Intestinal Research (IR) follows the Guideline on Good Publication of COPE (https://publicationethics.org), Recommendations of International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (http://www.icmje.org/recommendations), and Good Publication Practice Guidelines for Medical Journals of Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors (http://kamje.or.kr).
The manuscripts with following misconduct or dishonest act cannot be published either online or in journals. Forgery (Fabrication): Record or reporting with making up data or research results that do not exist. Alteration (Falsification): Manipulate research data, equipment, processes, or results intentionally to distort research contents or results.
Plagiarism: Using others’ ideas, research process, contents, and/or results without proper authorization or citation.
Clinical research should be conducted in accordance with the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/). Clinical studies that do not meet the Helsinki Declaration will not be considered for publication. For human subjects, identifiable information, such as patients’ names, initials, hospital numbers, dates of birth, and other protected health care information, should not be disclosed. For animal subjects, research should be performed based on the National or Institutional Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. The ethical treatment of all experimental animals should be maintained.
In case of clinical research including clinical trial, the manuscript must include a statement of approval from Institutional Review Board (IRB) or ethic committee (revised June 2009) and status of informed consent (revised October 2017). Author must have obtained informed consent from identifiable patient, if author plan to include any personal information including photo, image, illustration and video. Any information that could have revealed patient’s and research subjects’ identities, such as name, initials, ethnicity, occupation or date of birth, should not appear as much as possible. Formal consents are waived for the use of entirely anonymized image from which the individual cannot be identified (revised October 2017).
For research with animal subjects, studies should be approved by an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). If necessary, the editor or reviewers may request copies of these documents to resolve questions regarding IRB/IACUC approval and study conduct. (3) In case of clinical trial, we recommend register the clinical trial in public registry site that matches the criteria established by ICMJE or WHO to ensure scientific objectivity and transparency of study procedure (revised June 2010).
When necessary, Editorial Board ask for approval letter issued by IRB.
When reporting experiments on animals, authors should describe the measures they have taken to ease pains and inconvenience to the subjects, and a statement identifying whether the NIH Guide for the Care and Use of laboratory Animals or IRB guideline was followed. When necessary, Editorial Board ask for approval letter issued by Animal Ethics Committee.
Authorship credit should be based on (1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, and/or analysis and interpretation of data; (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; (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 or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. Every author should meet all of these four conditions. After the initial submission of a manuscript, any changes whatsoever in authorship (adding author(s), deleting author(s), or re-arranging the order of authors) must be explained by a letter to the editor from the authors concerned. This letter must be signed by all authors of the paper. Copyright assignment must also be completed by every author.
•Correction of authorship after publication: IR does not correct authorship after publication unless a mistake has been made by the editorial staff. Authorship may be changed before publication but after submission when an authorship correction is requested by all of the authors involved with the manuscript. Corresponding author and first author: IR does not allow multiple corresponding authors for one article. Only one author should correspond with the editorial office and readers for one article. IR does accept notice of equal contribution for the first author when the study was clearly performed by co-first authors.
•Correction of authorship after publication: IR does not correct authorship after publication unless a mistake has been made by the editorial staff. Authorship may be changed before publication but after submission when an authorship correction is requested by all of the authors involved with the manuscript.
•Author’s contribution should be stated according to CRedit standard. Person who made genuine contributions, yet not active and sufficient enough to be co-authors should be stated on Acknowledgements.
The author is responsible for disclosing any financial support or benefit that might affect the content of the manuscript or might cause a conflict of interest. When submitting the manuscript, the author must attach the letter of conflict of interest statement. Examples of potential conflicts of interest are financial support from or connections to companies, political pressure from interest groups, and academically related issues. In particular, all sources of funding applicable to the study should be explicitly stated.
Redundant or duplicate publication refers to the publication of a paper that overlaps substantially with one already published. Upon receipt, submitted manuscripts are screened for possible plagiarism or duplicate publication using Crossref Similarity Check. If a paper that might be regarded as duplicate or redundant had already been published in another journal or submitted for publication, the author should notify the fact in advance at the time of submission. Under these conditions, any such work should be referred to and referenced in the new paper. The new manuscript should be submitted together with copies of the duplicate or redundant material to the editorial committee. If redundant or duplicate publication is attempted or occurs without such notification, the submitted manuscript will be rejected immediately. If the editor was not aware of the violations and of the fact that the article had already been published, the editor will announce in the journal that the submitted manuscript had already been published in a duplicate or redundant manner, without seeking the author’s explanation or approval.
It is possible to republish manuscripts if the manuscripts satisfy the conditions for secondary publication of the ICMJE Recommendations (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf).
When the journal faces suspected cases of research and publication misconduct, such as redundant (duplicate) publication, plagiarism, fraudulent or fabricated data, changes in authorship, undisclosed conflict of interest, ethical problems with a submitted manuscript, appropriation by a reviewer of an author’s idea or data, and complaints against editors, the resolution process will follow the flowchart provided by COPE (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). The discussion and decision on the suspected cases are carried out by the Editorial Board.
IR will publish corrections as soon as possible detailing changes from and citing the original publication when errors are detected. We follow the ICMJE and COPE guidelines where applicable.
An erratum refers to a production error, caused by the journal. A corrigendum refers to an error made by the authors. Authors who notice an error should contact the editorial office of the journal.
The post-publication discussion is available through letter to editor. If any readers have a concern on any articles published, they can submit letter to editor on the articles.
The policy of the journal is primarily aimed at protecting the authors, reviewers, editors, and the publisher of the journal. If not described below, the process of handling complaints and appeals follows the guidelines of the Committee of Publication Ethics available from: https://publicationethics.org/appeals.
• Who complains or makes an appeal? Submitters, authors, reviewers, and readers may register complaints and appeals in a variety of cases as follows: falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, duplicate publication, authorship dispute, conflict of interest, ethical treatment of animals, informed consent, bias or unfair/inappropriate competitive acts, copyright, stolen data, defamation, and legal problem. If any individuals or institutions want to inform the cases, they can send a letter to editor. For the complaints or appeals, concrete data with answers to all factual questions (who, when, where, what, how, why) should be provided.
• Who is responsible to resolve and handle complaints and appeals? The Editor, Editorial Board, or Editorial Office is responsible for them.
• What may be the consequence of remedy? It depends on the type or degree of misconduct. The consequence of resolution will follow the guidelines of the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE).
The Editorial Board will continuously work to monitor and safeguard publication ethics: guidelines for retracting articles; maintenance of the integrity of academic records; preclusion of business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standards; publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed; and excluding plagiarized and fraudulent data. The editors maintain the following responsibilities: responsibility and authority to reject and accept articles; avoid any conflict of interest with respect to articles they reject or accept; promote the publication of corrections or retractions when errors are found; and preserve the anonymity of reviewers.
The Journal operates a Research Ethics Council for consideration of research ethics and related issues.
• Chairperson of the publication committee of Korean Association for the Study of Intestinal Research (KASID) is the chair of the Council. The constitution of the Council is decided by the publication committee of KASID. Operation of the Council follows separate regulations decided by the Council.
• The roles of the Council are as follows: (1) The Council reviews research ethics issued from the publication of the Journal and related papers (original articles, case reports, review articles and others); (2) The Council reviews any forgery, alteration, plagiarism, wrongful research paper author indication, or multiple or duplicates publication allegations for published papers and brings the results to the executive committee of KASID.
When research ethics violations occur, the Council decides a disciplinary measure.
• If duplicate or divided publication or any other ethical violation was confirmed, manuscripts even if already published will be retracted with a notice published in the next issue, as well as to related academic institutions.
• Retraction notice take same form as the general thesis and not take a form like announcement or letter to the editor.
• Author who violates this policy or general ethics cannot submit to Intestinal Research for next two years.