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Ethical Policies and Procedures
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Ethical Policies Poster -- (Turkish
Version and Chinese Version
are also available)
Authorship
The Editors of the journals of the American Physiological Society (APS)
expect each author to have made an important scientific contribution to the
study and to be thoroughly familiar with the original data. The Editors also
expect each author to have read the complete manuscript and to take
responsibility for the content and completeness of the manuscript and to
understand that if the paper, or part of the paper, is found to be faulty or
fraudulent, that he/she shares responsibility with his/her coauthors. The
Mandatory Submission Form, which is published in the journals, should be
signed by each author. In cases in which obtaining a signature from each
author would delay publication, the corresponding author’s signature is
sufficient provided that the corresponding author understands that he or she
signs on behalf of the other authors who have not signed the form. An
author’s name can be removed only at his/her request, but all coauthors must
sign a change of authorship agreement for any change in authorship
(additions, removals, or change of order) to be made.
Author Conflict of
Interest
Authors of research and other articles are required at the time of
submission to disclose to the APS Publications Office any potential conflict
of interest (e.g., consultancies, stock ownership, equity interests,
patent-licensing arrangements) and that they accept full responsibility for
the conduct of the study, had full access to all the data, and controlled
the decision to publish. Failure to do so may jeopardize eventual
publication. If disclosures are to be made, the author(s) will be asked to
fill out a Conflict of Interest Disclosure form. The information provided in
the form, unless already disclosed in the submitted article, will be held in
confidence while the paper is under review. If the article is accepted for
publication, information on the potential conflict of interest -- including
a lack of control of the decision to publish -- will be included in the
Disclosures section, following the
Acknowledgments section.
Editor and Reviewer Conflict of Interest
Editors and Reviewers should avoid making decisions on papers for which
they may have a personal or financial conflict of interest. Reviewers who
are collaborating with the author, or who are working on very similar
research, should recuse themselves from reviewing a paper for which they
have a conflict. An Editor in Chief should have a Consulting Editor or
Associate Editor make a decision on a paper for which he or she has a
conflict. When an Editor in Chief submits a paper to his or her journal, the
paper is automatically assigned to a Guest Editor, a Consulting Editor, or
an Associate Editor, who will handle all aspects of the peer review of the
paper. The reviews are handled outside the web-based peer review system, so
that the Editor in Chief will not have access to them.
Duplicate Publication, Plagiarism, Falsification
The journals of the APS accept only papers that are original work, no
part of which has been submitted for publication elsewhere except as brief
abstracts. When submitting a paper, the corresponding author should include
copies of related manuscripts submitted or in press elsewhere. Taking
material from another’s work and submitting it as one’s own is considered
plagiarism. Taking material (including tables, figures, and data; or
extended text passages), from the author’s own prior publications is
considered redundant publication or self-plagiarism, and is not permitted.
Fabricating a report of research or suppressing or altering data to agree
with one’s conclusions is considered fraud. This includes altering figures
in such a way as to obscure, move, remove, or introduce information or
features.
Prior Publication
Material published by the author before submission in the following
categories is considered prior publication: 1) articles published in any
publication, even online-only, non-peer reviewed publications, such as
Nature Precedings or the physics arXiv; 2) articles, book chapters, and long abstracts containing original
data in figures and tables, especially in proceedings publications; 3)
widely circulated, copyrighted, or archival reports, such as the technical
reports of IBM, the preliminary reports of MIT, the institute reports of the
US Army, or the internal reports of NASA.
Doctoral dissertations that are made available by UMI/Proquest or
institutional repositories are not considered prior publication. Data
portions of submitted papers that have appeared on a web site will
be permitted, with the proviso that the author inform the Editor at the time
of the submission that such material exists so that the Editor can determine
the suitability of such material for publication. Failure to do so will
result in an automatic rejection of the manuscript. Examples of such work
include, but are not limited to, immunofluorescence micrographs and/or
animated gif/video files posted on a web site, or NIH-mandated posting of
DNA microarray data. After the article is published in a journal of the
American Physiological Society, the data should be removed from the author’s
web site.
Authors with concerns about possible prior publication that does not fall
clearly into one of these categories should contact the Director of
Publications and forward the material for examination.
Experiments Involving
Animals or Humans
Authors using humans, animals, or fetal tissue in their experiments
should refer to APS’s policies on those subjects. Links to these policies
can be found at
http://www.the-aps.org/publications/i4a/policies.htm.
Ethical Procedure
APS reviewers have a responsibility to report suspected duplicate
publication, fraud, plagiarism, or concerns about animal or human
experimentation to the Editor. A reviewer may recognize and report that
he/she is refereeing, or has recently refereed, a similar or identical paper
for another journal by the same author(s). Readers may report that they have
seen the same article elsewhere, or authors may see their own published work
being plagiarized. In all cases the first action of the journal Editor is to
inform the Publications Committee Chair through the Director of Publications
by supplying copies of 1) the relevant material and 2) a draft letter to the
corresponding author asking for an explanation in a nonjudgmental manner.
The Publications Committee Chair must approve any correspondence with the
author before it is sent to the author. If the author’s explanation is
unacceptable and it seems that serious unethical conduct has taken place,
the matter is referred to the Publications Committee. After deliberation, a
decision is made whether the case is serious enough to warrant a ban on
future submissions and/or if the offending author’s institution should be
informed. The decision has to be approved by the Executive Cabinet of the
APS Council, and the author has the right to appeal a sanction, with the
opportunity to present his/her position, to the Publications Committee and
the full APS Council.
If the infraction is less severe, the Editor, upon the advice of the
Publications Chair, sends the author a letter of reprimand and reminds the
author of APS publication policies; if the manuscript has been published,
the Editor may require the author to publish an apology in the journal to
correct the record. If, through the author’s actions, APS has violated the
copyright of another journal, the Publications Chair writes a letter of
apology to the other journal.
In serious cases of fraud that result in retraction of the article, a
retraction notice will be published in the journal and will be linked to the
article in the online version. The online version will also be marked
“retracted” with the retraction date.
Updated May 02, 2008.
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