Publication Ethics
Authorship
The Editors of FJJM expect each author to have 1) made an important contribution to the conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data in the study; 2) critically drafted or revised the manuscript for intellectual content; and 3) approved the final version of the submitted manuscript. Only those who meet all three criteria should be included as authors. Those who do not meet all three criteria should not be included as authors. The Editors also expect each author to 1) take responsibility for at least one component of the work; 2) have access to the raw data and figure files for his/her component of the work; 3) be able to identify who is responsible for each other component; and 4) be confident in their co-authors' ability and integrity. One author, usually the corresponding author, must be thoroughly familiar with the original data for the entire study and be responsible for the integrity of the entire work. If the paper, or part of the paper, is found to be faulty or fraudulent, all co-authors may share in correspondence responsibilities.
The Authorship and Transfer of Copyright Form should be signed by each author. The revision process will be delayed if The Editors do not receive this form at the time of submission. An author’s name can be removed only at his/her request, but all coauthors must sign a Change of Authorship Form for any change in authorship (additions, removals, or change of order) that will be made
Author Conflict of Interest
All funding sources supporting the work and all institutional or corporate affiliations must be disclosed in the manuscript. Authors of research articles are required to disclose to the Editors of FJJM any potential conflict of interest, financial or otherwise, at the time of submission.
Editor and Reviewer Conflict of Interest
Editors and Reviewers should avoid making decisions on papers for which they may have a potential conflict of interest, financial or otherwise. Reviewers who are collaborating with the author, or who are working on very similar research, should recuse themselves from reviewing a paper for which they have a conflict. An Editor-in-Chief should ask other Editors, or an Associate Editor, to make a decision on a paper for which he or she has a conflict. When an Editor-in-Chief submits a paper to FJJM, the paper is automatically assigned to a Guest Editor or an Associate Editor, who will handle all aspects of the peer review of the paper.
Duplicate Publication, Plagiarism, Falsification
FJJM only accepts papers that are original work, no part of which has been published elsewhere except in the form of brief abstracts in any language. When submitting a paper, the corresponding author should include copies of related manuscripts submitted or in press elsewhere along with a cover letter. Taking material from another’s work and submitting it as one’s own is considered plagiarism. Taking material (including tables, figures and data, or extended text passages) from the authors’ own prior publications is considered duplicate publication or self-plagiarism and is not permitted. Fabricating a report of research or suppressing or altering data to agree with one's conclusions is considered fraud; this includes altering figures in such a way as to obscure, move, remove, or introduce information or features.
Ethical Procedure
FJJM Reviewers have a responsibility to report suspected duplicate publication, fraud, plagiarism, or concerns about animal or human experimentation to the editors. A Reviewer may recognize and report that he/she is refereeing, or has recently refereed, a similar or identical paper for another journal by the same author(s). Readers may report that they have observed the same article elsewhere, or authors may report that they have seen their own published work being plagiarized. In all cases, we diligently address ethical concerns by following an issue-specific standard practice as summarized below.
The first action of the journal Editor is to supply copies of 1) the relevant material and 2) a draft letter to the corresponding author asking for an explanation in a nonjudgmental manner. The Editor-in-Chief must approve any such correspondence before it is sent to the author. If the author’s explanation is unacceptable, and if it seems that serious unethical conduct has taken place, the matter is referred to the Editor-in-Chief. After deliberation, the Editor-in-Chief will decide whether the case is sufficiently serious to warrant a ban on future submissions to and on serving as a reviewer for FJJM and/or whether the offending author’s institution should be informed. The decision has to be approved by the Editor-in-Chief of the FJJM Council, and the author has the right to appeal a sanction, with the opportunity to present his/her position, to the Editor-in-Chief and the full FJJM Council.
If the infraction is less severe, the Editor, upon the advice of the Editor-in-Chief, sends the author a letter of reprimand and reminds the author of FJJM publication policies; if the manuscript has been published, the Editor may require the author to publish an apology in the journal to correct the record. If, through the author’s actions, FJJM has violated the copyright of another journal, the Editor-in-Chief writes a letter of apology to the other journal.
In serious cases of fraud that result in retraction of the article, a retraction notice will be published in the journal and will be linked to the article in the online version. The online version will also be marked “retracted” with the retraction date.
Research Involving Animals and Human Beings
The research described in papers submitted to FJJM that involves the use of human beings, including healthy volunteers, should be conducted according to high standards of safety and ethics. We expect that all studies adhere to the requirements of the U.S. Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects (45 C.F.R., Part 46) and support the general ethical principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. In particular, protocols involving human subject studies must be reviewed and approved by a research ethics committee (IRB) prior to starting the study, participants must provide written informed consent. These two statements must be affirmed in the Materials and Methods section of the manuscript. The approval number of the IRB document must be reported in the Materials and Methods section of the manuscript.
Research involving animals must adhere to the guiding principles for the care and use of vertebrate animals in research and training, and a statement of protocol approval number by the institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC) or equivalent must be included in the Materials and Methods section of the paper. The description of animal procedures in the manuscript should be sufficient to permit readers to evaluate the quality of the data presented and to replicate the experiments, if needed. Studies involving surgeries or other painful procedures must include an explanation of steps taken to mitigate pain and distress, including the types and dosage of anesthetics and post-operative analgesics that were used. Curarizing agents are not anesthetics; if these were used, evidence must be provided that anesthesia of suitable grade and duration was employed. Authors must review guidelines provided by the Institute for Laboratory Animal Research (National Academy of Sciences), entitled Guidance for the Description of Animal Research in Scientific Publications, and those of the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research, entitled Animals in Research: In Vivo Experiments, for additional guidance to determine what items are relevant to their study.
Editors/Associate Editors reserve the right to judge the appropriateness of the use of animals and humans in experiments submitted for publication and will refuse papers in which evidence of the adherence to these principles is not apparent.