Authors’ responsibility
The authors of each manuscript are asked to confirm that:
1) They are responsible for all aspects of the work and ensure that any concerns regarding the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved;
2) They made a significant contribution to the work and approved the final version of the manuscript;
3) Their work complies with ethical standards;
4) They are accountable for all aspects of the work and have all required permissions to publish any results.
5) They have obtained all necessary permissions to publish any figures or tables in the manuscript, and assure that the authors will pay for Article Processing Charges (APC) if applicable.
Authorship criteria
We require authors to refer to the criteria recommended by ICMJE for defining authorship:
AND
AND
AND
All persons listed as writers must fulfil all four requirements for authorship, and everyone who does so should be acknowledged as such. Recognizing those who helped but did not fulfil all four requirements is appropriate. All parties that are eligible for acknowledgement should provide the corresponding author with written consent before acknowledgment is made.
Author contributions
Only original, review, systematic, and meta-analytic articles are needed to have this part. It explains what each author contributed to the manuscript. Authorship credit ought to be determined by:
1) Substantial contributions to the conception and design of the study, the acquisition of the data, or the analysis and interpretation of the data;
2) Drafting the article or critically revising it for important intellectual content; and
3) The final approval of the final version to be published.
Authors should meet all three of these conditions.
Note: the acquisition of funding, collection of data, language editing, or general supervision of the research group alone do not constitute authorship.
The ‘Author contributions’ section should be presented as follows:
(I) Conception and design:
(II) Administrative support:
(III) Provision of study materials or patients:
(IV) Collection and assembly of data:
(V) Data analysis and interpretation:
(VI) Manuscript writing: All authors
(VII) Final approval of manuscript: All authors
Note: 1. With VI and VII, “All authors” is obligatory, while the other credits are case-based; 2. The ‘Author contributions’ section is not required when there is only one author.
Changes to authorship or contributor ship
All writers must give their consent before changing the authors' names or roles after the initial submission. This holds true for any insertions, deletions, author order changes, or various ways of attributing contributions. Any modification must be justified to the Editor. Any author or contributor may be contacted by the Editor to see if they have approved of any changes.
When disagreements among authors arise, IARCON follows the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Flowcharts
Informed Consent Policy
Individuals' data and information must be treated with the utmost confidence and discretion (for instance, data collected through a doctor-patient relationship). Therefore, it is nearly always important for authors to have the patients depicted in case reports and individuals who are the subject of images to provide them their written informed consent. If a report satisfies all three of the following criteria, however—that it is of great significance to public health (or is significant in some other way); that consent would be unusually difficult to obtain; and that a reasonable person would be unlikely to object to publication—it may be published without explicit consent.
Conflicts of Interest
IARCON journals comply with the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)’s uniform requirements on Conflicts of Interest.
Conflicts of interest exist when an author (or the author’s institution), reviewer, editor, editorial board member has financial or personal relationships with other individuals or organizations that could inappropriately influence his or her actions in a way that creates bias. The existence of such a relationship does not necessarily represent a true conflict of interest. The potential for conflicts of interest can exist whether or not an individual believes that the relationship affects their judgment. Financial relationships (e.g., employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patents) are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and are most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and the scientific value of the research (http://www.icmje.org/index.html).
All authors will be asked to fill in the ICMJE’s unified disclosure form (the latest version).
Each author should submit a separate form and is responsible for the accuracy and completeness of the submitted information. The corresponding author should use the information in the form completed by each author to create the COI statement for the manuscript. The statement (but not the forms) must be included along with the submission. The statement should include the initials of the author along with the conflicts of interest. The following examples show the format in which the Conflicts of Interest statement should appear in the manuscript:
“Conflicts of Interest: All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form. The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.”
“Conflicts of Interest: All authors have completed the ICMJE uniform disclosure form. KSS and VS are former employees of Scanco Medical AG. NV is a current employee of Scanco Medical AG. The other authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.”
If the paper is accepted, the completed ICMJE’s unified disclosure forms will be required and will be published alongside the article.
Corrections and Retractions
The Process for Handling Cases Requiring Corrections, Retractions, and Editorial Expressions of Concern
The International Academic and Research Consortium makes sure that all of its journals are published in accordance with the Committee on Publication Ethics' (COPE) and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors' (ICMJE) recommendations for the conduct, reporting, editing, and publication of scholarly work in medical journals (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf).
All published or planned publications will have an academic record that is authentic, according to our goal. Whenever it is determined that a serious error, false statement, or skewed report has been published, it must be immediately and prominently rectified. An item should be retracted if a proper inquiry reveals it to be fake. Readers and indexing tools should be able to easily recognize the retraction.
Corrections
When the Editor-in-Chief feels it is acceptable to alert journal readers to a prior error and correct the error in the published article, errors in published papers may be identified in the form of a corrigendum or erratum. The erratum or corrigendum will be published as a new article in the journal and will reference the original work that was published.
Retractions
When an article contains serious mistakes that render the conclusions invalid, retraction requests are taken into consideration and published. Retractions are also issued when there is proof of publishing malpractice, such as plagiarism, publication in many places, or unethical research.
According to industry best practice and in accordance with COPE guidelines, IARCON implements the following procedure if a retraction is confirmed:
