Responsibilities of Authors

Reporting Standards

Authors must present an accurate, honest, and objective account of the work performed and its significance. Data must be represented accurately, and authors should be prepared to provide access to raw data upon reasonable request and retain such data for at least two years after publication.

Originality and Duplicate Publication

Submissions must be original. Plagiarism, redundant publication, or concurrent submission to multiple journals is unethical and unacceptable.

Authorship

All individuals who made significant contributions must be listed as authors. The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that all co-authors approve the final manuscript and agree to its submission.

Fundamental Errors

Authors must promptly notify the journal if a significant error is discovered after publication and cooperate fully in issuing a correction or retraction.

Responsibilities of Editors

The Editors of Pathophysiology of Cell Injury Journal (PCIJ)  should have the full authority to reject/accept a manuscript and should maintain the confidentiality of submitted manuscripts under review or until they are published. The Editor-in-Chief of Pathophysiology of Cell Injury Journal (PCIJ) should decide on submitted manuscripts, whether to be published or not, with other editors and reviewers.

The Editors of the journal should preserve the anonymity of reviewers. The Editors of the journal should disclose and try to avoid any conflict of interest. The Editors of the journal should maintain academic integrity and strive to meet the needs of readers and authors.

The Editors of the journal should be willing to investigate plagiarism and fraudulent data issues and publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed. The Editors of the journal should limit themselves only to the intellectual content. The Editors of the journal must not disclose any information about submitted manuscripts to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.

Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted paper will not be used by the editor or the members of the editorial board for their research purposes without the author’s explicit written consent.

Responsibilities of Reviewers

Reviewers support editorial decisions by providing objective, constructive, and clearly reasoned feedback.

• Maintain confidentiality
• Declare conflicts of interest
• Decline reviews outside their expertise
• Identify plagiarism or redundant publication

Responsibilities of the Publisher

PCIJ is published by BM-Publisher Ltd. (United Kingdom), which supports editorial independence and ethical publishing.

• Ensure transparent and accessible policies
• Support COPE-compliant investigations
• Facilitate corrections and retractions
• Ensure long-term digital preservation

Handling of Alleged Misconduct

PCIJ follows COPE flowcharts for investigating suspected misconduct. Once PCIJ confirms a violation against PCIJ’s publication ethics, PCIJ addresses ethical concerns diligently following an issue-specific standard practice as summarized below.

1. The first action of the journal Editor is to inform the Editorial Office of PCIJ by supplying copies of the relevant material and a draft letter to the corresponding author asking for an explanation in a nonjudgmental manner.
2. If the author’s explanation is unacceptable and it seems that serious unethical conduct has taken place, the matter is referred to the Publication Committee via Editorial Office. After deliberation, the Committee will decide whether the case is sufficiently serious to warrant a ban on future submissions.
3. If the infraction is less severe, the Editor, upon the advice of the Publication Committee, sends the author a letter of reprimand and reminds the author of PCIJ publication policies; if the manuscript has been published, the Editor may request the author to publish an apology in the journal to correct the record.
4. Notification will be sent to the corresponding author and any work by the author responsible for the violation or any work these persons coauthored that is under review by PCIJ will be rejected immediately.
5. The authors are prohibited from serving on the PCIJ editorial board and serving as a reviewer for PCIJ. The PCIJ reserves the right to take more action.
6. In extreme cases, notifications will be sent to the affiliations of the authors and the authors are prohibited from submitting their work to PCIJ for 4 years.
7. In serious cases of fraud that result in the retraction of the article, a retraction notice will be published in the journal and will be linked to the article in the online version. The online version will also be marked “retracted” with the retraction date.

Violation of Publication Ethics

1. Plagiarism: Plagiarism is intentionally using someone else’s ideas or other original material as if they are one’s own. Copying even one sentence from someone else’s manuscript, or even one of your own that has previously been published, without proper citation, is considered by PCIJ as plagiarism. All manuscripts under review or published with PCIJ are subject to screening using plagiarism-prevention software. Thus, plagiarism is a serious violation of publication ethics. The service helps editors to verify the originality of papers. Plagiarism is powered by the iThenticate. For a searchable list of all journals in the database, please visit www.ithenticate.com.
2. Data Fabrication and Falsification: Data fabrication and falsification means the researcher did not carry out the study, but made up data or results and recorded or reported the fabricated information. Data falsification means the researcher did the experiment, but manipulated, changed, or omitted data or results from the research findings.
3. Simultaneous Submission: Simultaneous submission occurs when a manuscript (or substantial sections from a manuscript) is submitted to a journal when it is already under consideration by another journal.
4. Duplicate Publication: Duplicate publication occurs when two or more papers, without full cross-referencing, share essentially the same hypotheses, data, discussion points, and conclusions.
5. Redundant Publications: Redundant publications involve the inappropriate division of study outcomes into several articles, most often consequent to the desire to plump academic vitae.
6. Improper Author Contribution or Attribution: All listed authors must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript and approved all its claims. Don’t forget to list everyone who made a significant scientific contribution, including students and laboratory technicians.
7. Citation Manipulation: Citation Manipulation is including excessive citations, in the submitted manuscript, that do not contribute to the scholarly content of the article and have been included solely to increase citations to a given author’s work, or articles published in a particular journal. This leads to misrepresenting the importance of the specific work and journal in which it appears and is thus a form of scientific misconduct.
8. Sanctions: If there are documented violations of any of the above mentioned policies in any journal, regardless of whether or not the violations occurred in a journal, the following sanctions will be applied:
   1. Immediate rejection of the infringing manuscript.
   2. Immediate rejection of every other manuscript submitted to any journal published by any of the authors of the infringing manuscript.
   3. Prohibition will be imposed for a minimum of 36 months against all of the authors for any new submissions to any journal, either individually or in combination with other authors of the infringing manuscript.
   4. Prohibition against all of the authors from serving on the Editorial Board of any journal.

Corrections, Retractions, Errata & Withdrawal of Article

• Corrections: It will be done in the following manner:
  • The title will include the words ‘Erratum’, ‘Corrigendum’, ‘Addendum’, ‘Retraction’, or ‘Expression of concern’, as applicable.
  • It will be published as a separate document, with a unique DOI, and be included in the work’s table of contents.
  • It will cite the original publication.
  • It will enable the reader to identify and understand the correction in the context of the errors made or explain why the work is being corrected, or explain the editor’s concerns about the contents of the work.
  • It will be linked electronically with the original electronic publication, wherever possible.
  • It will be in a form that enables indexing and abstracting services to identify and link corrections to their original publications.
• Retractions: Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, or the like. Occasionally a retraction will be used to correct errors in submission or publication. The retraction of an article by its authors or the editor under the advice of members of the scholarly community has long been an occasional feature of the learned world. Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by many library and scholarly bodies, and this best practice is adopted for article retraction by PCIJ:
  • A retraction note titled “Retraction: [article title]” signed by the authors and/or the editor is published in the paginated part of a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in the contents list.
  • In the electronic version, a link is made to the original article.
  • The online article is preceded by a screen containing the retraction note. It is to this screen that the link resolves; the reader can then proceed to the article itself.
  • The original article is retained unchanged save for a watermark on the .pdf indicating on each page that it is “retracted.”
  • The HTML version of the document is removed.
• Expressions of Concern: Investigations in progress. All notices remain permanently linked to the original article.
• Errata: An erratum is a correction of an important error (one that affects the publication record, the scientific integrity of the work, or the reputation of the authors or the work) that has been introduced during the production of the work, including errors of omission such as failure to make factual proof corrections requested by authors within the deadline provided by PCIJ and within the PCIJ policy. Errata for typing or grammatical errors will not be published, except where a simple error is significant (for example, an incorrect unit). A significant error in a figure or table is corrected by the publication of a new corrected figure or table as an erratum only if the editor considers this necessary for a reader to understand it.
• Withdrawal of Article: PCIJ recognizes the importance of the integrity and completeness of the scholarly record to researchers and librarians and attaches the highest importance to maintaining trust in the authority of its electronic archive. Only used for Articles in Press that represent early versions of articles and sometimes contain errors, or may have been accidentally submitted twice. Occasionally, but less frequently, the articles may represent infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, or the like. Articles in Press (articles that have been accepted for publication but which have not been formally published and will not yet have the complete volume/issue/page information) that include errors, or are discovered to be accidental duplicates of other published articles or are determined to violate our journal publishing ethics guidelines in the view of the editors (such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like), maybe “Withdrawn” from PCIJ . Withdrawn means that the article content (HTML and PDF) is removed and replaced with an HTML page and PDF simply stating that the article has been withdrawn according to the PCIJ Policy on Article in Press Withdrawal with a link to the current policy document.

Research Ethics: Humans and Animals

Research involving humans or animals must have prior approval from an appropriate ethics committee and comply with international guidelines, including the Declaration of Helsinki and ARRIVE guidelines.

Informed Consent

Authors must confirm that informed consent was obtained for identifiable human data. Written consent is required for publication of images or personal information.

Competing Interests & Funding Disclosure

All authors, reviewers, and editors must disclose financial and non-financial competing interests. Individuals with conflicts must recuse themselves from the review or editorial process.