Journal Policy
- Authorship and contributorship
- Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest
- Verifiability and reproducibility
- Intellectual property (authorship and licences)
- Research ethics and declarations of consent
- Withdrawal of articles, errata and retractions
- Quality assurance and transparency
- Technical integrity, accessibility and indexing
- Dealing with research misconduct
PUBLISSO and German Medical Science (GMS) are committed to promoting good research practice. All editors of, contributors to, and reviewers of the journals are required to act and make decisions in accordance with the “Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice – Code of Conduct” published by the German Research Foundation (DFG) (hereinafter referred to as the “DFG Code of Conduct”; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3923602).
This ethics policy is also based on the “Core Practices” recommended by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (https://publicationethics.org/core-practices)
1. Authorship and contributorship
In accordance with the DFG Code of Conduct, we define an author as “an individual who has made a genuine, identifiable contribution to the content of a research publication” (Guideline 14 of the DFG Code of Conduct). Anyone who submits an article to a journal must name as authors all those who made a genuine and identifiable contribution to the research work. Examples of such a contribution include participation in development and conceptual design, execution, interpretation, or drafting of the manuscript. Appropriate reference must also be made to the contributions of any other individuals involved in the research publication. If their contributions do not meet the criteria for authorship, they should be mentioned in the acknowledgements or listed as a contributor. ‘Guest authorship' (co-authorship awarded to an individual who did not contribute significantly to the study), ‘gift authorship’ (honorary authorship awarded to an individual who did not contribute significantly to the study) and ‘ghost authorship’ (failure to list as an author an individual who contributed significantly to the study) do not meet the standards of good research practice.
2. Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest
Authors are required to disclose any conflicts of interest – also known as competing interests – related to their submitted articles. All submitted manuscripts must include a “Conflicts of interest” section declaring any competing interests – financial or otherwise – or stating that none exist.
A conflict of interest is defined as a situation where the authors’ interpretation of the data or presentation of the information is influenced by, or could appear to be influenced by, their personal or professional relationships – financial or otherwise – with other individuals or companies. Any potential conflicts of interest that existed in the 36 months prior to submission of the manuscript must be disclosed.
Examples of financial conflicts of interest include, but are not limited to:
- individuals receiving remuneration, fees, grants or salaries from third parties (e.g. companies) that may stand to gain or lose in any way from the publication of the article, either now or in the future;
- ownership of stocks or shares in a company that may stand to gain or lose in any way from the publication of the article, either now or in the future;
- patents held or applied for that are related to the content of the manuscript;
- individuals receiving remuneration, fees, grants or salaries from a company that holds, or has applied for, patents that are related to the content of the manuscript.
Non-financial conflicts of interest include, but are not limited to, political, personal, religious, ideological, scientific and intellectual conflicts of interest. Authors from pharmaceutical companies or other commercial organizations that are involved in clinical research should declare these affiliations as a conflict of interest.
Editors and reviewers are also obliged to declare any conflict of interest in relation to the authors or the manuscript and will be excluded from the peer review process should a conflict of interest exist.
3. Verifiability and reproducibility
By submitting their article, the authors confirm that the research data on which it is based has not been falsified, invented or otherwise manipulated and that it has been fully and thoroughly documented (Guideline 12 of the DFG Code of Conduct). Upon request, and for a reasonable period of time after publication, authors must be able to provide adequate documentation or data to allow the research results to be verified. The sources used must also be disclosed in an appropriate form and correctly cited.
PUBLISSO and GMS support authors in publishing research data related to their articles in open access (OA). Authors can use the ZB MED RDI research data repository for publication. This repository allows authors to publish research data free of charge under various open access licences (https://www.publisso.de/en/research-data-management/rd-publishing/).
Research data published in ZB MED RDI is assigned the same kind of persistent identifier, a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), as that assigned to articles published on the PUBLISSO platform. This allows the research data to be cited independently from the article. Research data deposited in ZB MED RDI is digitally preserved for the long term by ZB MED, provided that the file format allows this.
4. Intellectual property (authorship and licences)
All publications on the PUBLISSO platform are accessible to readers free of charge and without having to register. All publications are open access documents available under Creative Commons license conditions. The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC-BY 4.0) has been applied to all publications since 2015 (see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ for more information). This license permits users to share, copy, distribute and build upon documents, provided that the authors and source are appropriately credited. The license also permits content to be analysed using text and data mining technologies. The corresponding license information is included with each article.
As the creators of the research work, the authors continue to hold all the rights to their publication. They merely grant PUBLISSO/GMS a simple right of use, allowing them to publish the work online and store it electronically in databases.
Authors are required to clearly identify any passages of text taken from their own works or from the works of others and to indicate the source accordingly.
5. Research ethics and declarations of consent
5.1. Human and animal rights
Research involving human subjects, including research on human material and data, must be conducted in accordance with the version of the Declaration of Helsinki applicable at the time of the research (https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles-for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects/). The research must be approved by an appropriate ethics committee before the study begins. All manuscripts that constitute such research are required to include a statement to this effect. Should a study be exempted from approval by an ethics committee, this must also be stated in the manuscript. Submissions may be rejected if the editors consider that the research has not been conducted within an appropriate ethical framework.
All manuscripts on research involving animal experimentation must explain the measures taken to guarantee ethical treatment of the animals involved.
5.2. Declarations of consent
In the case of research involving human subjects, participants must sign an informed consent form in order to take part in the study. The fact that informed consent has been obtained should be indicated in the manuscript.
For any manuscripts that contain specific details, images or videos of individual study participants, it is necessary to obtain informed written consent from the participants confirming that such identifiable data may be published. The manuscript must also include a statement confirming that consent has been given to publish such data. In cases where images are not identifiable and no identifiable details of an individual are given in the manuscript, it may not be necessary to obtain consent to publish the images. The final decision on whether this is necessary lies with the editors.
6. Withdrawal of articles, errata and retractions
At any time during the review process, authors may decide to withdraw their manuscript from consideration.
Should an author become aware of, or be notified of, errors in the content of the text or in the underlying data after the publication of the final article, they must alert the editors of the journal and the PUBLISSO/GMS editorial team. Any necessary post-publication changes to documents that are not a result of research misconduct are documented as corrections or errata, depending on the type of error and the type of data involved. Changes affecting the citation or content of an article are clearly presented in an erratum section in all publication files.
To decide whether there are sufficient grounds to retract a publication and how retraction should be carried out, PUBLISSO/GMS and the editors of the respective journals follow the advice set out in the Retraction Guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.1.4). These state that editors shall have sufficient grounds to retract an article in the event of various forms of research misconduct, such as manipulated data, plagiarism, copyright infringements or failure to disclose a conflict of interest. Even where an article is retracted, the metadata still remains visible.
To encourage post-publication discussion, readers who wish to comment on an article or discuss its results may do so in the form of a short communication or a letter to the editor.
7. Quality assurance and transparency
7.1. Gold open access publishing & preprints
Only gold open access publishing, where an article is made freely and permanently accessible to everyone immediately upon initial publication, is permitted. Submissions where the manuscript, or substantial parts thereof, have been published or submitted for publication elsewhere are not accepted. However, articles based on a conference presentation (abstract or poster) or a dissertation (or other document in support of candidature for a qualification) are allowed, provided this is made clear in the submission.
To encourage scientific discussion, the publication of preprints on relevant preprint servers (https://asapbio.org/preprint-servers) is allowed at any time, both before and after submission to a journal. This is conditional upon authors including the citation of the article in the preprint publication once an article has been published by PUBLISSO/GMS.
7.2. Quality assurance: peer review
All articles published in the journals are rigorously reviewed. Research papers, review articles and most other types of articles undergo peer review, i.e. review by independent experts in the relevant field. Review by members of a journal’s editorial board alone is only permitted for letters to the editor, notifications, etc.
All submissions are assessed by the journal editors to determine whether they are suitable for the journal and whether peer review is initiated. Generally, this review is conducted by two independent reviewers. The editors make their decision on the manuscript based on the reviewers’ assessment and communicate this decision and the reviewers’ comments to the authors.
Both the reviewers and the editors of the journals treat submitted manuscripts as strictly confidential as per Guideline 16 of the DFG Code of Conduct and undertake not to use submitted manuscripts for their own gain (e.g. for their own publications). Information on the manuscripts and the manuscripts themselves are only made available to the corresponding author, solicited and accepted reviewers, the editors and the editorial team. Manuscripts can only be shared with editors of other journals with the authors’ consent.
The editorial boards of the individual journals and the editing professional societies or institutions are responsible for organising and conducting the peer review process. Individual journals handle the peer review process in different ways. More information about the review process used by each journal can be found under the “About” tab on the relevant journal’s page. PUBLISSO/GMS provides journal editors with a manuscript and peer review management system that enables single-blind reviews, where the reviewers remain anonymous to the authors but author names are known to the reviewers. The journal editors are also free to organise the peer review process without this system by choosing a different peer review process that is commonly used in academic publishing in their discipline.
7.3. Transparency
All journals (https://journals.publisso.de/en/journals/overview) have one or more editors. Information on their institutional affiliation and contact details can be found under the “About” tab on the web page for each journal. All journals have distinctive titles to ensure that they cannot be mistaken for other journals. Articles in the journals are listed consecutively unless stated otherwise in a journal’s policies.
PUBLISSO and GMS, as scholarly-led and scholarly-owned publishing services, support the Diamond Open Access model. To facilitate OA scientific and scholarly publishing, a business model in which the costs incurred are borne by the editing professional societies or institutions has been developed. This includes the costs of peer review management, editing, online hosting and archiving. Most of the journals are Diamond Open Access journals. However, some of the journals charge authors an article processing charge (APC) to cover the costs. More information is available under the “For authors” tab for each journal.
As non-profit publishing services providers, PUBLISSO and GMS do not generate revenue from advertising. Journal editors may add sponsor information. To ensure that the scientific objectivity is not compromised, any articles that are wholly or partly of an advertising nature (e.g. product reviews) must be clearly marked as such.
8. Technical integrity, accessibility and indexing
8.1. Technical operation, digital preservation and data integrity
As the technical operator of the PUBLISSO platform, ZB MED – Information Centre for Life Sciences works to ensure that all documents are freely and permanently accessible. Barring a fundamental change in the conditions of the service offered by ZB MED, the minimum period for which a document must be accessible is five years. The time period and location in which documents are available may, however, be restricted in justified cases, for example by defining certain IP address ranges that may or may not access the documents. ZB MED undertakes to ensure the digital preservation of content published through the PUBLISSO platform. The three specialist national libraries TIB, ZBW and ZB MED operate a joint digital preservation system which is based on the Rosetta software and hosted and operated by TIB. In addition, the journal articles are archived by the German National Library.
Each document is assigned two unique persistent identifiers to ensure they can be cited anywhere and at any time in the future: a URN (Uniform Resource Name) and a DOI (Digital Object Identifier). Any changes to the documents that may be required are documented. Even where an article is retracted, the metadata still remains visible. (See also 6.)
8.2. Accessibility and indexing in databases
Electronic documents are indexed using structured metadata and XML files of the articles are provided. The terms used for subject indexing are generally supplied by authors in the form of free keywords in German and English. The metadata are made available via a freely accessible OAI-PMH interface in the Dublin Core format (https://journals.publisso.de/en/publisso_gold/oa) and via DataCite.
The documents are integrated into various national and international databases and search portals, depending on the suitability of the journal and whether it has been incorporated in the database; examples include DOAJ, LIVIVO, MEDLINE, PubMed Central, Scopus, Web of Science.
9. Dealing with research misconduct
Journal editors deal with allegations of research misconduct against one of their authors by following the procedure recommended by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2019.2.26) and Guidelines 18 and 19 of the DFG Code of Conduct. This includes immediately involving the author in the investigation of the allegations as well as maintaining maximum confidentiality.
