Policies

The Journal of Medicine – University of Santo Tomas (JMUST) is committed to publishing and widely disseminating high-quality content. It is critical that the editorial operations of JMUST be governed by rigorous ethical standards that are both transparent and fair. We recognize that the scholarly publishing ecosystem is complex and includes editors, authors, reviewers, and publishers. Our expectation is that all involved have a shared understanding and acceptance of JMUST’s policies on publication ethics and malpractice. Our policies are closely aligned with COPE’s (Committee on Publication Ethics) Core Practices document, which can be accessed at COPE Core Practices

 

Allegations of misconduct

JMUST follows the COPE guidelines provided in the COPE Ethics Toolkit to handle allegations and cases of misconduct.

 

Complaints and Appeals process

Authors, reviewers, or other affected parties are requested to send a formal letter via email to the JMUST Editorial Board at jmust2018@gmail.com with the details of the complaint, issue, or appeal. The JMUST Editorial Board will take up the matter with the editors in the Editorial board meeting and the decision will be based on the collective decision taken by the editors. The entire process will be guided by the recommendations in the COPE Ethics Toolkit.

 

Withdrawals and Retractions

The JMUST Authoring System provides a facility for the authors to withdraw their submissions before they are accepted for publication in the journal. If an author would like to withdraw an article after acceptance or retract it after publication, the author must send a formal letter to the Editors detailing the reasons for withdrawal of the article. The journal editors will decide on the matter as a group and reach a final decision as to the final course of action, i.e., official retraction in the next issue of the journal, if necessary.

In special or unusual situations where major issues are raised in published articles, the editors will receive a formal letter alluding to that, in which case the editors will decide as a group on the course of action i.e., publication of the Letter to the Editor (LTE) with reference to the published article where issues were raised. The LTE will be subjected to the peer-review process just like any other submitted manuscript before it can be published.

The editors as a group will also determine whether the Article Processing Charges (publication fees) can be refunded and/or withdrawal fees are to be collected from the authors. This decision is arrived at after discussion with the editors as a group and guided by the cost already incurred in processing the manuscript for publication (like copy editing, DOI, typesetting, etc).

 

Retraction requests

Any requests for retraction should be sent to the JMUST Editors via email at jmust2018@gmail.com by the author clearly stating the reasons for retraction. The matter will be taken up for discussion with the editors in the Editorial board meeting and the decision will be based on the collective decision taken by the editors. The entire process will be guided by the recommendations in the COPE Ethics Toolkit.

 

Conflicts of interest

Please refer to the Disclosure and conflicts of interest sections for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors in the JMUST Ethics and Malpractice Statement.

 

Other codes of conduct

The responsibilities of the Editors, Reviewers, and Authors are outlined in the JMUST  Ethics and Malpractice Statement which are to be followed strictly. 

 

Authorship criteria

Please refer to the Authorship of the paper in the JMUST Ethics and Malpractice Statement for details.

 

Repository policy

JMUST is dedicated to providing healthcare practitioners with the best and most updated information in health science research and education. Its mission is to assist healthcare practitioners through education, in delivering the best care to their patients. To ensure that this objective is fulfilled, JMUST encourages wide distribution of its peer-reviewed articles so that authors, researchers, practitioners, etc have access to the research published by JMUST. JMUST, therefore, allows authors to upload the accepted version of their manuscript or published PDF version on their personal websites. JMUST places no restrictions on archiving the published PDF article in any institutional or any other repository. 

 

Accepted Version / Published Version:

Restriction: None

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Copyright Owner: Authors

Location: Any repository, author's personal website  or institution home page, or journal website

Conditions: The article manuscript should include the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license terms and the article DOI link.

 

Author Self-Archiving Policy and Re-use Guidelines:

JMUST is an Open Access journal. Authors own the copyright to their articles. The articles are published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license terms. Therefore, authors shall have the right to make their articles publicly available under the terms of the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. Please visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ for details.

 

Long-term Preservation and Archiving

All the articles published in JMUST are archived with Portico for long-term preservation. Please visit https://www.portico.org/publishers/fmsust/ for the current status of the archival.