Publication Ethics And Publication Malpractice Statement

IJPNS believes in following the highest standards of moral and ethical practices in publishing the articles and follows the COPE Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors and the Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers. It is expected that the Editorial Board, the reviewers and the authors shall abide by the best-practices in fulfilling their responsibilities.

Duties of Editors

Impartiality and independence

Editors are expected to evaluate the submitted manuscript solely in the basis of originality and quality of the work and must give highest priority to the merit of the article, the scientific issue addressed and the validity of the study results. It is also a responsibility of the editors to decide whether the article is relevant to IJPNS and fall under the aims and scope of this journal. The Editors and the Editorial Board shall in unbiased manner and not to be influenced by authors’ religion, nationality, political or institutional affiliations, and ethnic origin while accepting or rejecting any manuscript. The Editorial Board shall act independently of any political or government influence and must take independent decisions with regard to publishing the articles or content in this journal.

Confidentiality

The manuscripts and the content reviewed by the editors shall remain confidential and must not be disclosed to any other third party except the reviewers and advisers to the Editorial Board. The supplementary information submitted along with the original manuscript shall be treated at par with the original data and hence shall not be revealed or disclosed prior to the publication of the original manuscript.

Conflict of interest

It is expected that any editorial board member will not use any unpublished data to carry out research and all the research findings or novel mechanisms or ideas or hypothesis discusses in the manuscript will be kept confidential till it gets published. All the members of the Editorial board shall refrain from considering research papers in which they either have collaborative or competitive interests. In such cases, other editorial board members must take the decision regarding the manuscript.

Publication decisions

The Editors must ensure that the submitted manuscript must be reviewed by at least two subject experts and the final decision to accept or reject the manuscript after the peer-review process shall lies with the Editor-in-Chief. It is expected that the decision of the Editor-in-Chief will be impartial and the decision will be solely on the basis of merit of the article. He may seek advice of other editorial board members in while making the final decision.

Involvement and cooperation in investigations

The Editors will take part in investigations or other responsive measures in cases where an unethical practice has been reported to the Editorial Board. After such investigations, if the complain is found true, the Editorial Board shall take appropriate actions such as retraction, correction, or any other appropriate measures to restore the credibility of this journal. All such actions will be published in the journal at an early date of completion of such inquiry.

Duties of Reviewers

Contribution to editorial decisions

Peer-review process is at the centre of publishing quality scientific research and helps in advancement of science by improving the quality of research and preventing publication of spurious and fake scientific data. IJPNS has stringent peer-review policy where every submitted manuscript is reviewed by at least two field experts. The reviewers shall help the Editorial Board in deciding the quality of the research article via a stringent peer-review process. It is expected that reviewers shall act promptly and complete the peer-review process in a time-bound manner. In case of non-availability, a reviewer must inform the Editor which helps the Editor in finding other suitable reviewer without delaying the process of peer-review. Reviewers must not criticize the authors personally and the focused must be on improving the quality of the manuscript  by providing constructive suggestions.

Confidentiality

The reviewers shall keep the scientific data, ideas or any other scientific advancement reported in the manuscript highly confidential and shall not discuss them with other field experts, or present them in any scientific conference or try to replicate in the lab of reviewer (s) or his/her collaborators.

Duties of Authors

Reporting standards

Authors should report accurate and authenticate information and must follow all the moral and ethical practices while reporting the data to this journal. The methodology part of the manuscript must be sufficient to replicate the data in other laboratories across the globe. In some cases, the Editorial Board can ask the raw data during the peer-review process and the authors are expected to furnish the requested information at the earliest for a timely completion of the review process. Authors must ensure that they have provided appropriate ethical approval numbers for their animal experiments or human clinical trials. In case of human trials, a proper consent has been taken from all the participants.

 

Originality and plagiarism

Authors must ensure that the submitted manuscripts are free of any plagiarism and duplication and the work has not been submitted simultaneously to any other journal. Authors must give due credit to other collaborators while submitting the manuscript in the form of authorship or acknowledgment depending on the degree of involvement of the collaborators. However, they should not give authorships to undeserving researchers. The authorship is limited to individuals who have contributed significantly while designing or performing the experiments, writing or editing the manuscript, or have provided any intellectual input essential for the successful completion of the study.  Submitting other researcher’s work as own work will be taken very seriously and reported to the parent institution.

Disclosure and conflicts of interest

Authors ensure that they have disclosed any possible conflict of interest while submitting the manuscript. A conflict of interest is a situation in which the interpretation or reporting of the data is influenced by funding source or affiliation with any particular institution or person. Some of the possible conflict of interest situations are funding from pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies to carry out “Drug-Efficacy” trails, use of patented invention in the study, shareholding in funding companies, financing of conference (travel grants) etc.

Acknowledgement

The corresponding author must ensure that the funding source (s), government or private fellowships provided to doctoral or post-doctoral students or any other help received from other subject experts, specific research facilities, individuals who helped in successful completion of the study.