Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
Policy on Authorship and Contributorship
Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the study in the manuscript. Authors should ensure all contributing co-authors are included in the manuscript.
Handle Complaints and Appeals
The Editors-in-Chief will form a committee (excluding the one who is handling the submission receiving the complaint) to handle the authors’ complaint and make decision. Further appeals will be referred to GCSCE for the final decision.
Handle Allegations of Research Misconduct
The journal takes seriously all allegations of potential misconduct. The journal will follow the COPE guidelines (https://publicationethics.org/misconduct) outlining how to deal with cases of suspected misconduct.
Policy on Conflicts of Interest
The authors need to declare all financial and non-financial competing interests. If it is not applicable, the authors need to make a statement such as “The authors declare that they have no competing interests” in the acknowledgement section of the article.
Policy on Data Sharing and Reproducibility
The authors need to detail where the data supporting the authors’ findings can be found. If authors do not wish to share their data, they need to state that data will not be shared, and state the reason. If it is not applicable, the authors need to indicate “Not applicable.”
Policy on Ethical Oversight
The authors need to provide a statement which details they received ethics approval for research involving human participants, human material, or human data – performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by an appropriate ethics committee. The statement should include the name of the ethics committee and the reference number where appropriate. If a study has been granted an exemption from requiring ethics approval, this should also be detailed in the manuscript (including the name of the ethics committee that granted the exemption).
Policy on Intellectual Property
The publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Options for Post-Publication Discussions
Post-publication discussions are allowed through letters to the editor.
Policy on Corrections and Retractions
Corrections to, or retractions of, published articles will be made by publishing a Correction or a Retraction note bidirectionally linked to the original article. Any alterations to the original article will be described in the note. The original article remains in the public domain and the subsequent Correction or Retraction will be indexed.
Policy for ensuring the integrity of the scholarly literature in their journals and outline their policies and procedures for handling such issues when they arise. These issues include plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication, among others
Any questions regarding the integrity of the scholarly literature (including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication) raised during or after the peer review process will be referred to the Editors-in-Chief. The Editors-in-Chief may request (anonymized) underlying study data from the authors for inspection or verification. If the original data cannot be produced, the manuscript may be rejected or, in the case of a published article, retracted. Cases of suspected misconduct will be reported to the authors’ institutions.