Policies and Ethics

Accessibility and Permanency of Articles

Dr. Science consistently and proactively endeavors to make all published articles fully accessible to all users. Articles appearing in journals published by Dr. Science are ‘open access’ where articles are universally and freely accessible via the Internet, in an easily deciphered format following the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing. Articles in Dr. Science’s journals are published under the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) to make sure implementation of open access as defined.

All work that reaches rigorous technical and ethical standards is published with a permanent DOI link provided by CrossRef. Dr. Science will take steps to ensure that all open access published articles will be deposited in safe open access archives.

Plagiarism and Duplication

Plagiarism is the unethical act when an author attempts to copy someone else’s prior ideas, processes, results or words without explicit acknowledgement of the original author and source and claim it as their own. Duplicate publication, sometimes called self-plagiarism, occurs when an author reuses substantial parts of his or her own published work without providing the appropriate references. This can range from getting an identical paper published in multiple journals, to ‘salami-slicing’, where authors add small amounts of new data to a previous paper.

Plagiarism is not acceptable in Dr. Science submissions. Dr. Science is strictly against any unethical act of copying or plagiarism in any form. All articles submitted to our journals will be cross-checked for plagiarism during the initial screening process and are out-rightly rejected if any copied or plagiarized content is found.

However for review papers the above is not completely applicable. Review papers are anticipated to give a summary of existing literature. Authors should use their own words with exception of properly quoted and/or cited texts and the work should include a new interpretation.

Ethical Publishing Practice

Dr. Science follows Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines and aim to adhere to its Best Practice Guidelines. The publication of an article in a peer-reviewed journal is a crucial part in the development of a coherent and respected network of knowledge that reflects the quality of the work of the authors and the institutions that support them.

Authors, editors, and reviewers are expected to be aware of, and comply with, best practice in publication ethics that includes authorship, duplicate publication, plagiarism, digital image manipulation, competing financial interests, compliance with policies on research ethics, confidentiality and pre-publicity. It is also crucial to follow the ethical behavior by concerned readers.

For any concerns about potential misconduct, please email the journal editor.

Ethics of Experimentation

Experiments, statistics, and other analyses must have been conducted rigorously to a high technical standard and are described in sufficient detail. Approval from the relevant body is required for studies involving humans (live or tissue), including studies that are observational, survey-based, or include any personal data; Animals (live or tissue), including observational studies; Cell lines that are not commercially available; Field sampling; and Potential biosafety implications. We reserve the right to reject any submission that does not meet the ethical standards mentioned above.

Licenses and Copyright

In order for Dr. Science to publish and disseminate articles, we require publishing rights. Dr. Science applies the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license to the articles published. If authors submit their manuscripts for publication by Dr. Science, they agree to have the CC BY license applied to their work. Under this Open Access license, you as the author agree that anyone may copy, distribute, or reuse the content as long as the author and original source are properly cited. This facilitates freedom in re-use and also ensures that Dr. Science articles’ content can be mined without barriers for the needs of research.

Authors must provide us with proof that the owner of the content has given you written permission to use it, and has approved of the CC BY license being applied to their content if your article contains content such as images, figures, tables, audio files, videos, etc., that you or your co-authors do not own. Kindly submit the permission note provided by the owner during the manuscript submission.

Competing interests

A competing interest — often called a conflict of interest — is anything that interferes with, the full and objective presentation, peer review, editorial decision-making, or publication of research or non-research articles submitted to Dr. Science. We believe that, to make an ideal decision on how to cope with an article, we should know about any conflict of interests that authors may have, and that if we publish the article, readers should know about them too.

Competing interests can be professional, or personal, financial or non-financial. Competing interests can arise in relationship to an institution, organization, or another person. Declaration of all potential competing interests mentioned is a requirement at Dr. Science and is integral to the commitment to transparency in reporting of research.

Article Withdrawal/Retraction Policy

Dr. Science is committed to providing high quality articles and acknowledges the importance of the integrity and completeness of the scholarly record to researchers and librarians. We uphold the publication ethics and crucial in maintaining trust in the authority of the electronic archive.

Dr. Science’s Article Withdrawal/Retraction Policy is based on the guiding principles provided by COPE under the category of Non member Institutions. We anticipate our authors to comply with, best practice in publication ethics as well as in quality of their work.

Articles can be withdrawn either by the authors or the publisher. The article can be withdrawn anytime before it is formally published in its final form. A signed statement from the authors will be required to be submitted to our editorial office via email in case when authors request withdrawal of an article. The publisher has all the rights to withdraw the article if it is found to violate the ethical publishing guidelines of the Journal such as plagiarism, duplicate publication, fraudulent use of data, multiple submission or bogus claims of authorship.

Retractions are published if editors found any clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error) or have previously been published elsewhere without proper cross referencing, permission or justification (i.e. cases of redundant publication) or if plagiarized data has been published. A signed statement and agreement from all the authors of a paper will be required to be submitted to the Journal editorial office before an article can be retracted. In case if any co-authors do not agree to the retraction of the article, it will be published as decided by Editor-in-Chief.

Authorship

Dr. Science follows The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of scholarly work in Medical Journals (ICMJE Recommendations 2013) with regards to authorship and group authorship.

Authorship criteria is based on the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals.

The ICMJE lists four conditions for authorship credit. Authors must meet all four conditions in order to be listed.

• Substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data, and
• Drafting the article 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.

We expect that all authors will take public responsibility for the content of the manuscript submitted to Dr. Science. The contributions of all authors must be described.