Research and Publication Ethics Policies

Research and Publication Ethics Policies

RESEARCH

POLICY ON THE IDENTIFICATION AND HANDLING OF ALLEGATIONS OF MISCONDUCT IN RESEARCH

Submitted articles must be original and must not contain manipulated data, plagiarism, citation manipulation or data fabrication. Should the editorial team of  Servir Journal be informed of any allegations of research misconduct relating to a published article or one under review, it will strictly follow the guidelines of COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) in dealing with such allegations.

CITATION POLICY

Authors must ensure that, where material is taken from other sources (including their own published works), the source is properly cited and, where appropriate, the necessary permission is obtained.

  • Authors should not engage in excessive self-citation of their own work.

  • Authors should not copy references from other publications if they have not read and analysed the work cited.

  • Authors must not cite advertisements or commercial promotional material, and must also avoid selectively citing their own publications, those of colleagues or their institution for the sake of convenience.

In accordance with COPE guidelines, original text taken directly from other researchers’ publications should be placed in quotation marks or formatted as a block quotation, accompanied by the appropriate attribution. This requirement also applies to the author’s own previous work.

PLAGIARISM DETECTION POLICY

To detect plagiarism and ensure the originality of articles submitted to  Servir Journal, a computerised system for automatic text recognition and plagiarism prevention is used. If the manuscript meets the initial submission criteria and is recommended for the peer-review process, the Section Editor submits the article to the plagiarism detection programme. The identification of excessive similarities or plagiarism will result in the text not being accepted.

POLICY ON ARTICLES INVOLVING PRODUCTS OR EQUIPMENT PRESENTING UNUSUAL RISKS AND ANIMALS

If the work involves chemicals, procedures or equipment that present unusual risks inherent in their use, the authors must identify and describe them clearly in the article.

Although the journal’s main focus is on human health, if the work involves the use of animal models, authors must ensure that all procedures were carried out in strict compliance with national laws and relevant institutional and international guidelines, and must explicitly state that approval was granted by the relevant ethics and/or animal welfare committee.

POLICY ON ARTICLES INVOLVING HUMAN PARTICIPANTS

The participation of human subjects in research must be based on ethical and deontological principles and on full respect for human rights (in line with the Declaration of Helsinki). The safety, dignity and consent of participants are essential:

  • Informed Consent: It is mandatory that all human participants (and/or their legal representatives) are properly informed about the study and freely consent to take part by signing the relevant consent form.

  • Voluntary Participation: Collaboration must not be coerced or influenced by any form of pressure, undue benefit or manipulation.

  • Privacy and Confidentiality: Participants’ data must be presented in a strictly anonymous manner, making any direct or indirect identification impossible.

  • Protection of participants: The study design should minimise risks and maximise benefits, ensuring that no participant is subjected to harm or unnecessary risks.

POLICY ON THE PROTECTION OF VULNERABLE PEOPLE

Authors must comply with strict requirements to ensure that published work adheres to the highest ethical standards in relation to vulnerable populations (including children, older people, people with cognitive or motor disabilities, pregnant women, prisoners, or people in severely disadvantaged socio-economic circumstances). This policy applies to the research process, the protection of identity and the use of image records.

  • Consent and Assent: Informed consent must be obtained from the legal representatives and, where applicable, the assent of the vulnerable person themselves (for example, in the case of minors) must be documented.

  • Ethics approval: All studies involving these populations must have been formally approved by a Health Ethics Committee (CES) or its legal equivalent, and the reference number of the approval must be explicitly stated in the methods section of the article.

PUBLICATION

Servir Journal adheres to high standards of ethical conduct in publishing, adopting a comprehensive set of sector-specific policies:

AUTHORSHIP AND CONTRIBUTION POLICY

Submitted articles must be entirely original. Upon submission, the corresponding author warrants that the manuscript has not been published (in whole or in part) in any other scientific journal or in any other language, and that it is not currently under review by any other journal.

Authors are legally responsible for ensuring that their work does not infringe the copyright of third parties. They are also responsible for obtaining and retaining authorisation for the reproduction of tables, images or any other material subject to intellectual property rights.

Any changes to the list of authors (additions, deletions or reordering) must be duly justified and formally requested from the editorial team prior to the article’s acceptance, and must be signed and agreed to in writing by all authors involved.

Servir Journal promotes transparency and requires a breakdown of the authors’ individual contributions to the manuscript (e.g. study design, data collection, statistical analysis, drafting of the text), encouraging the use of the standard CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) taxonomy.

POLICY ON THE HANDLING OF COMPLAINTS AND APPEALS

Complaints provide an opportunity for institutional improvement. Servir Journal will respond promptly to all formal, substantiated complaints concerning:

  • Allegations of plagiarism or misappropriation.

  • Duplicate publication or simultaneous submission.

  • Hidden conflicts of interest.

The editorial team may request the necessary evidence from the parties involved and will act in good faith to restore the scientific truth, resorting, where necessary, to the suspension, correction or removal of content, giving reasons for such action. Editorial complaints should be addressed in writing to the journal’s official email address.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST POLICY

  • Authors: Must explicitly declare the existence or absence of any potential conflicts of interest at the time of submission (whether financial in nature, such as funding and grants, or non-financial, such as professional or institutional relationships that may influence the results).

  • Reviewers: They must promptly decline to review a manuscript if they identify that it gives rise to a conflict of interest (personal, institutional or arising from direct scientific rivalry or collaboration), and must notify the editor in charge.

  • Editors: They undertake to manage the review process with complete impartiality, refraining from reviewing articles where they have any direct connection with the authors or any conflict of interest.

DATA SHARING AND REPRODUCIBILITY POLICY

In line with the Open Science movement, Revista Servir offers free and immediate access to its content. Readers can read, download and print any article without financial barriers or compulsory registration, thereby promoting the reproducibility of studies and the exchange of knowledge within the healthcare community.

ETHICAL SUPERVISION POLICY

The editorial team takes a proactive approach to mitigating misconduct. Where there are well-founded doubts, or if requested by the reviewers, the journal reserves the right to require authors to provide documentary evidence of approval by local ethics committees, as well as the anonymised datasets on which the study was based.

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY POLICY

Authors retain the copyright to their works, granting Servir Journal the right of first publication. Most articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, which allows the material to be shared and adapted for any purpose, provided that proper and mandatory credit is given to the original authors and the initial publication in this journal.

POLICY ON POST-PUBLICATION DISCUSSIONS AND CORRECTIONS

If an author identifies a material error or significant scientific inaccuracy in their already published article, they are obliged to notify the journal immediately so that an Errata can be published.

Errors in metadata (such as author names or titles) reported after publication will be assessed by the editorial team. Once approved, the file and the portal’s metadata will be updated, and the indexing platforms will be duly notified.

  • Retraction: In serious cases of inadvertent error that invalidates the conclusions, scientific fraud, extensive plagiarism or an irreconcilable breach of ethics, the article will be formally retracted in accordance with COPE guidelines. The original document will remain in the digital archive, clearly and permanently marked with the watermark ‘RETRACTED’ (RETRACTED), thereby safeguarding the historical record of scientific literature. Permanent digital removal will only occur if keeping the text online violates legal regulations or causes severe and irreparable harm.

POLICY ON GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) AND AI-ASSISTED TECHNOLOGIES

  • Authors: Generative AI tools (such as ChatGPT and LLM-based equivalents) do not meet the criteria for scientific authorship and therefore cannot be listed as co-authors. The text, graphics or images in the manuscript must not be artificially generated by these technologies without clear and justified methodological disclosure (and the express approval of the editors). Human authors assume full and exclusive ethical, legal and scientific responsibility for all submitted content. The concealed use of generative AI for scientific writing constitutes misconduct.

  • Reviewers: Manuscripts submitted for peer review are strictly confidential documents. Reviewers are expressly prohibited from entering texts (in whole or in part), data or evaluation reports into public generative AI tools, as this action breaches the confidentiality of the editorial process, copyright, and privacy and data protection regulations. Critical, humanised assessment based on clinical and scientific judgement is an exclusive and non-transferable responsibility of human reviewers.

See: Statement of Publication Ethics and Practice