends the manuscript to an appropriate number of reviewers (usually two, depending on the type of manuscript). Editors may ask for suggested reviewer names from an Editorial Board Member. Comments from reviewers are examined by the Editor-in-Chief and/or Associate Editors, who make the final decisions. Rebuttals should be addressed to the Editor-in-Chief at the email address provided on the journals’ website.

Permissions
It is the author’s responsibility to secure all permissions prior to publication.

Material from other sources
Any written or illustrative material that has been or will be published elsewhere must be duly acknowledged and accompanied by the written consent of the copyright holder (this may be the publisher rather than the author). This includes your own previously published material if you are not the copyright holder.

Reproducing materials published by APB
Materials published by APB may be reproduced in full or part in any medium or language only on the condition that the original material is cited properly.

Publication frequency
Quarterly. APB is published four times a year.

Fees, Copyright and Licensing
Publication Fees
All “open access” journals (including APB) published by Tabriz University of Medical Sciences are sponsored by Tabriz University of Medical Sciences Department of Vice-Chancellor for Research. Therefore, there are no publication fees for the authors at the moment.

Open Access Agreement

APB is a Platinum Open Access journal and provides immediate open access to the content published in the journal, on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

The authors are required to grant TUOMS PRESS and the journal an exclusive license for open access publication of their article with a Creative Commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited. The authors of the articles retain the copyright to their work.

The authors are not required to pay a submission fee or article processing/publication charge for open access publication of their work, as TUOMS PRESS is funded by Tabriz University of Medical Sciences.

Advertising

TUOMS PRESS does not consider advertisements in its collection of scholarly journals, including APB.

Complaints policy

Any complaint regarding our editorial policies or manuscripts handling should be directed to apb@tbzmed.ac.ir.

Note: In elaboration of this document, ideas from similar statements of other publishers have been used