Editorial Policies

Timeline Publication takes intellectual integrity very seriously. The publisher, editors, reviewers, and authors all agree upon the following standards of expected ethical behaviour, which are based on COPES’s Best Practice Guidelines.

Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement

(Based on Elsevier recommendations and COPE's Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors)

Ethical guidelines for journal publication

(These guidelines are based on existing Elsevier policies).

The publication of an article in a peer-reviewed journal IJECCE is an essential building block in the development of a coherent and respected network of knowledge. It is a direct reflection of the quality of the work of the authors and the institutions that support them. Peer-reviewed articles support and embody the scientific method. It is therefore important to agree upon standards of expected ethical behaviour for all parties involved in the act of publishing: the author, the journal editor, the peer reviewer, the publisher and the society.

Timeline Publication as publisher of the journal IJECCE takes its duties of guardianship over all stages of publishing extremely seriously and we recognize our ethical and other responsibilities.

We are committed to ensuring that advertising, reprint or other commercial revenue has no impact or influence on editorial decisions. In addition, the Timeline Publication and Editorial Board will assist in communications with other journals and/or publishers where this is useful and necessary.

Duties of authors

(These guidelines are based on existing Elsevier policies).

Reporting standards

Authors of reports of original research should present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion of its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately in the paper. A paper should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to replicate the work.

Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behaviour and are unacceptable.

Review and professional publication articles should also be accurate and objective, and editorial opinion works should be clearly identified as such.

Data access and retention

Authors may be asked to provide the raw data in connection with a paper for editorial review, and should be prepared to provide public access to such data, if practicable, and should in any event be prepared to retain such data for a reasonable time after publication.

Originality and plagiarism

The authors should ensure that they have written entirely original works, and if the authors have used the work and/or words of others, that this has been appropriately cited or quoted. Plagiarism takes many forms, from passing off another’s paper as the authors own paper, to copying or paraphrasing substantial parts of another’s paper (without attribution), to claiming results from research conducted by others. Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical publishing behaviour and is unacceptable.

Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication

An author should not in general publish manuscripts describing essentially the same research in more than one journal or primary publication. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behaviour and is unacceptable. In general, an author should not submit for consideration in another journal a previously published paper. Publication of some kinds of articles (e.g. clinical guidelines, translations) in more than one journal is sometimes justifiable, provided certain conditions are met. The authors and editors of the journals concerned must agree to the secondary publication, which must reflect the same data and interpretation of the primary document. The primary reference must be cited in the secondary publication.

Acknowledgement of sources

Proper acknowledgment of the work of others must always be given. Authors should cite publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work. Information obtained privately, as in conversation, correspondence, or discussion with third parties, must not be used or reported without explicit, written permission from the source. Information obtained in the course of confidential services, such as refereeing manuscripts or grant applications, must not be used without the explicit written permission of the author of the work involved in these services.

Authorship of the paper

Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study. All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors. Where there are others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research project, they should be acknowledged or listed as contributors. The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors and no inappropriate co-authors are included on the paper, and that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.

Hazards and human or animal subjects

If the work involves chemicals, procedures or equipment that have any unusual hazards inherent in their use, the author must clearly identify these in the manuscript. If the work involves the use of animal or human subjects, the author should ensure that the manuscript contains a statement that all procedures were performed in compliance with relevant laws and institutional guidelines and that the appropriate institutional committee(s) has approved them. Authors should include a statement in the manuscript that informed consent was obtained for experimentation with human subjects. The privacy rights of human subjects must always be observed.

Disclosure and conflicts of interest

All authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial or other substantive conflict of interest that might be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed. Examples of potential conflicts of interest which should be disclosed include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. Potential conflicts of interest should be disclosed at the earliest stage possible.

Fundamental errors in published works

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the authors obligation to promptly notify the journal editor or publisher and cooperate with the editor to retract or correct the paper. If the editor or the publisher learns from a third party that a published work contains a significant error, it is the obligation of the author to promptly retract or correct the paper or provide evidence to the editor of the correctness of the original paper.

Peer Review Policy

The practice of peer review is to ensure that only good science is published. It is an objective process at the heart of good scholarly publishing and is carried out by all reputable scientific journals. Our referees play a vital role in maintaining the high standards Review Policy and all manuscripts are peer reviewed following the procedure outlined below.

Initial manuscript evaluation

The Editor first evaluates all manuscripts. It is rare, but it is possible for an exceptional manuscript to be accepted at this stage. Manuscripts rejected at this stage are insufficiently original, have serious scientific flaws, have poor grammar or English language, or are outside the aims and scope of the journal. Those that meet the minimum criteria are normally passed on to at least 2 experts for review.

Type of Peer Review

Policy employs double blind reviewing, where both the referee and author remain anonymous throughout the process.

How the referee is selected

Whenever possible, referees are matched to the paper according to their expertise and our database is constantly being updated.

Referee reports

Referees are asked to evaluate whether the manuscript: - Is original - Is methodologically sound - Follows appropriate ethical guidelines - Has results which are clearly presented and support the conclusions - Correctly references previous relevant work.

Language correction is not part of the peer review process, but referees may, if so wish, suggest corrections to the manuscript.

How long does the review process take?

The time required for the review process is dependent on the response of the referees. Should the referee's reports contradict one another or a report is unnecessarily delayed, a further expert opinion will be sought. The Editor's decision will be sent to the author with recommendations made by the referees, which usually includes verbatim comments by the referees. Revised manuscripts might be returned to the initial referees who may then request another revision of a manuscript.

Final report

A final decision to accept or reject the manuscript will be sent to the author along with any recommendations made by the referees, and may include verbatim comments by the referees.

Editor's Decision is final

Referees advise the editor, who is responsible for the final decision to accept or reject the article.

 

Editorial & Peer Review Process

Editorial and Peer Review Processes generally follow these steps:

1. We follow and request from authors, reviewers and editors the "ICJME Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals".
    
2. When an article is submitted to Webology, Editor makes the first check of submitted articles (structure, plagiarism, scientific quality).
    
3. Article may be rejected, sent back for structural revision, or sent to at least two reviewers for peer review.
    
4. After peer review process, articles may be rejected, sent back for revision requested by reviewers or accepted for publication.
    
5. Revised articles by authors may be accepted, resent to reviewers, resent to authors for additional corrections/revision or rejected.
    
6. Authors could not see reviewers’ information. Editor may make authors’ information available to reviewers or not.
    
7. Accepted articles are forwarded to publishing process.
    
8. Editor(s) may require additional materials or changes from authors during copy editing, composing, grammatical editing and/or proof reading steps.

 

Author's Rights and Obligations

All authors published their research papers in Webology are entitled for following rights and obligations:

1. Authors hold full copyright and self archiving rights, they transfer the publishing rights to Webology
    
2. We do decline to publish material where a pre-print or working paper has been previously mounted online.
    
3. We allow author to get their seminar papers published with note about the seminar if the paper is not mounted online.
    
4. The research and review papers published in Webology can be archived in any private of public archives online or offline. For this purposed authors need to use the final published papers downloaded from Website
    
5. Authors are allowed to archive their article in open access repositories as “post-prints”. (Please note that: a post-print is the version incorporating changes and modifications resulting from peer-review comments.)
    
6. The authors need to acknowledge the original reference to the published paper when used in some other format like epub or audio files.
    
7. Journal of Neurobehavioral Sciences offers Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License to researchers and scholar who uses the content of the published papers.
    
8. Authors are free to use link to our published papers and share the published papers online or offline in the final format printed on the Journal website.
    
9. Authors can index and store the published papers in the private or public archives or repositories like university database, internet archived, academia, researchgate etc.
    
10. We promote sharing of knowledge with due credit to the authors and researchers of the papers published with Webology.
     

 

Publication Ethics & Publication Malpractice

The publication of a peer reviewed journal requires continuous work, responsibility, liability and collaboration from all involved parties: authors, reviewers, chief editor, managing editors, associate editors, editors and board members. The chief editor/ editors have the responsibility of keeping/monitoring the publishing ethics and maintaining the academic record. The Editorial Board assume their responsibility on verifying the articles of fraudulent data or plagiarism. The editorial teams goal is to maintain the publication at the highest publication standards, implying: good quality, original, research based articles, but also corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies, if needed. We appreciate the contributions of every involved party to the work that we publish.

Publication and Authorship:

• All submitted papers are subject to strict blind peer review process by at least two national and international reviewers;
• The rejected articles are not being resent for reviewing;
• The papers before being sent for reviewing are first checked by anti-plagiarism software. Authors should provide all sources of data used in the research. Plagiarism in all its forms is unethical and it is unacceptable.

Authors' responsibilities:

• Authors must ensure that the submitted article is their original work, which has not been previously published;
• Authors must ensure that the submitted article has not been considered for publication elsewhere;
• Authors must state that all data in the paper are real and authentic;
• Authors must report any errors in their published paper to the Chief Editor/ Editors;
• Authors should provide revised version of their article, according to the reviewers' recommendations.

Reviewers' responsibilities:

• Any manuscript received for reviewing will be treated as confidential document;
• Reviewers should identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors;
• Reviews should be conducted objectively, and observations should be formulated clearly with supporting arguments, so that authors can use them for improving the paper;
• Reviewers should inform the Chief editor/editors on any substantial similarity between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper;
• Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.

Chief Editor/ Editors' responsibilities:

• Editors decide which of the articles submitted to the journal should be published;
• Editors are responsible for the contents and overall quality of the publication;
• Editors should evaluate manuscripts exclusively on the basis of their academic merit;
• Peer review assists the editors in making editorial decisions. Editors should publish only peer reviewed accepted articles;
• Editors should have a clear picture of a research's funding sources;
• An editor must not use unpublished information in the editor's own research without the express written consent of the author.

Plagiarism Policy:

Whether intentional or not, plagiarism is a serious violation. Plagiarism is the copying of ideas, text, data and other creative work (e.g. tables, figures and graphs) and presenting it as original research without proper citation. We define plagiarism as a case in which a paper reproduces another work with at least 25% similarity and without citation.

If evidence of plagiarism is found before/after acceptance or after publication of the paper, the author will be offered a chance for rebuttal. If the arguments are not found to be satisfactory, the manuscript will be retracted and the author sanctioned from publishing papers for a period to be determined by the responsible Editor(s).

 

Conflict of Interest Policy

Adopted from Conflict of Interest in Peer-Reviewed Medical Journals which is prepared by WAME Editorial Policy and Publication Ethics Committees.

Articles would be published with statements or supporting documents declaring:

• Authors’ conflicts of interest; and
• Sources of support for the work, including sponsor names along with explanations of the role of those sources if any in study design; collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; writing of the report; the decision to submit the report for publication; or a statement declaring that the supporting source had no such involvement; and
• Whether the authors had access to the study data, with an explanation of the nature and extent of access, including whether access is on-going.

To support the above statements, editors may request that authors of a study sponsored by a funder with a proprietary or financial interest in the outcome sign a statement, such as “I had full access to all of the data in this study and I take complete responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.”

 

Plagiarism Policy

Whether intentional or not, plagiarism is a serious violation. Plagiarism is the copying of ideas, text, data and other creative work (e.g. tables, figures and graphs) and presenting it as original research without proper citation. We define plagiarism as a case in which a paper reproduces another work with at least 20% similarity and without citation.

If evidence of plagiarism is found before/after acceptance or after publication of the paper, the author will be offered a chance for rebuttal. If the arguments are not found to be satisfactory, the manuscript will be retracted and the author sanctioned from publishing papers for a period to be determined by the responsible Editor(s).

Screening for plagiarism

We check each submission for plagiarism with dedicated software at www.ithenticate.com, to prevent such unethical practices.

 

Privacy Policy

Manuscripts will be reviewed with due respect for authors’ and reviewers' confidentiality. Our editors have been instructed to not disclose information about manuscripts (including their receipt, content, status in the reviewing process, criticism by reviewers, or ultimate fate) to anyone other than the authors and reviewers. Manuscripts sent for review are privileged communications. Therefore, reviewers and members of the editorial staff must respect the authors’ rights by not publicly discussing the authors’ work or appropriating their ideas before the manuscript is published. Reviewers may not make copies of the manuscript for their files and will not share it with others, except with the editor’s permission. Reviewers should return or destroy copies of manuscripts after submitting reviews.

Protection of Research Participants
(Statement on Human and Animal Rights)

Adopted from ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals (http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/protection-of-research-participants.html).

When reporting experiments on people, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national), or if no formal ethics committee is available, with the Helsinki Declaration as revised in 2008. If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study.

Patients have a right to privacy that should not be violated without informed consent.

Identifying information, including names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, or pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that an identifiable patient be shown the manuscript to be published. Authors should disclose to these patients whether any potential identifiable material might be available via the Internet as well as in print after publication. Patient consent should be written and archived with the journal, the authors, or both, as dictated by local regulations or laws. Applicable laws vary from locale to locale, and journals should establish their own policies with legal guidance. Since a journal that archives the consent will be aware of patient identity, some journals may decide that patient confidentiality is better guarded by having the author archive the consent and instead providing the journal with a written statement that attests that they have received and archived written patient consent.
Nonessential identifying details should be omitted. Informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt that anonymity can be maintained. For example, masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate protection of anonymity. If identifying characteristics are de-identified, authors should provide assurance, and editors should so note, that such changes do not distort scientific meaning.

The requirement for informed consent should be included in the journal’s instructions for authors. When informed consent has been obtained, it should be indicated in the published article.

When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether institutional and national standards for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed. Further guidance on animal research ethics is available from the International Association of Veterinary Editors’ Consensus Author Guidelines on Animal Ethics and Welfare.

Publishing Ethics

Authorship

All contributors who have made a significant contribution should be given chance to be cited as authors. Other individuals who have contributed to the work should be acknowledged. Articles should include a full list of the current institutional affiliations of all authors, both academic and corporate.

Competing interests

All authors, referees and editors must declare any conflicting or competing interests relating to a given article. Competing interests through their potential influence on behaviour or content or perception may undermine the objectivity, integrity or perceived value of publication.

Sources of funding

Funding received for the work described in the paper or for the publication itself, for all authors, must be declared within the publication.

Corrections, Retractions & Expressions of Concern

In an effort to better serve our researchers, librarians, and others in the academic community, Ejmanager believes clarity in the publishing record is a critical component of information distribution. Recognizing a published article as a finalized “Version of Record” establishes the expectation that it can be relied upon as accurate, complete, and citable. Ejmanager defines this Version of Record as the initial article publication for open access journals.

It is presumed that manuscripts report on work based on honest observations. However occasionally information becomes available with may contradict this. In such situations Ejmanager Publishing journals apply Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines on corrections, retractions and expressions of concern.

Corrections

Errors in published papers may be identified requiring publication of a correction in the form of a corrigendum or erratum. Because articles can be read and cited as soon as they are published, any changes thereafter could potentially impact those who read and cited the earlier version. Ejmanager provides authors with an opportunity to review article proofs prior to publication with the express goal of ensuring accuracy of the content. Publishing an erratum or corrigendum increases the likelihood readers will find out about the change and also explains the specifics of the change.

Corrigenda and Errata are published on a numbered page and will contain the original article's citation. Cases where these corrections are insufficient to address an error will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis by the Editor in Chief. Inadequacies arising from the normal course of new scientific research are not within the scope of this and will require no correction or withdrawal.

Expressions of Concern

Where substantial doubt arises as to the honesty or integrity of a submitted or published article it is the Editor in Chief's responsibility to ensure that the matter is adequately addressed, usually by the authors' sponsoring institution. It is not normally the Editor in Chief's responsibility to carry out the investigation or make a determination. The Editor in Chief should be promptly informed of the decision of the sponsoring institution and a retraction printed should it be determined that a fraudulent paper was published. Alternatively, the Editor in Chief may choose to publish an expression of concern over aspects of the conduct or integrity of the work.

Article withdrawal

Articles may be withdrawn by corresponding author before accepting for publication. If it is accepted, it could be used only 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 submission, 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 article(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), may be “Withdrawn” from eJManager. Articles which have been published under an issue could not be withdrawn.

Article retraction

Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus 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 have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this best practice is adopted for article retraction by eJManager:

  -  A retraction note titled “Retraction: [article title]” signed by the authors and/or the editor is published in the paginated part of a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in the contents list.
  -  In the electronic version, a link is made to the original article.
  -  The online article is preceded by a screen containing the retraction note. It is to this screen that the link resolves; the reader can then proceed to the article itself.
  -  The original article is retained unchanged save for a watermark on the .pdf indicating on each page that it is “retracted.”
  -  The HTML version of the document is removed.

Article removal: legal limitations

In an extremely limited number of cases, it may be necessary to remove an article from the online database. 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 with a screen indicating the article has been removed for legal reasons.

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 with the difference that the database retraction notice will publish a link to the corrected re-published article and a history of the document.

Self-Archiving Policies

We are a 'green' publisher, as we allow self-archiving. Further details are given below.

Publishing in a subscription-based journal

By signing the Copyright Transfer Statement, you still retain substantial rights, such as self-archiving:

"Authors may self-archive the author’s accepted manuscript of their articles on their own websites. Authors may also deposit this version of the article in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later. He/ she may not use the publisher's version (the final article), which is posted on the journal and other Discover Publishing Group’s websites, for the purpose of self-archiving or deposit. Furthermore, the author may only post his/her version provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on the journal’s website. The link must be provided by inserting the DOI number of the article in the following sentence: “The final publication is available at link.journalsite.com via https://dx.doi.org/[insert DOI and remove brackets]”."

Prior versions of the article published on non-commercial pre-print servers like arXiv.org can remain on these servers and/or can be updated with the author’s accepted version. The final published version (in PDF or HTML/XML format) cannot be used for this purpose. Acknowledgement needs to be given to the final publication and a link should be inserted to the published article on the journal’s website, by inserting the DOI number of the article in the following sentence: “The final publication is available at Journal Name, via https://dx.doi.org/[insert DOI and remove brackets]”.

When publishing an article in a subscription journal, without open access, authors sign the Copyright Transfer Statement (CTS) which also details Discover Publishing Group’s self-archiving policy.

Publishing in open access

If you publish your article in an open access model, the final published version can be archived in institutional or funder repositories and can be made publicly accessible immediately.

Statement of Informed Consent

Medical research involving human subjects must be conducted according to the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki.

Submitted manuscripts should conform to the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, and all papers reporting animal and/or human studies must state in the methods section that the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board provided (or waived) approval. Please ensure that you have provided the full name and institution of the review committee, in addition to the approval number.

For research articles, authors are also required to state in the methods section whether participants provided informed consent and whether the consent was written or verbal.
Information on informed consent to report individual cases or case series should be included in the manuscript text. A statement is required regarding whether written informed consent for patient information and images to be published was provided by the patient(s) or a legally authorized representative.

Please also refer to the ICMJE Recommendations for the Protection of Research Participants

All research involving animals submitted for publication must be approved by an ethics committee with oversight of the facility in which the studies were conducted. The journal has adopted the Consensus Author Guidelines on Animal Ethics and Welfare for Veterinary Journals published by the International Association of Veterinary Editors.

Terms of Use

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• In no event shall the Journal, its publisher, editors or anyone involved in the Journal be liable to you or any other party on any legal theory, for any special, incidental, consequential, punitive, exemplary or any damages whatsoever arising out of or in connection with the use of any material in this web site or material published in the Journal, whether or not advised of the possibility of damage.
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License Information

This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of open access.

The articles in International Journal of Pharmacy Research & Technology are open access articles licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited