OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE JSLR > EDITORIAL POLICIES

JCEH

  • EDITORIAL POLICIES

    Overview

    JCEH supports and adheres to the guidelines and best practices of the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf), published by the International Committee of Medical Journals Editors (ICMJE), as well as the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (a joint statement by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the World Association for Medical Editors (WAME) and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA): (http://doaj.org/bestpractice).

    Authorship

    According to the ICMJE’s Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals, all authors listed in the manuscript must meet the following criteria of contribution:
    　1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the research or the acquisition
    　　and analysis of data
    　2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content
    　3. Final approval of the version to be published
    　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.

    Contributors who do not meet the criteria above should not be listed as authors. Those who do not qualify for an authorship may be acknowledged in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript. Examples of activities that do not qualify a contributor for authorship include: acquisition of funding; general supervision of a research group; general administrative support; or writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, or proofreading.

    Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-Assisted Tools/Technologies Äb0

    In consonance with the COPE’s position statement, WAME’s recommendations, and ICMJE’s Recommendation, JCEH does not allow artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted tools/technologies such as Large Language Models (LLMs), chatbots, or image creators to be listed as author or co-author. As described in the ICMJE, those tools cannot be responsible for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of the work, thus they do not meet the ICMJE’s criteria for authorship listed above. The authors (humans) are fully responsible for any materials of the submitted work, including the use of AI-assisted tools or technologies. AI should not be cited as an author. Authors (humans) are also responsible for plagiarism including in text and AI-produced images. Authors must disclose, upon submission and in the Methods (or similar section), any use of AI-assisted tools or technologies in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data.

    Redundant or Duplicate Publication

    Manuscript submissions in any language that are under review elsewhere or have been published in another journal, including advanced publications (in press or published online ahead of print), are regarded as redundant or duplicate publications.

    Abstracts or posters presented at scientific meetings are not considered previously published work, nor are Preprints (see Preprints section for more details).

    Submission to the journal implies that the manuscript is original work. All information and contents that originate from other resources must be credited and cited, as per the guidance in the References section of these Instructions to Authors. Any manuscript with an unacceptable level of unoriginal material may be rejected or retracted at the Editors’ discretion.

    Preprints

    To support the wide dissemination of research, the journal encourages authors to post their research manuscripts on community-recognized preprint servers, either before or alongside submission to the journal. This policy applies only to the original version of a manuscript that describes primary research. Any version of a manuscript that has been revised in response to reviewers’ comments, accepted for publication or published in the journal should not be posted on a preprint server. Instead, forward links to the published manuscript may be posted on the preprint server.

    Authors should retain copyright in their work when posting to a preprint server.

    Scooping

    When assessing the novelty of a manuscript submitted to the journal, the Editors will not be influenced by other manuscripts that are posted on community-recognized preprint servers after the date of submission to JCEH (or after the date of posting on a preprint server, if the manuscript is submitted to the journal within 4 months).

    Image integrity

    Authors may digitally manipulate or process images, but only if the adjustments are kept to a minimum, are applied to the entire image, meet community standards, and are clearly described in the manuscript. All images in a manuscript must accurately reflect the original data on which they are based. Authors must not move, remove, add or enhance individual parts of an image. The Editors reserve the right to request original, unprocessed images from the authors. Failure to provide requested images may result in a manuscript being rejected or retracted.

    Reproducing Copyrighted Material

    If a manuscript includes material that is not under the authors’ own copyright, the authors must obtain permission from the copyright holder(s) to reproduce it.

    If a manuscript includes previously published material, the authors must obtain permission from the copyright owners and the publisher of the original work to reproduce it. The authors must cite the original work in their manuscript.

    Copies of all reproduction permissions must be included with the manuscript when it is first submitted.

    Conflicts of Interest

    JCEH requires authors, reviewers and editors to disclose any potential conflict of interest related to articles submitted for publication. A conflict of interest exists when anyone has financial or personal relationships that could inappropriately influence (bias) his or her actions. The intent of the JSLTR conflict of interest disclosure policy is to provide authors, editors, and readers with all the facts necessary to make informed judgments about the content of JCEH.

    Animal/Human Experimentation

    Manuscripts that report on human subjects or materials of human origin must comply with the provisions of the Declaration of Helsinki (and its revisions). Authors must state in the manuscript that the study was approved by the relevant institutional or national review board (IRB). If approval from any IRB was not required, it must be explicitly stated in the manuscript.

    Manuscripts that describe research involving human subjects must clearly state that written consent was obtained from all patients (or the parent or the legal guardian of the patient) to obtain and publish their information.

    Data or information such as patient names, initials, hospital patient identification codes (patient IDs), specific dates, or any other information that may identify patients must not be presented in the manuscript.

    Manuscripts that report data from animal experimentation must comply with institutional, national, or international guidelines, and must state in the Materials and Methods section the approval of the testing design by the affiliated institution’s animal care and use committee.

    Availability of Data and Materials

    Authors must disclose the source of publicly available data and materials, such as public repositories or commercial manufacturers, by including accession numbers or company details in their manuscript, as appropriate.

    Authors may make their own data and materials available in Electronic Supplementary Material, or by linking from their manuscript to relevant community-recognized public databases or digital repositories. All data sets must be made available in full to the Editors and reviewers during the peer review process and must be made publicly available by the date of publication. Authors commit to preserving their data sets for at least three years from the date of publication in the journal.

    The journal encourages authors to grant reasonable requests from colleagues to share any data, materials and experimental protocols described in their manuscript.

    Clinical Trials

    All clinical trials must be registered with a public trials registry before the time of first patient enrollment, in line with ICMJE policy. ICMJE defines clinical trials as any research project that prospectively assigns people or a group of people to an intervention, with or without concurrent comparison or control groups, to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a health-related intervention and a health outcome. Health-related interventions include but are not limited to those used to modify a biomedical or health-related outcome. Examples include drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, educational programs, dietary interventions, quality improvement interventions, and process-of-care changes.

    Authors are required to register all clinical trials in registries that are managed by a non-profit organization, are openly accessible to the public free of charge, have a mechanism to ensure the validity of the registration data, and are electronically searchable. Registration in any registry in the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP: https://www.who.int/clinical-trials-registry-platform) or in ClinicalTrials.gov (http://clinicaltrials.gov/) is acceptable.

    Reporting Guidelines

    Authors are encouraged to follow published standard reporting guidelines for the relevant discipline of the study. They are:

    CONSORT for randomized clinical trials (http://www.consort-statement.org/)
    CARE for case reports (http://care-statement.org/)
    STROBE for observational studies (http://strobe-statement.org/)
    PRISMA for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (http://prisma-statement.org/)
    STARD for studies of diagnostic accuracy (http://www.stard-statement.org/)

    Otherwise, the Equator Network (http://www.equator-network.org/) has further reporting guidelines that should be consulted.

    Misconduct and Breaches of Publication Ethics

    All records and data presented in the manuscript must be accurate, without any fabrication, manipulation, or falsification. Any identified or suspected misconduct is subject to investigation by the Editorial Board of JCEH according to the guidelines recommended by COPE. If an investigation raises any valid concerns, the author will be contacted to address the issue. The Editor-in-Chief may decide to publish an Expression of Concern if suspicion is raised after an article has been published. If misconduct or a breach of publication ethics is established, regardless of the severity, then the journal reserves the right to retract the paper, publish a formal notice of misconduct, provide formal notice to an author’s institution, and/or not consider further submissions from the authors.

    Long-term digital archiving

    J-STAGE preserves its full digital library, including JCEH, with Portico in a dark archive (see https://www.portico.org/publishers/jstage/). In the event that the material becomes unavailable at J-STAGE, it will be released and made available by Portico.

    Waiver policy

    Waivers can be provided when the corresponding author is from a “Group A” Research4Life country or in cases of demonstrated financial hardship. In both cases, the journal will consider a pre-submission application for a waiver from any corresponding author to the Editor-in-Chief. Applications cannot be made after the peer review process has begun.

    The ability of an author to pay the APC does not influence editorial decisions. To avoid any possibility of undue influence, Editors involved with the decision-making process for articles are not involved in any deliberations on waivers.

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