International Journal of Orofacial Research

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Editorial Policy

The policies are based on the recommendations of ICMJE and COPE.

Submission fee and Article processing fee

IJOFR does NOT charge authors article submission fees and it does NOT charge article processing fees.

Peer review:

All the original research articles to be published in IJOFR will be peer reviewed. IJOFR adopts a double-blind review policy. For those authored by a member of a journal’s editorial team, the editor will have no input or influence on the peer review process or publication decision for their own article.

Detailed peer review policy can be found HERE.

Authorship

Confers credit,
Has academic, social and financial implications,
Implies responsibility and accountability for published work.

The author should meet all of the four criteria as recommended by International committee of medical journal editors (ICMJE).

Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
Final approval of the version to be published; AND
Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

IJOFR encourages use of ORCID ID (digital identifier) for all the authors at the time of submission. To get ORCID IDs, please log on to http://orcid.org/

Acquisition of funding, the collection of data or general supervision of the research itself does not account for authorship.
IJOFR wishes any individual who meets the criteria for authorship not be excluded.

Acknowledging contributors

All the contributors who do not qualify for authorship should be listed in an Acknowledgements. Those acknowledged should grant permission to be included.

Change of affiliation

If an author's affiliation has changed during the course of the work, the author may either list the affiliation at the time that the research (or most significant portion of the research) was conducted, or their current affiliation, or both. For clarity, the change of affiliation can be explained in an acknowledgements section

Alteration to authorship

Any change in authors after initial submission must be approved by all authors. This applies to additions, deletions, a change of order to the authors’ names or a change to the attribution of contributions. Any alterations must be explained to the Editor. The Editor may contact any of the authors and/or contributors to ascertain whether they have agreed to any alteration.

Deceased Authors

Deceased persons deemed appropriate as authors should be included with a death dagger (†) next to the author's name, and a footnote stating that the author is deceased and giving the date of their death e.g., †Deceased 10 October 2014.

Ethical approval of research:

All research articles submitted should include a letter from the Institutional review board/committee that the study obtained ethics approval.

Experimental research on humans or any animals must comply with and conform to institutional, national, or international Good Clinical Practice guidelines.

Even when a study has been approved by a research ethics committee or institutional review board, editors may be worried about the ethics of the work. Editors may then ask authors for more detailed information such as:

how they justified the ethical and moral basis of the work
to provide the contact details of the research ethics committee that reviewed the work, so that the journal can request further information and justification from that committee

Patient consent and confidentiality:

If an article contains personal medical information including x-rays, photos etc., the patient’s consent is necessary for publication of such details. If consent cannot be obtained for whatever reason, then IJOFR will anonymize the details as much as possible.

Privacy:

All the personal details entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

Competing interests

All the competing interest related to the study should be acknowledged at the end of the main text before the references with the heading "Competing Interests".

A competing interest in medical publishing exists when a participant’s private interests compete with his or her responsibilities to the scientific community, readers, and society.

Types of competing interests include but are not limited to:

Financial ties
Academic commitments
Personal relationships
Political or religious beliefs
Institutional affiliations

Examples of competing interests are

Grants, membership, education events, receipt of equipment or supplies, royalties etc.

Funding:

All sources of funding should be declared under the heading “Funding” at the end of the manuscript file (before the references).

Authors must describe the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in the study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of the data; in the writing of the report.

Open Access Policy

All materials published in IJOFR are immediately and freely available to anyone in the world via the Internet, permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any lawful purpose, without financial, legal or technical barriers.

Copyright and authors’ rights

The International Journal of Orofacial Research (IJOFR) publishes open access articles under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) License which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

IJOFR allows authors to retain copyright for their work without restrictions. The author retains the publishing rights provided that the original publication of the article is properly cited. IJOFR only requires an exclusive license to publish the article first in its journal online.

The corresponding author should read and agree to the following statement before submission of the manuscript for publication,

License agreement

In submitting an article to the International Journal of Orofacial Region (IJOFR) I certify that:

I am authorized by my co-authors to enter into these arrangements.
I warrant, on behalf of myself and my co-authors, that:
- the article is original, has not been formally published in any other peer-reviewed journal, is not under consideration by any other journal and does not infringe any existing copyright or any other third-party rights;
- I am/we are the sole author(s) of the article and have full authority to enter into this agreement and in granting rights to IJOFR are not in breach of any other obligation;
- the article contains nothing that is unlawful, or which would, if published, constitute a breach of contract or of confidence or of commitment given to secrecy;
- I/we have taken due care to ensure the integrity of the article. To my/our - and currently accepted scientific - knowledge all statements contained in it purporting to be facts are true and any formula or instruction contained in the article will not, if followed accurately, cause any injury, illness or damage to the user.
I, and all co-authors, agree that the article, if editorially accepted for publication, shall be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY). If the law requires that the article be published in the public domain, I/we will notify IJOFR the time of submission, and in such cases the article shall be released under the Creative Commons 1.0 Public Domain Dedication waiver. For the avoidance of doubt, it is stated that sections 1 and 2 of this license agreement shall apply and prevail regardless of whether the article is published under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or the Creative Commons 1.0 Public Domain Dedication waiver.
I, and all co-authors, agree that, if the article is editorially accepted for publication in IJOFR, data included in the article shall be made available under the Creative Commons 1.0 Public Domain Dedication waiver, unless otherwise stated. For the avoidance of doubt, it is stated that sections 1, 2, and 3 of this license agreement shall apply and prevail.

Please visit Creative Commons web page for details of the terms.

Plagiarism and other misconduct:

Technical Team screens all manuscripts that are sent out for peer review for plagiarism using a web-based tool (Turnitin). For minor plagiarism, as defined by COPE, we write to authors and discuss findings, request them to correct it and resubmit. For major plagiarism and other misconduct such as duplicate publication, data fabrication and data falsification, we explain that the misconduct is unacceptable and ask them to take responsibility by writing a letter of apology, reject the article and ban them for up to three years. If they refuse to do so, we may inform their institution and/or regulatory body in the country and inform them about the incident.

Corrections to published work

Authors are requested to inform the journal of any errors they have noticed (or have been informed of) in their article once it is published. Corrections are made at the journal's discretion. The correction procedure depends on the publication stage of the article:

Online First publication

The Online First (or ‘published ahead of print’) version is considered the version of record, and not an opportunity to make changes prior to print publication. IJOFR will consider replacing this version with an updated version which corrects the errors and notes that the change has been made (in a correction notice at the end of the article).

Online First publication:

Most articles accepted for publication are published Online ahead of publication in an online journal issue.

Advertising:

IJOFR reserves the right to decline any submitted advertisement or to discontinue publication of any advertisement previously accepted.

Products or services closely related to medical practice, medical education, professional development, or health care delivery are eligible for advertising.

Consumer products and nonfinancial services that are offered by responsible advertisers and that are of interest to physicians may be eligible.

Drugs, medical devices, alcoholic beverages, and tobacco are not eligible for advertisement in IJO.

Editor Responsibilities toward Readers and the Scientific Community:

Evaluate all articles to ensure the evidence readers need to evaluate the article’s conclusion.

Provide references to articles.

Provide the author's contact information.

Ensure authorship criteria are met.

Make all authors responsible for the content of their article.

Disclose all relevant conflicts of interest.

Ensure that research and publication malpractices are neutralized.

Promote discussion on scientific merits of a paper.