Malpractice Statement

Publication ethics and malpractice statement 

University of Kurdistan Hawler Journal (UKHJ) supports high publication standards and takes all possible measures against publication malpractices. Measures are taken to ensure accurate, timely, fair, and ethical publication of scientific papers.

Our Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement are mainly based on the Code of Conduct and Best-Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors (Committee on Publication Ethics, COPE 2011 www.publicationethics.org).

The Board of Editors has developed clear guidelines for the publishing process.

Publishing process

  1. Manuscript submission.
  2. Editor assignment to the manuscript.
  3. The editorial initial decision on the manuscript.
  4. Assignment of reviewers.
  5. Reviewers’ agreement to peer review the manuscript.
  6. Reviewers report submission (manuscript acceptance with or without revisions, or manuscript rejection).
  7. Discussion of reviewers’ reports by the editorial team, further communication with the reviewers and authors if required, and making an informed final decision.
  8. The editor contacts the author with the decision.
  9. Authors can choose to transfer their manuscript to another journal.

Duties and expectations of editors, reviewers, authors, and publishers of the journal are set out below:

Responsibilities of Editors

The editor has to follow strict ethical principles in dealing with the manuscript. Editors make the initial and final decision of accepting a manuscript for publication in the journal. Editors also decide the priority of publication of submitted articles based on the need of readers and authors.

Editors need to ensure that all data are true, and are genuinely owned by the authors. All submitted manuscripts are treated as confidential documents. Information about the manuscript can be given only to the editorial advisers, reviewers, and publisher. Unpublished materials should not be used by the editor without the written permission of the author.

Editors should have no conflict of interest concerning articles they accept or reject. No race, nationality, religion, or gender should influence the editor’s evaluation of the manuscript. The publication of an article is done in a peer-reviewed process and the anonymity of reviewers and authors is preserved (double-blind process).

If a published paper proves inaccurate after a time, authors must collaborate with the editors to reach an appropriate decision. The decision is case-dependent, and it will be usually either withdrawing the paper or writing a clarification.

All publication decisions are made by the journal's Editors-in-Chief based on the reviewers' reports. Authors of papers that are not accepted are notified promptly.

Responsibilities of Authors

The authors’ manuscript/work should guarantee full originality, accuracy, objectivity, and reproducibility.

Research data

All data should be represented accurately in the paper, there should be no data fabrication (made up data) and data falsification (changing and manipulating some of the data).

Upon request from the editors and if practicable; raw data must be provided when submitting the manuscript. Also, if practicable, the author should be prepared to provide public access to such data (consistent with the ALPSP-STM Statement on Data and Databases).

If authors discover errors or inaccurate data in their manuscript, they should inform the editor and collaborate with them to reach an appropriate decision. Authors also agree to cooperate with any inquiry or investigation initiated by the journal, institution, regulatory agency, and/or funding body into an allegation of research misconduct involving a manuscript.

Multiple publications

Manuscripts that have been published in other journals (multiple submission), or publishing many very similar manuscripts based on the same experiment (redundant publications or 'salami' publications), will not be considered for publication in this journal. Elsewhere published or presented work must be stated by the author when submitting the manuscript. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable.

The authors have the right to present the articles at conferences or congresses, providing that they indicate it in their covering letter to editors. In general, conference proceedings that publish only abstracts are considered acceptable.  If the conference publication has published the whole paper, then the authors are required to submit a significant change (about 30% extra information and changes, including the title) of the conference paper.

Authorship of the Paper

Persons who have made a significant contribution to the conception, plan, carrying out, or analysis of the reported study, should be listed as co-authors. Those who have participated in a limited manner should be acknowledged or listed as contributors.

The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors are listed and that they have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.

Inappropriate authorship credit should be avoided. This includes “ghostwriting” - when a person significantly contributes to the publication for another person who is named as or presumed to be the author, without disclosing this contribution, or not being acknowledged in the publication); and ”guest authorship”, i.e. honorary authorship (the granting of authorship status to individuals who have made little, if any, contribution to the article). Guest authorship is a violation of academic integrity standards, it undermines the credibility and scientific independence of the author. 

Human Research

When reporting a study that involves human participants or any form of human data, authors must declare that the investigations were carried out following the rules of the Declaration of Helsinki of 1975 (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/), revised in 2013. Also, a statement identifying the ethics committee that approved the study is required, included in the Methods section.

The journal requires that clinical trials are prospectively registered in a database, and clinical trial registration numbers to be included.

All participants should give their informed consent before their inclusion in the study.                      

Participant’s identity should not be revealed in any way. In exceptional cases were participants’ identity may be entirely or partially revealed should be only after obtaining their informed written consent from the author. If authors think that informed consent is not necessary, they need to justify it. A consent, permission, or release form should include unlimited permission for publication in all formats.

To respect patients’ and any other individual’s privacy, please do not send signed forms, unless deemed necessary by the editors.

Editors reserve the right to reject any submission that does not meet these requirements.

Animal Research

For research conducted on animals, appropriate approval should have been obtained from an institutional review board or ethics committee before conducting the research. Authors must provide an ethics statement as part of their Methods section in full details (including the name of the granting organization, and the approval reference numbers, and all detailed information on the animals used).

Authors must make a state that experiments were performed in a manner avoiding or minimizing discomfort or pain to the used animals, and that, when possible, to have avoided the use of laboratory animals altogether. They must ensure also that all experiments on animals should have been carried out following the International Guiding Principles for Biomedical Research Involving Animals, as revised by the International Council for Laboratory Animal Science (ICLAS) and the Councils for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) in 2012, and the 'Animal Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments' (ARRIVE) guidelines, developed by The National Center for the Replacement, Refinement, and Reductions of Animals in Research (NC3Rs).

Editors reserve the right to reject any submission that does not meet these requirements.

Acknowledgment

All work of other authors should be cited or quoted. Financial support when relevant and all due acknowledgments should be stated. Also, any type of conflict of interest that might influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript should be stated by the author.

Copyright

Articles are published after the authors’ agreement to transfer all copyrights to UKH Journal.

Responsibilities of Reviewers

Papers will be refereed by at least two experts suggested by the editorial board. The journal peer review process is a "double-blind peer review". Reviewers assist the editor in making editorial decisions, and through the editor assist the author to improve the paper. Additional reviews will be sought when needed, and authors will be informed of it.

The reviewers have to be objective, and all criticism of the paper should be based on a solid argument. Reviewers should have no collaborative, competitive, or other relations or connections with the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.

The reviewers must evaluate the manuscript for originality, and to inspect its content from the scientific and the logical point of views, for intact data, strong research methods, reasonable results, and solid arguments in discussing the results.

Reviewers have to identify all forms of similarity in the data and/or writing the manuscript with other published papers. Simultaneous submissions of the same manuscript to different journals will not be tolerated.

Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept strictly confidential and not used for personal advantage. In the case of unpublished materials, this should not be used by the reviewer in any way without the written permission of the author. Privileged information or ideas that are obtained through peer review must not be used for competitive gain.

Note: UKHJSE is a member of CrossRef and CrossRef services, e.g., CrossCheck. All manuscripts submitted will be checked for plagiarism (copying text or results from other sources) and self-plagiarism (duplicating substantial parts of authors' published work without giving the appropriate references) using the CrossCheck database. Plagiarism is not tolerated.

For more information about CrossCheck/iThenticate, please visit http://www.crossref.org/crosscheck.html.

Responsibilities of Publisher

Once published all versions of the papers will remain available. Papers are posted on the website of the Journal (Archive) within a short period of the paper publication. The Journal has adopted the DOI (digital object identifier) system to enable accurate citation and stable online availability of published articles.