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Ethical Policies and Procedures
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Ethical Policies Poster -- (Chinese
Version, French Version, German, Greek Version,
Japanese Version,
Portuguese Version,
Russian Version,
Spanish Version and Turkish
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
All funding sources supporting the work and all institutional or corporate
affiliations must be disclosed in the manuscript. All authors who have
commercial associations (e.g., consultancies, stock ownership, equity interests,
patent‑licensing arrangements) that might pose a conflict of interest in
connection with the submitted article must be disclosed in the Conflict of
Interest Disclosure section of the Web-based manuscript submission process
(http://www.apscentral.org). Authors who do have commercial associations must
also assert that they accept full responsibility for the conduct of the trial,
had full access to all the data, and controlled the decision to publish. If the
article is accepted for publication, information on the potential conflict of
interest must be included in the final manuscript, in a"Disclosures" section,
which will appear in the published article adjacent to any other
acknowledgements of funding, grants, gifts, and personal contributions.
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 (see
exception below for the Journal of Neurophysiology); 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.
Authors submitting to the Journal of Neurophysiology (JN) may
submit papers that have been previously posted to preprint servers and
other non peer-reviewed websites. Once you have submitted your
manuscript to JN, we ask that you not subsequently post it, or further
revisions to it, to a preprint server. If your manuscript receives a
final reject decision at JN or if you withdraw it from editorial
consideration at JN, this restriction is then lifted.
Authors
submitting manuscripts to preprint servers must be sure to retain the
copyright to their work, which can then be transferred to the publisher
when a later version of the work is accepted at a traditional
peer-reviewed journal (this is standard at arXiv and Nature Precedings).
Questions about whether a particular preprint server venue is allowed
under this rule should be addressed to the JN Editor in Chief, David
Linden at dlinden@jhmi.edu.
Authors will be
asked at submission to disclose whether their manuscript has been posted
to a preprint server, identify the preprint server, and to provide a
file of the most recent version of, and the DOI or a working link to,
the posting.
This is a trial
exception to APS policy that applies to submissions to Journal of
Neurophysiology through February, 2011 and subject to change
thereafter.
Experiments Involving
Animals or Humans
Authors using humans, animals, or fetal tissue in their experiments
should refer to APS’s policies on those subjects:
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.
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