Perspectives on Integrative Medicine

Perspectives on Integrative Medicine adheres completely to the ethical guidelines and best practices published by professional organizations, including Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Journals (http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines) of ICMJE and Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (joint statement by COPE, DOAJ, WAME, and OASPA: http://doaj.org/bestpractice).
1. Research Ethics: All manuscripts should be prepared in strict observation of the research and publication ethics guidelines recommended by the Council of Science Editors, International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, and the World Association of Medical Editors. Any study including human subjects or human data must be reviewed and approved by a responsible institutional review board (IRB). For further information on investigations involving human material, please refer to the principles in the Declaration of Helsinki (https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles-for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects/).
2. Manuscript Originality: Manuscripts are considered with the understanding that no part of the work has been published previously in print or electronic format and that the paper is not under consideration by another publication or electronic medium. All in-press or submitted works that are pertinent to the manuscript under consideration by the journal (including those cited in the manuscript under consideration) must accompany the submission. Related manuscripts that have been submitted elsewhere during the revision period must accompany revised manuscripts. Failure to provide copies of related manuscripts under consideration elsewhere may delay the review process and may be grounds for rejection. Under no circumstances will any paper be considered that contains any data that have been submitted for publication elsewhere.
3. Authorship: Authorship credit must be based on:
1) substantial contributions to the concept and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and 3) final approval of the version to be published. All authors must satisfy the above three conditions. If the number of authors exceeds six, the specific role(s) of the authors should be described at the end of the main text.
4. Role of the Funding Source: You are requested to identify who provided financial support to conduct the research and/or prepare the article and to briefly describe the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in the study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the article for publication. If the funding source(s) had no such involvement, then this should be stated.
5. Conflict of Interest Statement: The corresponding author must inform the editor of any potential conflicts of interest that could influence the authors’ interpretation of the data. Examples of potential conflicts of interest are financial support from or connections to companies, political pressure from interest groups, and academically related issues. In particular, all sources of funding applicable to the study should be explicitly stated.
6. Human and Animal Rights: Animal experiments should be reviewed by an appropriate committee (IACUC: Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee) for the care and use of animals. Studies involving pathogens requiring a high degree of biosafety should pass the review of a relevant committee (IBC: Institutional Biosafety Committee). The editor of PIM may request copies of informed consent from human subjects in all studies or IRB approval documents. Articles wherein human subjects can be identified in descriptions, photographs, or pedigrees must be accompanied by a signed statement of informed consent to publish (in print and online) the descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees from each subject who can be identified. Articles covering the use of human samples in research and human experiments must be approved by the relevant review committee. Articles covering the use of animals in experiments must be approved by the relevant authorities.
7. Data Statement: To foster transparency, we encourage you to state the availability of your data in your submission. This may be a requirement of your funding body or institution. If your data is unavailable to access or unsuitable to post, you will have the opportunity to explain why during the submission process, for example, by stating that the research data is confidential.
8. Copyright: Jaseng Medical Foundation (publisher) holds the copyright on all submitted materials and the right to publish, transmit, sell, and distribute them in the journal or other media.
The publisher applies the Creative Commons Attribution license to works it publishes. Under this license, although the publisher retains ownership of the copyright for content, it allows anyone to download, reuse, reprint, distribute, and/or copy the content for non-commercial purposes.
9. Open Access: Every peer-reviewed article appearing in this journal will be published open access. This means that the article is universally and freely accessible via the internet in perpetuity, in an easily readable format, immediately after publication. The author does not have to pay any publication charges for open access. Jaseng Medical Foundation will pay to make the article open access.
Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial for non-commercial purposes permits others to distribute and copy the article and include it in a collective work (such as an anthology), as long as they credit the author(s) and provided they do not alter or modify the article.
10. Secondary Publication: It is possible to republish manuscripts if they satisfy the conditions of secondary publication of the ICMJE Recommendations (http://www.icmje.org/urm_main.html).
11. Editorial Responsibilities: The Editorial Board will continuously work to monitor and safeguard publication ethics: guidelines for retracting articles; maintenance of the integrity of the academic record; preclusion of business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standards; publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed; and excluding plagiarism and fraudulent data. The editors maintain the following responsibilities: responsibility and authority to reject and accept articles; avoiding any conflict of interest with respect to articles they reject or accept; promoting publication of corrections or retractions when errors are found; and preservation of the anonymity of reviewers.
12. Technical Checks: The Editorial Office of Perspectives on Integrative Medicine prescreens all submitted manuscripts, and processes all submitted manuscripts confidentially. The submitted manuscripts are initially checked for format and duplication using Crosscheck (https://app.ithenticate.com) before undergoing the peer-review process.
13. Double-Blind Peer Review Process: This journal operates a double-blind review process. Once the manuscript is prescreened for format and adherence to the aim & scope, it is sent to the two most relevant reviewers for review. The reviewers are selected by the editor from the Editorial Board's database or the board members' recommendations. The reviews are then conducted based on originality, validity, presentation, importance, interest, and, when considered necessary, statistics.; Acceptance of a manuscript depends on the evaluation, critiques, and recommended decisions of the reviewers. A reviewer’s recommendation can be "accept," "minor revision," "major revision," or "reject." If there are conflicting decisions between reviewers, the Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to decide whether the manuscript will be published in the journal.; The reviewed manuscripts, with comments, recommended directions, and revisions, are returned to the corresponding author. The corresponding author is to submit the revised manuscript along with point by point replies to the editor's comments explaining how the revisions have been made.; Each change made (point by point) in the manuscript in accordance with the reviewer’s comments should be highlighted ("yellow highlighted" or "marked in red color").; If the revised paper is not received within 2 months of the revision intimation, the manuscript is considered to have been withdrawn.; After the final decision on the acceptance of the manuscript is made, the Editorial Office notifies the corresponding author. The peer review process takes approximately 12 weeks.; Accepted manuscripts will be copyedited in house to ensure conformance to the journal's style and format.
14. Redundant Publication and Plagiarism: Attempting to publish substantially similar work more than once without attribution of the original source(s) is considered a redundant publication. The definition of substantially similar can be explained as follows:
At least one of the authors is common to all reports (it is likely to be plagiarism if there are no common authors);
The subject or study populations are the same or similar;
The methodology is typically identical or nearly so;
Finally, the results and interpretation vary little or not at all.
If all or part of the subject population has been reported previously, it should be declared in the Materials and Methods section and must be appropriately referenced. In cases wherein authors are concerned about any potential overlap with published manuscripts or manuscripts under review, they must include a letter explaining how the manuscript submitted to PIM significantly differs from other materials. For more information, please refer to "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication" (Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3142758/).
15. Policy on Ethical Oversight: When the journal encounters suspected cases of research and publication misconduct, such as falsification of data, plagiarism, improprieties of authorship, misappropriation of the ideas of others, violation of generally accepted research practices, material failure to comply with legislative and regulatory requirements affecting research, and inappropriate behavior in relation to misconduct, the resolution process will follow the flowchart provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). The Editorial Board will discuss the suspected cases and reach a decision. We will not hesitate to publish errata, corrigenda, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed.; The World Association of Medical Editors defines scientific misconduct and provides a useful overview of the following issues:; Falsification of data
This ranges from fabrication, the deceptive reporting of findings, and the omission of conflicting data to willful suppression and/or distortion of data.; Plagiarism
This is the appropriation of the language, ideas, or thoughts of another without crediting their true source and representing them as one’s own original work.; Improprieties of authorship
This is the improper assignment of credit, for example, by excluding others, presenting the same material in more than one publication, including as authors individuals who have not made a definite contribution to the work, and publishing or submitting multi-authored publications without the concurrence of all authors.; Misappropriation of the ideas of others
An important aspect of scholarly activity is the exchange of ideas among colleagues. Scholars can acquire novel ideas from others during the process of reviewing grant applications and manuscripts. However, the improper use of such information can constitute fraud. The wholesale appropriation of such material constitutes misconduct.; Violation of generally accepted research practices
This category includes serious deviation from accepted practices in proposing or carrying out research, the improper manipulation of experiments to obtain biased results, deceptive statistical or analytical manipulations, and the improper reporting of results.; Material failure to comply with legislative and regulatory requirements affecting research
This includes but is not limited to serious or substantial, repeated, and willful violations of local regulations and laws involving the use of funds, care of animals, human subjects, investigational drugs, recombinant products, new devices, or radioactive, biological, or chemical materials.; Inappropriate behavior in relation to misconduct
This includes unfounded or knowingly false accusations of misconduct, the failure to report known or suspected misconduct, the withholding of information relevant to a claim, and any kind of misconduct or retaliation against persons involved in an allegation or investigation.
16. Complaints and Appeals: How the journal will handle complaints and appeals: The policy of the journal is primarily aimed at protecting the authors, reviewers, editors, and publisher of the journal. If not described below, the process of handling complaints and appeals follows the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics, available at https://publicationethics.org/appeals.; Who complains or makes an appeal?
Submitters, authors, reviewers, and readers may register complaints and appeals in a variety of cases as follows: falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, duplicate publication, authorship dispute, conflict of interest, ethical treatment of animals, informed consent, bias or unfair/inappropriate competitive acts, copyright, stolen data, defamation, and legal problems. If any individuals or institutions want to report the cases, they can send a letter to the editor for the complaints or appeals. Concrete data with answers to all factual questions (who, when, where, what, how, and why) should be provided.; Who is responsible for resolving and handling complaints and appeals?
The Editor, Editorial Board, or Editorial Office is responsible for them.; What may be the consequence of remedy?
It depends on the type or degree of misconduct. The consequence of resolution will follow the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
17. Research Reporting Guidelines: The journal requires that manuscripts adhere to recognized reporting guidelines relevant to the research design used and requires the author(s) to submit a checklist verifying that essential elements have been reported for all primary research and systematic reviews.
The reporting guidelines endorsed by the journal are listed below:; • Observational cohort, case control, and cross-sectional studies
- STROBE - Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology
- MOOSE - Meta-analysis of Observational Studies in Epidemiology; • Qualitative studies
- COREQ - Consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research
- SRQR - Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research; • Quasi-experimental/non-randomized trials
- TREND - Transparent Reporting of Evaluations with Non-randomized Designs; • Randomized (and quasi-randomized) controlled trials
- CONSORT - Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials; • Study of diagnostic accuracy/assessment scale
- STARD - Standards for the Reporting of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies; • Systematic review and meta-analysis
- PRISMA - Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses
- MOOSE - Meta-analysis of Observational Studies in Epidemiology; • Quality improvement studies
- SQUIRE - Standards for Quality Improvement Reporting Excellence

Editorial and ethical policies