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JAIMC POLICY

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• PUBLICATION ETHICS
  • Authorship criteria
  • Change in authorship process
  • Acknowledgement criteria
  • Statement of contribution
  • Corresponding author
  • Author deceased before publication
  • Copyright policy
  • Ethical approval policy
  • Conflict of interest
  • Disclosure of research funding
  • Retract of article policy
  • Appeal against rejected article
  • Clinical trials and systematic review
  • Reproduction of previously published work
  • Scientific misconduct
• PLAGIARISM POLICY
• PEER REVIEW POLICY
• OPEN ACCESS POLICY
  • Regular publication
  • Supplement issue policy
• DISTRIBUTION OF JOURNAL COPY
• COMPLAINT POLICY
• PUBLICATION CHARGES POLICY
• Advertisement Policy

PUBLICATION ETHICS

AUTHORSHIP CRITERIA

• Journal will consider a right to authorship ONLY when ALL of the four criteria are met according to ICMJE guidelines. These criteria are as follows:
  • Substantial participation in the research work with contribution to all stages of research namely the conception of the research work, the research design itself, or the data collection, data analysis following collection, or data interpretation following analysis, AND
  • Active contribution to the research manuscript during drafting or its critical revision with reference to importance of the intellectual content, AND
  • Active contribution / participation in the final copy of manuscript that is ready for publication, AND
  • Willingness to share responsibility for the whole research work to allow for investigation and resolution of integrity and accuracy of research work.
• Journal considers all forms of ghost, guest, and gift authorship to be unethical and will take a firm action against such practices.
• Ghost authorship refers to the practice of using a non-named author to write or prepare an article for publication; Ghost authors can be paid sponsors or external academic affiliates.
• Guest or gift authorship refers to the practice of naming an individual that made little or no contribution to a study as an author on an article. Gift authors can be senior researchers, affiliated researchers, friends or colleagues of the principle author.
• Where such practices are identified the authors in question will be removed from an article through a post-publication correction or erratum. In addition, the journal may choose to notify the institutional or local ethics committee for the authors in question.

CHANGES IN AUTHORSHIP

• The JAIMC does not allow addition, alteration or deletion in the list of authors which was submitted to the journal at the time of initial submission. OR
• Requests for changes to authorship must be directed to the Editor-in-Chief. Changes in authorship will only be permitted where valid reasons are provided and all authors are in agreement with the change. Post-publication changes to authorship will typically be made via a published correction.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT CRITERIA

Those who do not meet the criteria of authorship but helped in study must be included in acknowledgement section. Examples of such contributors include, but are not limited to:

• Those who helped acquire funds for research.
• Those who supervised the research but did not actively participate.
• Those who provided help in study design, reviewed the manuscript, assisted in write-up of manuscript, proofread it for the authors, provided editorial support for technical and language matters, etc.
• Colleagues who helped in finding cases for the research, assistance in laboratory procedures, etc.
• Statisticians who helped in the analysis of collected data by application of proper statistical tests

STATEMENT OF CONTRIBUTIONS

The manuscript submission policy of Journal requires that the original manuscript be accompanied by a description of individual contribution by each other at the time of initial submission. This should be mentioned in Author’s undertaking and contribution form.

CORRESPONDING AUTHOR

• Corresponding author refers to a nominated author who is available throughout the submission and peer review process and respond to editorial queries in a timely way.
• JAIMC will communicate with the author designated as corresponding author during the submission process.
• The corresponding author should provide a working email address that he or she checks regularly to be able to answer any queries from the editorial board regarding the manuscript throughout the submission and peer review process after initial submission and following publication of the article.

AUTHORS WHO HAVE DECEASED BEFORE PUBLICATION OF THE RESEARCH

• Journal should be notified about the death of authors who died before the research was published.
• The journal recommends use of a death dagger (†) immediately after the name of deceased author and the information about their death and date of death to be provided in footnote.

COPYRIGHT POLICY

• All authors are required to sign the copyright policy (which is in accordance with Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License) statement at the time of submission of manuscript.
• JAIMC allows authors to retain the copyright of their research work.

ETHICAL APPROVAL OF RESEARCH

• Every Manuscript should have ethical approval by ethical review board of the institution.
• For case reports, an approval on the institutional letterhead from the head of the department is required which should include a statement that participants gave informed consent before being included in the study or for publication of a case report.
• In conditions where no ethical approval was required for the study, a statement explaining the situation countersigned by the head of the department should be submitted to the JAIMC.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

• Conflict of interest is defined as “… when a participant in the publication process (author, peer reviewer, or editor) has a competing interest that could unduly influence (or reasonably seems to do so) his or her responsibilities in the publication process.”
• Any conflict of interest should be declared by all authors.
• All sources of grants received and its spending should be disclosed. This may include grants or honorarium, credits and promotions, memberships or any personal or professional relationships which may appear to influence the manuscript.
• This statement should also appear at the end of the text before the references.
• If there are no conflicts of interests, the authors should state, “none to declare” explicitly.

DISCLOSURE OF RESEARCH FUNDING

• JAIMC requires disclosure of all grants and funding received for the purpose of completion of research.
• These disclosures can be made in the appropriate text box during the submission process and at the end of manuscript after declaration of conflict of interest.
• In case of no external funding sources, the authors should explicitly declare so.

RETRACT (WITHDRAWAL) OF MANUSCRIPT

• If and when the authors want to withdraw the submitted manuscript after submission to the journal, they will have to inform the journal in writing with a signed statement of withdrawal from all authors before sending it to the journal.
• The editorial board will then inform the corresponding author(s) about withdrawal of the manuscript.
• It should be noted that a formal statement from the editorial board approving the withdrawal request is necessary and without it no manuscript may be considered withdrawn.
• Submission of manuscripts, once submitted to JAIMC, in other journals may result in blacklisting of the authors.

APPEAL AGAINST REJECTION OF ARTICLES

• In case of rejection of a manuscript, a letter of appeal carrying detailed explanation of why an article rejected by the editorial team of JAIMC should be published can be submitted by the author.
• The fate of rejected manuscript will be decided by an in-house review by the journal editorial board.
• Once an appeal against rejection of an article has been granted, the authors will make a new submission of the revised manuscript and the review process will start afresh.

CLINICAL TRIAL AND SYSTEMATIC REVIEWS

• Result of all randomized control trials are only considered for publication, if they register with clinical trials registry of the concerned institute.
• The Editor recommends the use of CONSORT Statement for clinical trials.
• For systematic reviews and meta-analyses refer to the guidelines of The PRISMA and MOOSE Statements.

REPRODUCTION OF PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED ARTICLES

Reproducing material from other sources:

• It is the authors responsibility to secure all permissions prior to submission of the manuscript.
• Any part of article assessed from another source, should be accompanied by a signed letter of consent from the copyright holder which may be the author, journal or the publisher.

SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT POLICY 

• JAIMC policy of scientific misconduct is based on international committee of medical journal editors (ICMJE), committee on publication ethics (COPE) the guidelines laid down by the Higher Education Commission, Pakistan (HEC).
• The forms and examples of misconduct covered by the scientific misconduct policy of JAIMC include falsification/ fabrication of scientific data.
• Plagiarism involving misrepresentation of facts / ideas and language used by others in prior work,
• Issues of ghost authors and guest authors,
• Not giving other actual authors their due recognition,
• Re-publishing the same research work as different research work in another journal,
• Manipulation of data to obtain desired preconceived results or for using dubious statistical analyses,
• False accusation of misconductnot reporting a case of misconduct or not sharing information about such cases.

Responses to possible misconduct

• Halt the processing of manuscripts.
• Launching an investigation into allegations of misconduct if and when received.
• Black-listing the author from the journal.

PLAGIARISM POLICY

• Plagiarism refers to intentional copying of others work without proper attribution or reference and includes self-plagiarism which refers to reuse of one’s own copyrighted material without proper attribution to the original source, mosaic plagiarism of mix and match of yours and others work, and salami slicing.
• JAIMC follows a strict policy regarding plagiarism.
• All authors are required to adhere to high principles of research conduct as per “COPE”, “ICMJE” and “HEC” guidelines.
• All authors whose names appear on the manuscript will be held responsible for intellectual integrity of the submitted manuscript.
• The submitted manuscript will be checked for the plagiarism before starting the review process using plagiarism checking software “Turnitin”.
• If the article has more than 19% similarity, it will be returned to author for correction.
• The Journal reserves the right to request any related material at any stage of the review process and requires authors to use referenced material according to the guidelines for authors.

PEER REVIEW POLICY

• Journal of Allama Iqbal medical college follows a double-blind peer review policy to ensure and enhance the quality of published literature.
• Journal maintains a reviewers database both internal and external comprising of national and international reviewers according to their subject specialty as identified by the Editorial board.
• If the manuscript is approved after initial assessment by the editor, it is sent for peer review by an internal and an external peer reviewer along with a statistical reviewer.
• An average of two weeks’ time is given to reviewers for reviewing the manuscript.
• The article reviewed is sent back to author if corrections are advised after peer review. 
• In case article is rejected by the reviewer, it is sent to another reviewer along with the comments from the initial reviewer.
• Final decision for the paper acceptance or rejection lies with the editors after reviewing the comments and the reviewers are informed about the final decision.

OPEN ACCESS POLICY

• JAIMC follows an open access policy allowing for immediate free access to the work and permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose.
• The final version of article will be available on the JAIMC website which can be accessed by anyone freely without any delay, subscription fee or registration.
• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

COMPLAINT POLICY

• Any stakeholder can contact the editorial office for registering any complaint. The contact details are given on journal website.

PUBLICATION CHARGES POLICY

The publication charges in Pakistani Rupee of JAIMC are as under:

Category of author (based on first author)	Processing fees (non-refundable)	Publication Fee
Undergraduate students	PKR 1000	No charges
Post graduate residents	PKR 2000	PKR 3000
Faculty/ employee of AIMC	PKR 5000	PKR 15000
Other institutions (National)	PKR 5000	PKR 20,000
International Authors (in USD)	USD 50	USD 100

• Up to three tables and two figures/photographs are allowed within publication fee. Any additional table/ figure may incur an additional fee of PKR 500 per table/figure.
• Two copies of journal will be provided to corresponding author. PKR 2000 will be charged for any additional copy.
• For mode of payment, please contact Editorial Office for further instructions.

SUPPLEMENT ISSUE POLICY

• JAIMC publishes supplements to standard issues on different meetings, conference abstracts or topic upon requests by organizations.
• The requesting organization / body will bear all the costs that will be decided after discussion with the journal

Advertisement Policy

JAIMC does not entertain any type of advertisement on any medium, print or online.