PJP Policies

OPEN ACCESS POLICY

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. As per Open Access policy of Pak J Pathol, copyright holder of a scholarly work grants usage rights to others using an open license (Creative Commons or equivalent) allowing for immediate free access to the work and permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose.

DATA SHARING POLICY  

Pak J Pathol has policy on data sharing. We require that the data generated by research supporting the article be made openly and publicly available upon publication of article.  Pak J Pathol require data from clinical trials to be made available upon reasonable request.

Clinical trials that begin enrolling participants on or after 1 January 2019 must include a data sharing plan in the trial's registration according to the ICMJE's policy regarding trial registration. If the data sharing plan changes after registration this should be reflected in the statement submitted and published with the manuscript, and updated in the registry record.

Data sharing statements indicates the following: whether individual deidentified participant data (including data dictionaries) what data in particular is shared; whether additional, related documents is available (e.g., study protocol,  informed consent form, statistical analysis plan, clinical study report etc.); when the data is available and for how long; by what access criteria data is shared (including with whom, for what types of analyses, and by what mechanism). Data are available indefinitely immediately after publication of article. 

REPOSITORY POLICY 

Author Self-Archiving Policy

As Pak J Pathol is an Open Access journal authors are entitled to make their article publicly available according to the terms of the CC BY license:

  • CC BY-NC
  • Authors who have published under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license may share and distribute their article on non-commercial websites and repositories.

 Re-use guidelines for open access content

When posting, distributing or reusing Open Access articles, the journal should be clearly attributed as the original place of publication and correct citation details should be given. Authors should also deposit the URL of their published article in any repository, in addition to the Version of Record.

When making their article available according to the terms of their Open Access license, we strongly encourage authors to deposit the Version of Record. This will guarantee that the definitive version is readily available to those accessing your article from such repositories and means that your article is more likely to be cited correctly.

EDITORIAL POLICY

The Journal takes great care to secure the confidentiality and integrity of the peer-review process; it is considered a violation of this confidentiality for authors to identify or attempt to communicate directly with peer reviewers or journal editors regarding their manuscript. All editorial communications should be directed through the Editorial Office at pakjpathol@hotmail.com.

In general, the manuscript should not already have been formally published in any journal or in any other citable form. In any case where there is the potential for overlap or duplication we require that authors are transparent. Authors should declare any potentially overlapping publications on submission.

 SCIENTIFIC MISCONDUCT

Regarding any matter associated with scientific misconduct, Pak J Pathol follows the guidelines mentioned by  Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) https://publicationethics.org/misconduct, and The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) https://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf .

Following these guidelines, Pak J Pathol can handle scientific misconducts like falsification of data, plagiarism, redundant and duplicate publication, simultaneous submission, improprieties of authorship, misappropriation of the ideas of others and violation of generally accepted research practices. Others can be material failure to comply with legislative and regulatory requirements affecting research, inappropriate behavior in relation to misconduct, Salami slicing (or salami publication) and plagiarism check. Their details are mentioned below:

  • Falsification of data: This ranges from fabrication to deceptive reporting of findings and omission of conflicting data, or willful suppression and/or distortion of data.
  • Plagiarism, redundant and duplicate publication: The appropriation of the language, ideas or thoughts of another without crediting their true source and representation of them as one’s own original work.
  • Simultaneous submission: This occurs when a person submits a paper to different publications at the same time, which can result in more than one journal publishing that particular paper. Articles submitted for publication must be original and must not have been submitted to any other journal.We require authors to disclose any details of related papers in press, including translations  
  • Improprieties of authorship: Improper assignment of credit, such as excluding others, misrepresentation of the same material as original in more than one publication, inclusion of individuals as authors who have not made a definite contribution to the work published or submission of multi-authored publications without the concurrence of all authors.
  • Misappropriation of the ideas of others: an important aspect of scholarly activity is the exchange of ideas among colleagues. Scholars can acquire novel ideas from others during the process of reviewing grant applications and manuscripts. However, improper use of such information can constitute fraud. Wholesale appropriation of such material constitutes misconduct.
  • Violation of generally accepted research practices: Serious deviation from accepted practices in proposing or carrying out research, improper manipulation of experiments to obtain biased results, deceptive statistical or analytical manipulations, or improper reporting of results. A lack of declaration of competing interests and of funding/sponsorship, and other failures of transparency.
  • Material failure to comply with legislative and regulatory requirements affecting research: Including but not limited to serious or substantial, repeated, willful violations of applicable local regulations and law involving the use of funds, care of animals, human subjects, investigational drugs, recombinant products, new devices, or radioactive, biological or chemical materials.
  • Inappropriate behaviour in relation to misconduct: This includes unfounded or knowingly false accusations of misconduct, failure to report known or suspected misconduct, withholding of information relevant to a claim or misconduct and retaliation against persons involved in the allegation or investigation.
  • Salami slicing (or salami publication):It is described as unnecessary splitting of findings from a single study across several publications. Salami slicing is considered a form of redundant publication. We do not accept publications where we suspect salami slicing has occurred, as these publications have the potential to skew the scientific record and create biases in the results of meta-analyses. All submitted articles will be assessed for potential salami slicing by our editorial team as part of our standard checks. Studies that share significant similarities in the hypotheses, population, and methods should usually be presented to the readers in a single paper. If you believe that you have legitimate grounds to submit multiple publications based on the same study, we ask that you inform the editorial office about any and all potentially overlapping papers (published or unpublished). For further information about best practice please refer to the ICMJE guidance on overlapping publications.

Plagiarism detection: Pak J Pathol checks the similarity index by using plagiarism software prior publication of manuscripts. Submission to Pak J Pathol implies that the work described has not been accepted for publication elsewhere, that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere and does not duplicate material already published.

POLICY FOR COMPLAINTS HANDLING

This procedure applies to complaints that relate to content, procedures or policies that are the responsibility of Pak J Pathol or our editorial staff. Complaints may provide an opportunity and a spur for improvement, and so we aim to respond quickly, courteously, and constructively. The procedure outlined below aims to be fair to those making complaints and those complained about. Complaints must relate to content or a procedure that was the responsibility of Pak J Pathol or our editorial staff. We define a complaint as: ‘anything defined as a complaint by the complainant’ and ‘anything we believe goes beyond an expression of disagreement with a decision and identifies a perceived failure of process or severe misjudgment. For that Pak J Pathol appeals procedure will be opted to make a complaint. It should be directly emailed to pakjpathol@hotmail.com. 

  • All complaints will be reviewed initially by our editorial team.  
  • This team will direct the complaint to the relevant member of the editorial or publishing staff and escalate if required.
  • In the case that this initial response is felt to be insufficient, the complainant can request that their complaint is escalated to a more senior member of the team.
  • If the complainant remains unhappy, complaints may be escalated to Pak J Pathol Chief Editor, whose decision is final in view to satisfy and justify the complaint.

 POST- PUBLICATION DISCUSSIONS AND CORRECTIONS POLICY

Correction Policy:

Erratum is an error that affects the veracity of the published paper, the reputation of the authors. Errata are published as a distinct article. An erratum should be published in the case of a serious mistake or a factual error or omission in the methods, results, or conclusions. To warrant an erratum the scientific error must be serious enough to affect the replication and interpretation of results.

Cases that warrant an erratum:

  • A figure was not explained correctly.
  • Incorrect results were included in a table.
  • An author is accidentally missed out.

A notice of correction will be issued by Pak J Pathol to article and correct considerable errors that appear in online articles when these errors considerably affect the content or understanding of the work reported (e.g., error in data presentation) or when the error affects the publication’s metadata (e.g., misspelling of an author’s name). In these cases, Pak J Pathol will publish a correction that will be linked to the original article.

We expect authors to inform the journal’s office of any errors they have observed (or have been informed of) in their article once published.

Removal of Published Content:

In exceptional circumstances, the Pak J Pathol reserves the right to remove a paper from Pak J Pathol online platforms. This may happen when:

  • Pak J Pathol has been advised that content is defamatory;
  • Infringes a third party’s intellectual property right, right to privacy or another legal right;
  • It poses an immediate and serious risk to health if acted upon.

Criteria for the Emergency Takedown:

The emergency takedown will be happened if:

  • The publication of a paper contains a photograph in which a particular individual can be identified;
  • The paper includes the personal identifying information of an individual that lead to an individual being easily identified.

Addenda:

An addendum is a notification to add information to a published paper. It should be noted that the addenda do not contradict the original publication and are not used to fix the error. For the errors, the Pak J Pathol will publish a correction notice. Actually, if the author needs to update or add some key information then, they can publish an addendum. According to the Pak J Pathol policies, the addenda may be peer-reviewed and are normally subject to oversight by the chief editor.