Publishing Ethics
Ethical aspects, confidentiality and plagiarism
Ethics in scientific publishing
When the publication involves contact with human beings, especially during experiments, it must be indicated if procedures were done according to the Ethical Committee standards approving the scientific work. Besides, the scientific work should be in agreement to the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, revised by the 59th General Assembly of the World Medical Association at Seoul, Korea, October 2008, available at http://www.wma.net/s/policy/pdf/17c.pdf. The informed consent and the name of the ethical committee approving the study must be stated in the methodology section, and in the case of clinical trials, the register number must be indicated.
Patients' names, initials or hospital numbers must not be used at any time. In case of using pictures of patients, a consent letter for publication should be included.
In case of animal experiments, report that you have followed local regulations established to protect these animals.
Please, follow the guidelines suggested by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) published as "Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals". They are also available at http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/. The Spanish version may be found at http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/translations/.
Authorship
An author is the person who has made a significant intellectual contribution to the study.
The International Committee of Biomedical Journal Editors (IMJE) in its review updated in December 2019, recommends that “authorship be based on the following 4 criteria:
1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the word; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
3. Final approval of the version to be published; AND
4. Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy of integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work he or she has done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific parts of the work. In addition, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co-authors. All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria forauthorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. Those who do not meet all four criteria should be acknowledged”.
For more information, you may consult the ICMJE website, available from: http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf
Confidentiality
Manuscripts received and evaluated no matter if they are accepted or rejected, they will be handled as confidential material: the editor and the publishing group will not share information from them, or about their receipt and evaluation, content or status of the review process, criticism of evaluators and their final destination to anyone other than the authors and reviewers. Requests for third parties to use the manuscripts and to review legal procedures should be politely rejected.
During the process of external peer review, they will be asked to handle the submitted material as confidential, that it must not be discussed in public, do not appropriate from the ideas of the authors, and once presented its evaluation they are asked to destroy paper copies and eliminate electronic ones.
The manuscripts that are received, no matter if they are accepted or rejected along with their respective correspondence, they will be stored in a repository, this is done in order to comply with the instructions from PUBLINDEX Colombia.
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is one of the most common forms of misconduct in publications. It happens when one of the authors poses as own the work of others without permission, mention or appreciation. Plagiarism has different levels of severity and the journal’s editor conduct depends on it.
Regarding plagiarism, MedUNAB follows the recommendations of the Comitte on Publitation Ethics – COPE for different scenarios.
When plagiarism is suspected in newly submitted articles, MedUNAB follows this algorithm: https://publicationethics.org/files/plagiarism%20A.pdf
When plagiarism is suspected in published articles, MedUNAB will consider article retractation and follow this algorithm: https://publicationethics.org/files/plagiarism%20B.pdf
