Publishing Policies

The following policies apply to all journals published by JMED Research and Development on Medical Sciences unless a journal publishes a more specific disciplinary policy.

JMED is committed to maintaining the integrity, accuracy, transparency, and reliability of the scholarly record. Authors, reviewers, editors, editorial board members, guest editors, publisher personnel, and service providers are expected to comply with these policies.

Editorial Independence

Editors have authority over the evaluation, acceptance, rejection, correction, and retraction of journal content.

The publisher provides administrative, technological, financial, and production support but does not direct editors to accept or reject manuscripts for financial, personal, institutional, religious, political, or commercial reasons.

Editors evaluate manuscripts according to their relevance, originality, methodological soundness, ethical compliance, clarity, scholarly contribution, and reviewer assessments.

The payment, waiver, or nonpayment of publication charges does not influence editorial decisions.

Peer-Review Policy

Initial Administrative Review

The editorial office checks each submission for:

• Completeness of required files;
• Compliance with manuscript formatting;
• Authorship information;
• Required ethical declarations;
• Conflict-of-interest disclosure;
• Funding disclosure;
• Data availability statement;
• AI-use declaration; and
• Basic conformity with the selected journal’s requirements.

Incomplete submissions may be returned to the corresponding author before editorial assessment.

Editorial Screening

The Editor-in-Chief or an assigned editor evaluates the manuscript for:

• Alignment with the journal’s aims and scope;
• Scholarly relevance;
• Basic methodological adequacy;
• Quality and clarity of writing;
• Originality;
• Ethical acceptability;
• Excessive textual overlap;
• Duplicate or redundant publication; and
• Suitability for external peer review.

A manuscript may be declined during editorial screening when it falls outside the journal’s scope, does not meet minimum scholarly standards, contains serious ethical concerns, or cannot reasonably be improved through peer review.

External Peer Review

Manuscripts that pass editorial screening are normally evaluated by at least two independent reviewers with relevant expertise.

JMED journals use double-anonymous peer review. The identities of authors are withheld from reviewers, and reviewer identities are not disclosed to authors, except when a journal has formally adopted a different and publicly stated review model.

Editors select reviewers based on subject expertise, research experience, absence of relevant conflicts of interest, and ability to provide a timely and objective assessment.

Reviewer Evaluation

Reviewers are asked to assess:

• Relevance to the journal;
• Originality and contribution;
• Adequacy of the literature;
• Appropriateness of the methodology;
• Accuracy and clarity of results;
• Strength of interpretation;
• Consistency of conclusions with evidence;
• Ethical compliance;
• Quality of tables, figures, and references; and
• Overall suitability for publication.

Editorial Decisions

The journal may issue the following decisions:

• Accept;
• Accept subject to minor revisions;
• Major revisions required;
• Reject with an invitation to submit a substantially revised manuscript as a new submission; or
• Reject.

Reviewer recommendations are advisory. The final decision is made by the responsible editor.

Revised Manuscripts

Authors must submit:

• A clean revised manuscript;
• A marked or highlighted version, when requested; and
• A point-by-point response explaining how each editorial and reviewer comment was addressed.

Substantial revisions may be returned to the original reviewers or assessed by the editor.

Confidentiality

Editors and reviewers must treat submitted manuscripts, data, correspondence, and reviewer reports as confidential.

Unpublished information must not be used for personal, professional, financial, or research advantage.

Conflicted Submissions

An editor must not handle a manuscript involving:

• Their own work;
• A close family member;
• A current student or direct subordinate;
• A recent or close collaborator;
• A person with whom the editor has a significant dispute;
• A financial relationship; or
• Another circumstance that may reasonably affect impartiality.

The manuscript must be assigned to another qualified editor.

Duties of Authors

Authors must:

• Submit original and accurate work;
• Ensure that the manuscript is not simultaneously under consideration elsewhere;
• Identify all sources and properly cite the work of others;
• Report methods and findings honestly;
• Retain relevant research records;
• Obtain ethics approval and informed consent when required;
• Protect participant and patient confidentiality;
• Disclose funding and conflicts of interest;
• Identify all persons who meet the journal’s authorship criteria;
• Obtain approval from all authors before submission;
• Disclose substantial use of generative artificial intelligence;
• Respond to editorial and reviewer comments professionally;
• Correct significant errors discovered after publication; and
• Cooperate with legitimate publication ethics investigations.

Duties of Reviewers

Reviewers must:

• Accept assignments only when they possess relevant expertise;
• Declare conflicts of interest before accepting a review;
• Maintain manuscript confidentiality;
• Evaluate manuscripts objectively and respectfully;
• Support major criticisms with clear reasons;
• Identify relevant literature that may have been overlooked;
• Alert the editor to suspected plagiarism, duplication, fabrication, falsification, or other ethical concerns;
• Refrain from contacting authors directly;
• Refrain from using unpublished information;
• Submit reviews within the agreed period; and
• Avoid uploading confidential manuscripts to public artificial intelligence systems.

Reviewers must decline an assignment when they cannot provide an impartial, competent, or timely assessment.

Duties of Editors

Editors must:

• Protect editorial independence;
• Evaluate manuscripts fairly;
• Select qualified and impartial reviewers;
• Protect manuscript and reviewer confidentiality;
• Manage conflicts of interest;
• Base decisions on scholarly merit;
• Give authors reasonable opportunities to respond to concerns;
• Investigate credible allegations of misconduct;
• Publish corrections and retractions when necessary;
• Avoid manipulating citations or publication statistics;
• Maintain the distinction between editorial and commercial functions; and
• Ensure that submissions from editors, board members, or publisher personnel receive independent handling.

Authorship and Contributorship

Authorship should be limited to individuals who have made substantial scholarly contributions to the work, participated in drafting or critically revising the manuscript, approved the final version, and agreed to be accountable for their contributions.

Individuals who provided administrative support, funding acquisition alone, general supervision, language editing, technical assistance, or data collection without sufficient scholarly contribution should normally be acknowledged rather than listed as authors.

The corresponding author is responsible for:

• Confirming that every listed author qualifies for authorship;
• Confirming the approved author order;
• Obtaining approval of the submitted and final versions;
• Managing communication with the journal;
• Providing required declarations; and
• Informing all authors of editorial decisions.

Changes in Authorship

Requests to add, remove, or reorder authors after submission must include:

• A clear explanation;
• Written agreement from all existing authors;
• Written agreement from any author being added or removed; and
• Approval from the responsible editor.

Changes after acceptance are permitted only in exceptional and properly documented circumstances.

Prohibited Authorship Practices

JMED does not permit:

• Gift or honorary authorship;
• Guest authorship;
• Ghost authorship;
• Purchased authorship;
• Sale of author positions; or
• Listing artificial intelligence as an author.

Conflicts of Interest

Authors, reviewers, and editors must disclose relationships or circumstances that could reasonably influence their judgment.

Conflicts may be:

• Financial;
• Employment-related;
• Institutional;
• Academic;
• Personal;
• Professional;
• Political;
• Religious; or
• Intellectual.

Authors must disclose funding sources, sponsor involvement, financial relationships, advisory roles, patents, consulting work, personal relationships, or other relevant interests.

The existence of a conflict does not automatically prevent publication. Failure to disclose a relevant conflict may result in editorial action.

Ethical Oversight

Human-Participant Research

Research involving human participants must comply with applicable ethical standards and must receive approval from a recognized research ethics committee or institutional review board before data collection when approval is required.

Authors must state:

• Name of the approving ethics committee;
• Institution;
• Approval or protocol number;
• Date of approval; and
• Consent procedure.

When formal ethics review was not required, authors must explain why and identify the policy or authority supporting the exemption.

Informed Consent

Authors must obtain informed consent when research involves identifiable participants, patients, personal information, photographs, audio recordings, videos, case histories, or other material that may permit identification.

Consent to participate is different from consent to publish identifiable information. Both must be obtained when applicable.

Vulnerable Participants

Research involving children, persons with limited decision-making capacity, institutionalized populations, economically disadvantaged groups, or other vulnerable participants must include appropriate safeguards.

Animal Research

Animal research must be approved by an appropriate animal ethics or care committee and must follow applicable standards for humane care and use.

Clinical Trials

Clinical trials must be registered in an appropriate public trial registry according to applicable disciplinary and regulatory requirements. The registration number should be reported in the manuscript.

Patient Privacy

Authors must remove unnecessary identifying information. Altering identifying details to avoid consent is not acceptable when the changes affect the scientific meaning of the report.

Research and Publication Misconduct

JMED considers the following serious concerns:

• Fabrication of data or results;
• Falsification or selective alteration of data;
• Plagiarism;
• Inappropriate text recycling;
• Duplicate or redundant publication;
• Manipulation of images, tables, or figures;
• Citation manipulation;
• Undisclosed conflicts of interest;
• Unethical research;
• Authorship manipulation;
• Peer-review manipulation;
• False reviewer identities;
• Paper-mill involvement;
• Purchased manuscripts;
• Undisclosed artificial intelligence use;
• Misrepresentation of ethics approval; and
• Deliberate submission of false information.

The publisher may request raw data, research records, ethics documents, consent forms, laboratory records, institutional confirmation, author correspondence, or other evidence.

When credible concerns arise, the journal may contact the authors, their institutions, ethics committees, funders, or other appropriate bodies.

Possible actions include:

• Requesting clarification;
• Suspending editorial review;
• Rejecting the manuscript;
• Withdrawing an acceptance;
• Publishing a correction;
• Publishing an expression of concern;
• Retracting the article;
• Restricting future submissions; or
• Referring the matter to the relevant institution or authority.

Plagiarism and Textual Overlap

Submitted manuscripts may be screened using similarity-detection software.

A similarity score is not used as the sole basis for a decision. Editors assess the location, extent, context, attribution, and nature of the overlap.

Properly cited quotations, references, standard methodological language, and legitimate descriptions may contribute to a similarity score without constituting plagiarism.

Unattributed copying, close paraphrasing, inappropriate reuse of previously published material, or attempts to conceal duplication may result in rejection or post-publication action.

Duplicate and Redundant Publication

Authors must not submit the same manuscript to more than one journal at the same time.

Publication of substantially similar findings in multiple articles without transparent cross-reference and justification is prohibited.

Authors must disclose:

• Related manuscripts;
• Previous reports from the same dataset;
• Conference abstracts;
• Preprints;
• Theses or dissertations;
• Institutional reports; and
• Other prior dissemination relevant to the submission.

A thesis, dissertation, conference abstract, or preprint does not automatically prevent journal publication, but its existence must be disclosed and the submitted manuscript must comply with the journal’s originality policy.

Citation Practices

References must be accurate, relevant, and necessary.

Authors must not include citations solely to increase the citation count of:

• The journal;
• An editor;
• A reviewer;
• The author;
• The author’s institution; or
• A particular publication group.

Editors and reviewers must not require irrelevant citations as a condition of acceptance.

JMED may investigate patterns suggesting coercive citation, citation cartels, or manipulated referencing.

Data Availability and Reproducibility

Authors should preserve data and research records according to applicable institutional, legal, ethical, and disciplinary requirements.

Each research article should include a data availability statement indicating whether the supporting data:

• Are available in a public repository;
• Are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request;
• Are restricted because of privacy, consent, legal, or ethical limitations;
• Belong to a third party; or
• Are not applicable.

Authors must not publicly disclose confidential, identifiable, proprietary, or legally restricted data.

The journal may request data or supporting documentation during review or after publication when questions arise regarding the reliability of the work.

Artificial Intelligence Policy

Artificial intelligence and AI-assisted technologies cannot be listed as authors because they cannot assume responsibility for the accuracy, originality, integrity, or ethical compliance of a scholarly work.

Authors remain fully responsible for all submitted content.

Substantial use of generative AI must be disclosed when it contributed to:

• Drafting or revising text;
• Data processing or analysis;
• Code generation;
• Translation;
• Image generation or alteration;
• Literature synthesis;
• Development of research materials; or
• Other substantive parts of the research or manuscript.
• The disclosure should identify:
• Name and version of the tool;
• Provider;
• Purpose of use;
• Parts of the work affected; and
• Manner in which the output was verified.

AI-generated references must be checked against original sources. Fabricated or inaccurate citations remain the responsibility of the authors.

Reviewers and editors must not upload confidential manuscripts, unpublished data, reviewer reports, or personal information to public AI platforms without explicit authorization and adequate data-protection safeguards.

Routine spelling, grammar, formatting, and reference-management tools do not normally require disclosure unless they generate substantive content.

Corrections, Retractions, and Expressions of Concern

Corrections

A correction may be issued when an error affects the accuracy, interpretation, attribution, or presentation of an article but does not invalidate its main findings.

The correction notice must:

• Identify the original article;
• Explain the error;
• Present the corrected information;
• State who initiated the correction; and
• Link to the original article.

Retractions

An article may be retracted when:

• Findings are unreliable;
• Data were fabricated or falsified;
• Plagiarism occurred;
• The work was published elsewhere without proper disclosure;
• Peer review was manipulated;
• Research was conducted unethically;
• Authorship was seriously misrepresented;
• A major undisclosed conflict affected the work; or
• Another serious concern invalidates the article.

The retraction notice must remain freely accessible and explain the reason for retraction. The original article should remain available but be clearly marked as retracted.

Expressions of Concern

An expression of concern may be issued when credible serious concerns exist but an investigation remains incomplete or inconclusive.

Article Removal

Removal is reserved for exceptional circumstances, such as a legal requirement, serious privacy violation, or immediate and substantial risk of harm. A notice explaining the removal should remain available whenever legally possible.

Complaints and Appeals

Complaints may concern:

• Editorial conduct;
• Peer review;
• Publication delays;
• Conflicts of interest;
• Ethical concerns;
• Published content;
• Fees;
• Website information;
• Journal personnel; or
• Failure to follow a published policy.

A complaint should include:

• Name and contact information of the complainant;
• Journal and manuscript or article concerned;
• Clear description of the concern;
• Supporting evidence; and
• Desired resolution, when applicable.

Authors may appeal a rejection when they believe that a material error, procedural irregularity, or significant misunderstanding affected the decision.

An appeal must address the reasons stated in the decision letter and provide specific grounds for reconsideration. Disagreement with reviewer opinion alone is not sufficient.

Complaints and appeals should be sent to: editor@jrdmsonline.com

Whenever possible, the matter will be reviewed by a person who was not directly involved in the disputed decision.

The result of the publisher-level review is final unless new material evidence becomes available.

Special Issues and Guest Editors

Special issues must remain subject to the same standards as regular journal content.

Every special issue must have:

• A clearly defined topic;
• A publicly identified guest editor;
• A call for papers or transparent commissioning process;
• The same authorship, ethics, and peer-review requirements;
• Independent review of papers submitted by the guest editor;
• Oversight by the journal’s Editor-in-Chief; and
• Clear disclosure of sponsorship or funding.

Guest editors may recommend decisions, but the Editor-in-Chief retains responsibility for the published content.

The journal will not publish a special issue controlled entirely by an external organization without adequate editorial oversight.

Open Access, Copyright, and Licensing

Each journal must clearly identify:

• Whether its content is open access;
• The copyright holder;
• The exact license;
• Author self-archiving rights;
• Permitted reuse;
• Commercial-use restrictions, if any; and
• Requirements for attribution.

The applicable copyright and license must appear on:

• The journal website;
• Every article landing page; and
• Every published PDF or full-text version.

JMED does not describe content as open access unless it is available under an appropriate open license.

Article Processing Charges, Waivers, and Refunds

Publication charges must be disclosed before submission on the website of each journal.

The journal must state:

• Exact amount;
• Currency;
• Services covered;
• Payment stage;
• Official payment recipient;
• Payment methods;
• Invoice and receipt procedures;
• Waiver and discount conditions; and
• Refund conditions.

Payment of a charge does not guarantee acceptance and does not influence peer review.

Unless a journal clearly states otherwise, no publication payment is requested until a manuscript has completed editorial evaluation and has been formally accepted.

Waivers and Discounts

Waivers or discounts may be considered for:

• Students without institutional funding;
• Authors from low-resource settings;
• Unfunded research;
• Invited content;
• Editorially justified circumstances; or
• Other categories published by the individual journal.

A waiver request is handled separately from editorial evaluation.

Refunds

Publication fees are generally nonrefundable after substantial production services have been completed or the article has been published.

A refund may be considered when:

• Duplicate payment occurred;
• The journal cannot complete publication;
• Payment was made in error; or
• Another circumstance is covered by the journal’s published refund policy.

Advertising, Sponsorship, and Funding

Advertising and sponsorship must not influence editorial decisions.

Advertisements must be clearly distinguishable from editorial content.

The publisher will not accept advertising that is unlawful, deceptive, discriminatory, or inconsistent with the professional purpose of the journals.

Sponsors do not have authority to:

• Select reviewers;
• Suppress findings;
• Require acceptance;
• Alter conclusions;
• Prevent corrections; or
• Control editorial decisions.

Any financial support for a journal, issue, or article must be disclosed.

Direct Marketing and Manuscript Solicitation

Communications inviting manuscripts must be accurate, professional, and relevant to the recipient’s field.

JMED does not use:

• False claims of indexing;
• Guaranteed acceptance;
• Misleading deadlines;
• Fabricated editorial endorsements;
• False impact factors;
• Deceptive statements about journal prestige; or
• Repeated unsolicited messages after a recipient requests removal.

Recipients may request removal from promotional mailing lists.

Privacy and Data Protection

JMED collects personal information needed for manuscript submission, peer review, publication, correspondence, payment processing, and website operation.

Information may include:

• Names;
• Email addresses;
• Institutional affiliations;
• ORCID identifiers;
• Postal addresses;
• Telephone numbers;
• Manuscripts;
• Reviewer reports;
• Payment records; and
• Website-use information.

Personal information is used only for legitimate publishing and administrative purposes.

Reviewer identities are protected according to the journal’s review model. Personal information is not sold to advertisers or unrelated third parties.

Information may be disclosed when required by law, necessary to investigate misconduct, or needed to provide an authorized publishing service.