RESEARCH & PUBLICATION ETHICS

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What is the ethical conduct of research?

You may have often heard the term "ethics." Ethics is a set of principles that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable behavior or way of conducting a task. These guidelines or regulations may vary across countries, disciplines, institutions, and laboratories. For instance, these ethics may dictate the conduct and functioning of an organization, government, and business entity! Do you know which codes you should follow when conducting your research?

One of the most commonly known ethical codes in medical practice, the "Hippocratic Oath," dates back to 500 B.C. Over the years, guidelines such as the Nuremberg Code and the Declaration of Helsinki have been introduced and implemented into practice. Moreover, ethical policies addressing plagiarism, fabrication, conflicts of interest, etc., are being outlined at different governmental and academic levels. Refer to the ethics timeline below for a detailed overview.

Why is it essential for you as a researcher to follow these ethical codes? 

How does adherence to these can impact your credibility and repute in the scientific community? 

Firstly, these ethical codes help maintain scientific integrity and safeguard the primary aim of conducting the research, i.e., to promote knowledge and truth. Secondly, these values encourage trust, respect, and objectivity in a collaborative work environment by avoiding conflicts related to authorship, copyrights, and others. Moreover, these codes help maintain the safety and interest of human subjects and ensure appropriate care of animal subjects in a clinical or laboratory setting. Lastly, these ethical norms make researchers accountable for the quality and outcome of the research that may directly or indirectly affect public health and interests.

• Publication Ethics (COPE)
• Ethical Guidelines for Editors
• Ethical Guidelines for Reviewers
• Ethical Guidelines for Authors
• Ethical Guidelines for The Publisher
• Publishing Ethics Issues

PUBLICATION ETHICS (COPE)

The Netherlands Press is committed to supporting stringent peer review processes and scientific, ethical, and quality standards in publishing. As such, we work hard to educate researchers, authors, board members, editors, and reviewers on understanding and meeting those standards as a team. The Netherlands Press follows the COPE Best Practice guidelines and this statement is according to the procedures and standards developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)

ETHICAL GUIDELINES FOR EDITORS

• Decision on the Publication of Articles: The Editor-in-chief (EIC) of the Journal is responsible for deciding on the publication of submitted articles. The EIC may be guided by the policies of the Journal's editorial board and subjected to such legal requirements. The Editor must decide in consultation with reviewers and editorial board members.
• Fair play: The manuscripts should be evaluated solely on their intellectual merit without regard to the author's race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy.
• Confidentiality: The Editor and editorial staff must not disclose any information about a manuscript submitted to the Journal to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the Publisher, as appropriate. The Editor must ensure the integrity of a double-blind peer review and should not disclose the identity of the reviewers to the authors of that manuscript, and vice versa.
• Disclosure and conflicts of interest: Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used by the Editor or reviewer or anyone else who has a view of the manuscript while handling it in their research without the express written consent of the author.

ETHICAL GUIDELINES FOR REVIEWERS

• Contribution of Peer Review: Peer review assists the Editor in making editorial decisions, and editorial communications help the author to improve his paper.
• Promptness: If a selected reviewer feels unqualified to review an article, they should notify the Editor-in-Chief and not participate. Reviews will be expected to be professional, honest, courteous, prompt, and constructive, and their judgment should be objective.
• Confidentiality: Manuscripts assigned to a reviewer must be treated as confidential documents. The manuscript(s) must not be shown to or discussed with others except as authorized by the Editor in Chief.
• Standards of Objectivity: Reviews should be conducted objectively. There shall be no personal criticism of the author. Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.
• Acknowledgment of Sources: Reviewers should mark the uncited work published previously. Authors are expected to provide the proper citation for each statement that is quoted from a previously published work. A reviewer should inform the Editor in Chief for any substantial similarity between the manuscript assigned to him for review and the other previously published paper of which they have personal knowledge, or they have found the similarity during the review process.
• Confidentiality: Information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage.
• Conflict of Interest: Reviewers should not review manuscripts with conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.

ETHICAL GUIDELINES FOR AUTHORS

• Reporting standards: Authors of the original research article must present accurate data of work performed during their research. Authors are also expected to discuss the objective of their work and the significance of their results. An article should contain sufficient information and references to ensure the reproducibility of the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements are considered unethical behavior and unacceptable.
• Data Access and Retention: Authors may be asked to provide the raw/supplementary data for a paper under editorial review. The authors should be prepared to give the public access to these data (if practicable) and to retain such data for a reasonable time after the publication.
• Originality and Plagiarism: Authors should ensure the originality of their contents while preparing a manuscript draft. In case the authors have used the work and/or words of others, this must be appropriately cited or quoted. All the articles submitted to The Netherlands Press shall be screened for plagiarism using iThenticate or Turnitin (online plagiarism detection software). In case plagiarism is detected during the review/editorial process, such manuscript(s) will be rejected immediately. If the plagiarism is proven after publication, such manuscript(s) will be retracted from the Journal and an appropriate announcement will be placed in this regard.

We can also consider appropriate action against authors depending upon the seriousness of the case which includes;

1. Debarring the authors from publication in the future
2. Such incidents shall be brought to the notice of the author's funding agencies, the author's institutes (where they work), and the original authors whose work has been plagiarized.

         COPE flow charts will also be considered while dealing with plagiarism complaints

Redundant or duplicate submission/publication:

Duplicate or redundant submission is the same manuscript (or the same data) that is submitted to different journals at the same time. International copyright laws, ethical conduct, and cost-effective use of resources require that readers can be assured that what they are reading is original. An author should not publish manuscripts that describe the same concept or present similar data, in more than one Journal. Submitting the same manuscript to multiple journals is unacceptable and unethical.

• In case the Editor was not aware of the violation and the article has been published, a notice of the duplicate submission and the ethical violation will be published.
• Acknowledgment of Sources: Authors should provide the proper acknowledgment for the work of others. Authors should cite publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work.
• Authorship of the Paper and corresponding author: Only the contributors who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study should be titled as the author. All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors. The corresponding author is the author responsible for communicating with the Journal for publication. The corresponding author should ensure that no inappropriate contributors are listed as co-authors in the paper. All the co-authors should check the final draft of the manuscript before submitting it to the Journal.
• Acknowledgment of Funding Sources: All the funding sources must be properly acknowledged.
• Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest: All the authors should disclose the possible financial or any other substantive conflict of interest that might influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript.
• Fundamental errors in published work: When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, he should promptly notify the journal editor or Publisher and cooperate with the Editor to retract or correct the paper.
• Data Falsification: Submitted research materials that are found to have falsified experimental outcomes will incur falsification penalty. The penalty will be decided by the Publication Ethics Committee (PEC).
• Citation Manipulation: Citation Manipulated articles are those articles that are found to include citations whose objective is to increase the number of citations to a given author's work, or to articles published in a particular journal. These citation Manipulated manuscripts will incur a penalty. The penalty will be decided by the Publication Ethics Committee (PEC)

ETHICAL GUIDELINES FOR THE PUBLISHER

The Publisher is supposed to protect the intellectual property and copyright of the contents submitted by the authors. We respect the privacy and personal data, especially for authors and peer reviewers. We work in close co-operation with the editors and peer reviewers to maintain editorial independence and to guarantee transparency and integrity in the peer-review process.

In cases of alleged or proven scientific misconduct, fraudulent publication or plagiarism, the Publisher, in close collaboration with the editors, will take all appropriate measures to clarify the situation and to amend the article in question.

PUBLISHING ETHICS ISSUES

Monitoring: The Editor in chief must ensure to establish the mechanism for monitoring and safeguarding of publishing ethics. All the complaints received from the reviewers or the authors or anybody else should be taken into the proper consideration and appropriate action should be taken promptly for such complaints.

Retraction & Corrections: The published articles will be retracted if there is clear evidence that the findings are unreliable. The retraction can be a result of scientific misconduct or honest error. To maintain the integrity of the scientific record, the retracted article will not be removed from the Journal's website, however, a notice of retraction will be posted and is made freely available to all readers. Retraction can be published by the authors or the Editor or the Publisher. In rare cases involving legal infringement, the Publisher may remove an article. Bibliographic information about the article will be retained to ensure the integrity of the scientific record. We follow the COPE guidelines in such a case. Sometimes it may be necessary to publish corrections/erratum in an article published in the Journal to maintain the integrity of the academic record. Appropriate notice regarding the correction will be placed and made freely available to the readers. We are always willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed.

Article withdrawal: We expect our authors to comply with best practices in publication ethics as well as in the quality of their articles. To avoid withdrawal of articles, we sincerely request the corresponding author to undertake the issues related to authorship, publication ethics and accurateness of data and results at the time of submission of the manuscript.

The authors can withdraw their article(s) at any stage of the peer-review and publication process (before the publication of the article that will not yet have the complete volume/issue/page information). The authors should be aware that the withdrawal action takes the manuscript out of the peer review & publication process and places it back into the author's dashboard, in the withdrawn Manuscripts list. The manuscript number of withdrawn articles cannot be used by the system and cannot be resubmitted.

If an article found to violate the ethical publishing guidelines of the Journal such as duplicate submission, fraudulent data, plagiarism, false claim of authorship, etc., the article will be withdrawn by the Journal. In case the article is under the 'Online first' stage, the Journal will remove the article from the website and an appropriate note for article withdrawal will be posted.

No response from the authors to journal communication after review and provisional acceptance is also considered as withdrawal of the article.

Submissions from editors, employees, or members of the editorial board

Furthermore, all the reviewers and handling editors are required to disclose the conflict of interest for the articles they are handling/reviewing before they submit their feedback/comments to the electronic manuscript handling system.