Policies

Publication Ethics & Policies

The International Journal of Biotechnology and Biomedicine (IJBB) expects all authors to adhere to ethical requirements in the preparation of their manuscripts. The Journal follows publication ethics that ensure the integrity of scientific publishing and confidence in published articles.

The corresponding author should confirm that the content of the manuscript or a major portion of the article has not been published previously in a refereed journal, and it is not being submitted fully or partially for publication elsewhere. They should notify that manuscript has been read and agreed upon by all listed authors.

After publication, the corresponding author should sign the Copyright Transfer Agreement Form which is included the following items:

A) Copyright

 1- The Author and each co-author shall transfer and sell to the Publisher for the length of the copyright starting from the moment the present Agreement comes into force the exclusive rights to the Materials, including the rights to translate, reproduce, transfer, distribute or otherwise use the Materials or parts (fragments) contained therein, for publication in scientific, academic, technical or professional journals or other periodicals and in other derivative works, worldwide, in English, in print or in electronic editions of such journals, periodicals and derivative works in all media or formats now existing or that may exist in future, as well as the right to license (or give permission to) third parties to use the Materials for publication in such journals, periodicals and derivative works worldwide. The transfer under this Agreement includes the right to adapt the presentation of the materials for use in conjunction with computer systems and programs, reproduction or publication in machine-readable format and incorporation into retrieval systems.

 2- Reproduction, placement, transfer or any other distribution or use of the materials, or any parts of the Materials contained therein, in any way permitted under this Agreement, shall be accompanied by a reference to the Journal and mention of the Publisher, namely: the title of the article, the name of the Author (Co-authors), the name of the Journal, volume/number, copyright of the publisher.

B) Reserved Rights

The Author (Co-authors) or the employer of the Author (Co-authors) of the materials shall retain all proprietary rights (except for the rights transferred to the Publisher under the present Agreement).

C) Author Guarantee

The Author (Co-authors) guarantees that the materials are original work, submitted only to IJBB, and have not been published previously.

In case the materials were written jointly with Co-authors, the corresponding Author guarantees that he/she has informed them of the terms of this Agreement and obtained their signatures or written permission to sign on their behalf.

 The Author guarantees as well that:

The Materials do not contain defamatory statements.

The Materials do not infringe on other person's rights (including without limitation copyrights, patent rights and the trademark right).

The Materials do not contain facts or instructions that can cause damage or injury to third parties and their publication does not cause the disclosure of any secret or confidential information.

Editorial Policies

The Journal aims to publish the best papers worldwide and to serve as a forum for discussion, career paths, and future trends. Submissions may cover a wide range of topics in health sciences but should always relate to the advancement in the field. The Journal encourages submissions relating to new technologies, findings and future trends. Papers submitted to the peer-reviewed section of the journal should advance the existing literature with original ideas or original research.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public support for a greater global exchange of knowledge. The Full Text of all published articles is Free and Open Accessible. All are linked with Google Scholar.

Creative Commons

All articles published by Academic Journals are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This permits anyone to copy, redistribute, remix, transmit and adapt the work provided the original work and source are appropriately cited.

Publication Ethics

The journal expects all authors to adhere to ethical requirements in the preparation of their manuscripts. The Journal is in compliance with publication ethics that ensure the integrity of scientific publishing and confidence in published articles.

Plagiarism Policies

This journal considers plagiarism as a serious offense. This journal uses the Turnitin Similarity detection application to check each manuscript for possible cases of plagiarism. A plagiarism check is the first step in the manuscript review process. Manuscripts that are found to contain undesirable levels of similarity with other published works are immediately rejected. Submitted manuscripts should be the original works of the author(s). Any instance of content overlap is further scrutinized for suspected plagiarism according to the publisher’s Editorial Policies. MJN allows an overall similarity of 20% for a manuscript to be considered for publication.

Types of Plagiarism

We all know that scholarly manuscripts are written after a thorough review of previously published articles. It is therefore not easy to draw a clear boundary between legitimate representation and plagiarism.

However, the following important features can assist in identifying different kinds of plagiarized content. These are:

• Reproduction of other words, sentences, ideas, or findings as one’s own without proper acknowledgment.
• Text recycling, also known as self-plagiarism. It is an author’s use of a previous publication in another paper without proper citation and acknowledgment of the original source.
• Poor paraphrasing: Copying complete paragraphs and modifying a few words without changing the structure of original sentences or changing the sentence structure but not the words.
• Verbatim copying of text without putting quotation marks and not acknowledging the work of the original author.
• Properly citing a work but poorly paraphrasing the original text is considered as unintentional plagiarism. Similarly, manuscripts with language somewhere between paraphrasing and quoting are not acceptable. Authors should either paraphrase properly or quote and cite the original source in both cases.
• Higher similarity in the abstract, introduction, materials and methods, and discussion and conclusion sections indicates that the manuscript may contain plagiarized text. Authors can easily explain these parts of the manuscript in many ways. However, technical terms and sometimes standard procedures cannot be rephrased; therefore, Editors must review these sections carefully before making a decision.

Plagiarism in Published Manuscripts:

Published manuscripts that are found to contain plagiarized text are retracted from the journal’s website after careful investigation and approval by the Editor-in-Chief of the journal.

Fabricating and Stating False Information:

To ensure the scholarly integrity of every article, IJBB will publish post-publication notices. The authors of the published articles, or those who have submitted the manuscripts with false information, or fabricated the supporting data or images, will be liable for sanctions, and their papers will be retracted.

Waiver Policy:

The generous waiver system of the Journal has an easy payment of the manuscript handling fee when researchers choose to publish their manuscripts in our journal.  Our primary goal is to accelerate the propagation of knowledge through the publication of high-quality research articles. We are continually pursuing this goal, without putting undue financial burden on researchers or their institutions.

Archiving Policies:

The Journal follows PKP Preservation Network (PN). The LOCKSS program offers decentralized and distributed preservation, seamless perpetual access, and preservation of the authentic original version of the content. The Journal allows PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN) to digitally preserve OJS journals. All articles published by the Journal are committed to the long-term preservation of its content.

Human and Animal Rights:

All research must have been carried out within an appropriate ethical framework. If there is doubt that work has not taken place within an appropriate ethical framework, Editors may reject the manuscript, and/or contact the author(s)’ ethics committee. The manuscript may be rejected on ethical grounds, even if approval from an ethics committee has been obtained.

Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee.

The submitted study must be supported by the ethics/bioethics committee's approval.

Authors reporting the use of a new procedure or tool in a clinical setting, for example as a technical advance or case report, must give a clear justification in the manuscript for why the new procedure or tool was considered more appropriate than usual clinical practice to meet the patient’s clinical need. Such justification is not required if the new procedure is already approved for clinical use at the authors’ institution.

Authors will be expected to have obtained ethics committee approval and informed patient consent for any experimental use of a novel procedure or tool where a clear clinical advantage based on clinical need was not apparent before treatment.

Informed Consent:

Details of individuals and images related to participants are not allowed.

Experimental research on vertebrates or any regulated invertebrates must follow institutional, national, or international guidelines, and must be approved by an appropriate ethics committee.

A statement detailing compliance with relevant guidelines and/or ethical approval (including the name of the ethics committee and the reference number where appropriate) must be included in the manuscript. The Editor will take into account the animal welfare issues and reserves the right to reject a manuscript, especially if the research involves protocols that are inconsistent with commonly accepted norms of animal research. In rare cases, Editors may contact the ethics committee for further information.

Field studies and other non-experimental research on animals must comply with institutional, national, or international guidelines, and where available should have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. A statement detailing compliance with relevant guidelines and/or appropriate permissions or licenses must be included in the manuscript.

Article Withdrawal:

Only used for Articles in Press which represent early versions of articles and sometimes contain errors, or may have been accidentally submitted twice. Occasionally, but less frequently, the articles may represent infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, or the like. Articles in Press (articles that have been accepted for publication but which have not been formally published and will not yet have the complete volume/issue/page information) that include errors, or are discovered to be accidental duplicates of other published articles (s), or are determined to violate our journal publishing ethics guidelines in the view of the editors (such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like), maybe “Withdrawn” from the Journal. Withdrawn means that the article content (HTML and PDF) is removed and replaced with an HTML page and PDF simply stating that the article has been withdrawn according to the Malaysian Journal of Nursing Policy on Article in Press Withdrawal with a link to the current policy document.

Article Retraction: 

Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, false claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like. Occasionally a retraction will be used to correct errors in submission or publication. The retraction of an article by its authors or the editor under the advice of members of the scholarly community has long been an occasional feature of the learned world. Standards for dealing with retractions will be adopted for article retraction by The Malaysian Journal of Nursing.

Article Removal (legal limitations):

In an extremely limited number of cases, removing an article from the online database may be necessary. This will only occur where the article is clearly defamatory or infringes others’ legal rights, or where the article is, or we have good reason to expect it will be, the subject of a court order, or where the article, if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk. In these circumstances, while the metadata (Title and Authors) will be retained, the text will be replaced.

Article Replacement: 

In cases where the article, if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk, the authors of the original article may wish to retract the flawed original and replace it with a corrected version. In these circumstances, the procedures for retraction will be followed.

Conflict of Interest 

Journal submissions are assigned to editors in an effort to minimize potential conflicts of interest. The following relationships between editors and authors are considered conflicts and are avoided: Current colleagues, recent colleagues, recent co-authors, and doctoral students for which the editor served as committee chair. After papers are assigned, individual editors are required to inform the managing editor of any conflicts not included in the list above. In the event that none of the editors satisfy all of the conflict screens, co-editors who are least conflicted will be assigned to the manuscript. In addition, co-editors who are least conflicted are assigned to all paper submissions by sitting editors. Journal submissions are also assigned to referees to minimize conflicts of interest. After papers are assigned, referees are asked to inform the editor of any conflicts that may exist.

Authors: 

When they submit a manuscript as an article authors are responsible for recognizing and disclosing financial and other conflicts of interest that might bias their work. They should acknowledge in the manuscript all financial support for the work and other financial or personal connections to the work.

Reviewers: 

External peer reviewers should disclose to editors any conflicts of interest that could bias their opinions of the manuscript, and they should disqualify themselves from reviewing specific manuscripts if they believe it appropriate. The editors must be made aware of reviewers’ conflicts of interest to interpret the reviews and judge for themselves whether the reviewer should be disqualified. Reviewers should not use knowledge of the work, before its publication, to further their own interests.

NB: Completion and signing the Copyright Transfer Agreement Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest is necessary for all authors and the articles submission won’t be accepted without filling this form.

Research data:

Data sharing enables others to reuse the results of experiments and supports the creation of new science that is built on previous findings, making the research process more efficient.  Data sharing also supports transparency and reproducibility, building trust in science. The Malaysian Journal of Nursing is playing a key role in supporting researchers who want to store, share, discover and reuse data and we are committed to working with other stakeholders to address challenges in making data more effective. Although much research data is disseminated as part of journal articles, a host of other data is not made available through article publication. This policy concerns research data that often underlies, but exists outside of research articles. Publishers can help make this hidden data discoverable and our research data policy provides the framework for our support and engagement in this important area. The precise notion of what constitutes research data will differ from field to field but broadly speaking it refers to the result of observations or experimentations that validate research findings and which are not already published as part of a journal article. Research data can include but are not limited to raw data, processed data, software, algorithms, protocols, methods, and materials.

Principles: The following principles underpin The International Journal of Biotechnology and Biomedicine (IJBB) research data policy:

• Research data should be made available free of charge to all researchers wherever possible and with minimal reuse restrictions.
• Researchers should remain in control of how and when their research data is accessed and used and should be recognized and valued for their investments in creating and making their research data available.
• Expectations and practices around research data vary between disciplines and discipline-specific requirements need to be taken into account.
• Enabling effective reuse of research data is a shared aim and all stakeholders should work together to pursue this collectively, to find efficiencies and avoid duplication of effort.
• Platforms, publications, tools and curation services can enhance research data by improving their discoverability, use, reuse, and citation.
• Where others add value and/or incur significant costs in enhancing research data to enable its reuse, these contributions need to be recognized and valued.

Concurrent Publication/Simultaneous Submission:

It is a condition of publication that manuscripts submitted to this journal have not been published and will not be simultaneously submitted or published elsewhere. Plagiarism is strictly forbidden, and by submitting the article for publication the authors agree that the publishers have the legal right to take appropriate action against the authors if plagiarism or fabricated information is discovered.

Abstracts and posters of conferences, results presented at meetings (for example, to inform investigators or participants about findings), results databases (data without interpretation, discussion, context or conclusions in the form of tables and text to describe data/information where this is not easily presented in tabular form) are not considered prior publication.

Authors who wish to publish translations of the articles that have been published elsewhere should ensure that they have appropriate permission(s), indicate clearly that the material has been translated and re-published, and indicate clearly the original source of the material. The Editor-in-Chief may request copies of related publications if he/she is concerned about overlap and possible redundancy.