Research and Publishing Ethics

POLICY FOR ETHICAL OVERSIGHT

The journal follows the ethical guidelines and best practices set forth by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). All cases of ethical misconduct will be dealt with in accordance with COPE's recommendations and guidelines.

Ethics and Policies

The JEVTM follows guidelines and best practices published by professional organizations, including Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals by International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), and Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing  (joint statement by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), and Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA)). The Journal also follows the guidelines for medical scientific publications (Vancouver, Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals - URM - and The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors - ICMJE - regulations).

The Journal is committed to maintaining the highest level of integrity in the content published. The Journal has a conflict of interest policy in place and complies with international, national and/or institutional standards on research involving human and animal participants and informed consent. The Journal follows the COPE recommendations and subscribes to its principles on how to deal with acts of misconduct, thereby committing to investigate allegations of misconduct in order to ensure the integrity of research. The Journal uses ithenticate's Similarity Check, a service that screens submitted manuscripts for text overlap. If plagiarism is identified, the COPE guidelines on plagiarism will be followed.

Content published in the Journal is peer reviewed (double blind review process). For more information, please review our peer review policy.

Ethics Statement

All published material will include the following Ethics Statement:

All the authors named as such in the manuscript have agreed to authorship, read and approved the manuscript, and given consent for submission and subsequent publication of the manuscript.

The authors declare that they have read and abided by the JEVTM statement of ethical standards including rules of informed consent and ethical committee approval as stated in the article.

Detailed Ethical Guidelines

Maintaining the integrity of the research and its presentation is helped by following the rules of good scientific practice, which are outlined here:

  • The manuscript should not be submitted to more than one journal for simultaneous consideration.
  • The submitted work should be an original work. Please provide transparency on the re-use of material to avoid the concerns about text-recycling (“self-plagiarism”).
  • A single study should not be split up into several parts to increase the quantity of submissions and submitted to various journals or to one journal over time (i.e. “salami-slicing/publishing”).
  • Concurrent or secondary publication is sometimes justifiable, provided certain conditions are met. Examples include translations or a manuscript that is intended for a different group of readers.
  • Results should be presented clearly, honestly, and without fabrication, falsification, or inappropriate data manipulation (including image-based manipulation). Authors should adhere to discipline-specific rules for acquiring, selecting, and processing data.
  • No data, text, or theories by others should be presented as if they were the author’s own (“plagiarism”). Proper acknowledgements to other works must be given (this includes material that is closely copied (near verbatim), summarized and/or paraphrased), quotation marks (to indicate words taken from another source) must be used for verbatim copying of material, and permissions secured for material that is copyrighted.
  • Authors should avoid untrue statements about an entity (which can be an individual person or a company) or descriptions of their behavior or actions that could potentially be seen as personal attacks or allegations about that person.
  • Authors are strongly advised to ensure the author group, the Corresponding Author, and the order of authors are all correct at submission. Adding and/or deleting authors during the revision stages is generally not permitted, but in some cases may be warranted. Reasons for changes in authorship should be explained in detail. Please note that changes to authorship cannot be made after acceptance of a manuscript. 

PATIENT ANONYMITY AND INFORMED CONSENT POLICY

It is the authors’ responsibility to ensure that a patient's anonymity is protected, to verify that any experimental investigation with human subjects reported in the manuscript was performed with informed consent and follows all the guidelines for experimental investigation with human subjects required by the institution(s) with which all the authors are affiliated and/or ethical committee processing. Authors are asked to comply with the general guidelines for integrity protection, as listed by the health ministries in the EU, the EU commission, and US Department of Health (see, for example, https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/research/index.html).  Authors should mask patient's eyes as well as genital organs, as far as possible, and always remove patient names from figures.

Protection of Human Subjects & Animals in Research

For original articles in the Journal that report research involving animals, the corresponding author must confirm that all experiments were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations (i.e. IACUC guidelines and federal regulations, or EU guidelines for animal research). One recommended document for animal studies is the Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments (ARRIVE) reporting guidelines (PLoS Bio. 2010; 8(6), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000412). We encourage authors to follow the Replace, Refine, Reduce (RRR; 3R) principles of animal studies in medicine (https://www.feam.eu/wp-content/uploads/FEAM-Forum_Round-table-animals_Report_Final.pdf).

All studies of human subjects must contain a statement within the Methods section indicating approval of the study by an institutional review body (i.e. Institutional Review Board or ethical committee), and, if appropriate, a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all subjects if possible. If no legally informed consent can be obtained, such as in research carried out with human subjects receiving emergency treatment, authors should indicate when possible if a waiver of regulatory requirements for obtaining and documenting informed consent applies.

General Statement

Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information, including patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that a patient who is identifiable be shown the manuscript to be published.

Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve, however, an informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt. For example, masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate protection of anonymity. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, such as in genetic pedigrees, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning and editors should so note.

Ethical Approval and Informed Consent

Authors should include information about ethical approval and informed consent, such as “Ethical approval to report these cases was given by XXXXX. Written informed consent was obtained from XXXXX.”

Or, in cases where approval and consent were not provided, “Ethical approval was not required. Informed consent was not possible because XXXXX and the information has been anonymized or informed consent was not required.”

All submissions are screened for inappropriate image manipulation, plagiarism, duplicate publication, and other issues that violate research ethics. Depending on the outcome of these investigations, the Journal may decide to publish errata, or, in cases of serious scientific misconduct, ask authors to retract their paper or to impose retraction on them.

CLINICAL TRIALS

The journal follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) clinical trials registration guidelines and the World Health Organization's (WHO) definition of a clinical trial:

A clinical trial is any research study that prospectively assigns human participants or groups of humans to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects on health outcomes [...] Interventions include but are not restricted to drugs, cells and other biological products, surgical procedures, radiologic procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, process-of-care changes, preventive care, etc.

Clinical trials must be registered in a public trial registry at or before the onset of patient enrolment.  The clinical trial registry name, URL and registration number must be included in the manuscript under the method section. If the trial is registered in more than one location, please provide all relevant registry names and numbers. Prior disclosure of results on a clinical trial registry site will not affect consideration for publication.

Where trials were not publicly registered before participant recruitment began, authors must:

1)     Register all related clinical trials and confirm they have done so in the Methods section

2)     Explain in the Methods section the reason for failing to register before participant recruitment

We reserve the right to inform authors' institutions or ethics committees, and to reject the manuscript, if we become aware of unregistered trials.

AUTHORS' RESPONSIBILITIES

A submitted manuscript cannot be under consideration for publication in other journals. All authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes after the review process. The final responsibility for the scientific accuracy and validity of published manuscripts rests with the authors, not with the Journal, its editors, or the publisher (Örebro University Hospital).

Conflict of interest policy

The authors must indicate any conflict of interest or the lack thereof in terms of e.g. financial conflict of interest or editorial board association. For example, authors must disclose any commercial associations that might represent a conflict of interest with respect to the manuscript. If a company's product is mentioned in a manuscript, all authors are expected to declare whether they have a consulting or employment arrangement or a royalty or stock agreement with the company.

Furthermore, authors need to consistently disclose any membership to the editorial board of JEVTM in the conflicts of interest.

EDITORS' RESPONSIBILITIES

The Editors of the JEVTM have responsibilities toward the authors who provide the content of the Journal, the peer reviewers who comment on the suitability of manuscripts for publication, the Journal’s readers and the scientific community, the owners/publishers of the Journal, and the public as a whole.

REVIEWERS' RESPONSIBILITIES

Peer review assists editors in making editorial decisions and, through editorial communications with authors, may assist authors in improving their manuscripts. Peer review is an essential component of formal scholarly communication and lies at the heart of scientific endeavor.

Any invited referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should immediately notify the editors and decline the invitation to review so that alternative reviewers can be contacted.

Any manuscripts received for review are confidential documents and must be treated as such; they must not be shown to or discussed with others except if authorized by the Editor-in-Chief (who would only do so under exceptional and specific circumstances). This applies also to invited reviewers who decline the review invitation.

Reviews should be conducted objectively and observations formulated clearly with supporting arguments so that authors can use them for improving the manuscript. Personal criticism of the authors is inappropriate. Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors. Any statement that is an observation, derivation or argument that has been reported in previous publications should be accompanied by the relevant citation. A reviewer should also notify the editors of any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other manuscript (published or unpublished) of which they have personal knowledge.

Any invited referee who has conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies or institutions connected to the manuscript and the work described therein should immediately notify the editors to declare their conflicts of interest and decline the invitation to review so that alternative reviewers can be contacted.

Unpublished material disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in a reviewer’s own research without the express written consent of the authors. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for the reviewer’s personal advantage. This applies also to invited reviewers who decline the review invitation.

In an effort to standardize the review process for the Journal of Endovascular Resuscitation and Trauma Management, we ask all reviewers to use our checklist when reviewing a manuscript.