APJCB statement of Transparency and Principals:
Peer review process: APJCB is a peer-reviewed journal. All manuscripts submitted to APJCB will be reviewed by independent reviewers who are expert in the subject of the manuscript. An independent reviewer is not part of APJCB’s editorial team nor has any conflict of interest toward the manuscript. The independent reviewers are mainly chosen from the long list of authors who have published in one of the West Asia Organization for Cancer Prevention's journals or have been suggested by the author and have declared no conflict of interest.
Governing Body: APJCB is scientifically governed by a team of scientists from all over the Asia and Pacific region acting as editorial team members and a group of senior scientists who act as the International advisory board and give policy advice to the editorial team. APJCB’s editorial management, editing, full-text production, preservation, and website maintenance are outsourced to professionals in the publishing industry. The financial aspect of the production and outsourcing is handled by the general secretary of the West Asia Organization for Cancer Prevention (WAOCP) who acts as the principal contact for APJCB. WAOCP is a not-for-profit, non-governmental scientific organization under the auspise of Sabsevar University of Medica Sciences, Sabzevar/Iran. The WAOCP has been assigned the responsibility of acting as a chapter of the Asian Pacific Organization for Cancer Prevention (APOCP). APOCP was established as a cancer control association in 2000 and been involved in promoting cancer control measures throughout Asia and Pacific region by holding scientific conferences and seminars, as well as publishing scietific journals (AAPJCB is one of these journals).
Editorial team/contact information: The full name, affiliation, and CV’s of the editorial and international advisory board are provided to the public on the journal website (click here to visit). The physical address and the contact information of the principal contact are provided in APJCB’ web site (Click Here to see).
Article Processing Charges (APCs) : Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Biology does not charge any article processing charges (APCs). The publishing cost of APJCB is funded and supported by West Asia Organization for Cancer Prevention (WAOCP).
Copyright: All manuscripts published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Cancer Biology, are under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. This permits anyone to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the published work, provided the original work and source are appropriately cited. The Copyright and licensing information is clearly described on the journal’s Web site's landing page and stated on all published articles since Oct. 2017.
Process for identification of and dealing with allegations of research misconduct: The editorial team of APJCB shall take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct (plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication) may occur. In addition, APJCB’s authors, editors, reviewers, and English editors are responsible to report any scientific misconduct that may feel happened. APJCB shall follow COPE’s guidelines in dealing with allegations of research misconduct.
Ownership and management: The journal‘ owner is the West Asia Organization for Cancer Prevention (WAOCP), a not-for-profit, non-governmental scientific organization under the Auspuise of the Sabzevar University of Medical Sciences. The WAOCP has been assigned the responsibility of acting as a chapter of the Asian Pacific Organization for Cancer Prevention (read about WAOCP here). The WAOCP has outsourced the journal mangment tasks (editorial system, XML generation, page designing...) to difrent third parties. The fund for management of the journal originates from the public donations and government subsidies.
Website: The editorial managent of the APJCB at APJCB (http://apjcb.waocp.com) is managed by Open Journal System software. The system is widely used by many journals and provides a coherent mean to manage all aspect of publishing process; submission, review, and publishing.
Name of journal: The Journal name, Asia Pacific Journal of Cancer Biology is unique and the uniqueness of the name has been verified when an ISSN was assigned to the journal. The Journal is considered as the official publication of the Asia Pacific Organization for Cancer Prevention and its subsidiary, the West Asia Organization for Cancer Prevention (WAOCP).
Conflicts of interest: APJCB has clear policies on conflicts of interest for editors, authors, and reviewers. All the editorial team members, reviewers, or authors must declare a conflict-of-interest statement prior to comment, review, recommend (for editors and reviewers), and submit (for authors).
Access and copy right policy: All the journal contents and individual articles are available to readers free of charge under the term of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source.
Revenue sources: The journal does not generate revenue. Its expences are manged by the WAOCP, and odonation of ther organizations including government subsidies. WAOCP as the finical supporter of the journal may seek funding from different bodies to help the journal keep its good standing. WAOCP shall not seek funding from tobacco industry or industries that their operation increases risk of cancer to the public.
Advertising: APJCB does not advertise and all logo and names on the journal website are for informing our clients and they shall not be considered as advertising.
Publication Ethics: APJCB is very sensitive to research misconduct and uses all means available to prevent publishing miscounted research. Though there is no a standard definition of research misconduct, the Council of Science Editors defines research misconduct broadly in three categories of action and conducts. APJCB uses this definition of the misconduct and follows strictly the COPE follow chart in dealing with research misconduct.
APJCB does not publish manuscripts that do not declare a statement about the protection of human subject. Normally, the journal requires that a statement is declared that research has been reviewed by an institutional review board (IRB) either in the material method section of the manuscript or in the acknowledgment section of the manuscript. APJCB encourage authors to report the registry number of the IRB in countries that a central registrar of the IRB exists.
Falsification and Fabrication of data: Fabrication is defined as making up of data without actually collecting or synthesizing scientific data. Falsification is defined as the manipulation of research material in order to reach a favorable result. Fabrication and falsification could happen at any stage of research (in the field) up to the publication of manuscript where a misuse of citation can happen (referencing to a citation when the citation does not support the argument). APJCB tries to identify any kind of fabrication or falsification in all level of manuscript processing, from initial screening to comprehensive evaluation of a revised manuscript and even after a manuscript has been published. Report of any fabrication and falsification is an ethical duty of our authors, co-authors, reviewers, editors, and readers. In any event of falsification or fabrication, APJCB keeps its right to retract or withdraw the fabricated or falsified article. APJCB strictly follows the COPE follow chart in dealing with fabrication and falsification.
Plagiarism: Plagiarism is defined as the appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit. Another category of plagiarism is self-plagiarism when author published his own idea, data, and text in different journals when no need of such duplication exists. APJCB uses all means to detect plagiarism. As a matter of quality assurance, a similarity of more than 30 percent in the text of a manuscript will be returned to the author to remove the similarities and reduce the chance of plagiarism. APJCB strictly follows the COPE follow chart in dealing with plagiarized articles.
APJCB Authorship Consideration and Dispute Management.
APJCB considers an author as a person who has substantially contributed in all stages of a research that the manuscript reports its result. In the other hands, all authors who are listed in a manuscript have contributed to the research and the manuscript submitted to the journal. There are many different definitions of authorship among different bodies that oversee authorship rights and responsibilities. The COPE define the authorship as “The term authorship can refer to the creator or originator of an idea (eg, the author of the theory of relativity) or the individual or individuals who develop and bring to fruition the product that disseminates intellectual or creative works (eg, the author of a poem or a scholarly article).” International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) bases the authorship on the following four criteria:
APJCB policies in maintaining its high standard of ethics have many provisions that help editorial to establish the authorship requirement that was defined by COPE or ICMJE. For this, APJCB uses its editorial management system to validate the authorship of a manuscript submitted. APJCB’s initial engagement with authors is through its “Editorial Management System”. The system functionally deals with the corresponding author but informs other authors any changes or major steps that are taken in the process of submission, review, revision, editing and final steps of publication. The only means of communication with authors are by email. All listed authors are required to verify their contribution to a submitted manuscript by receiving an email that informs them of the submission and the nature of authorship of the manuscript (author list with the order that is registered in the our Editorial Managment System). The email clearly validates the contribution of listed authors in the manuscript. In a case that an author disputes the submitted manuscript or his contribution, the journal returns the manuscript to the corresponding author and ask to resubmit when the dispute is resolved. Any authorship dispute, after the initial step, is managed as the COPE recommends. Authors that may need information on authorship right and responsibility and the way handle disputes are referred to the COPE publication on how to handle authorship dispute at (https://doi.org/10.24318/cope.2018.1.1) or to defining the Role of Authors and Contributors in ICMJE ‘s web site at (http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html). We expect that all authors listed in a manuscript will receive the journal’s email and read and the content of the email that is provided for the purpose of authorship validation.
Protection of Human and Animal Subjects: The APJCB endorses the principles governing the protection of human subjects in research embodied in the Declaration of Helsinki and expects that all investigations and research involving human subjects have been performed in accordance with these principles. It is expected that all information regarding research involving humans has been approved by an Institutional Review Board.
All manuscripts reporting human experimentation must include the following:
A statement that the human investigations were performed only after approval by an Institutional Review Board or ethics committee;
That it was performed in accordance with the ethical principles of the Declaration of Helsinki.
A statement that the researchers/investigators obtained informed consent from each participant or each participant’s guardian, prior to conducting any such research.
When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether the institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals, were followed.
Conflict of Interest : At the time of manuscript submission, the APJCB requires that corresponding authors disclose any conflict of interest. In addition, editors and reviewers need to declare conflict of interest before dealing with a manuscript.
Photographs with Identifiable Patients: In photographs, sonograms, CT scans, etc., the physical identification of a patient should be masked whenever possible. If a patient is identifiable, written permission to use the photograph must be obtained from the patient or guardian and sent to the Journal’s Editorial Office upon manuscript submission. It must be clearly stated in the manuscript that informed consent was obtained.
Simultaneous Submission and Online Posting: The APJCB will not consider manuscripts that are concurrently submitted elsewhere (except for pre-prints) or have been published previously (including online publication). The presentation of research results at scientific conferences or in the abstract book of such a conference does not constitute a previously published article. A manuscript cannot be posted on the author’s or institutional website when it has been submitted to APJCB and during editorial process. Accepted manuscripts cannot be posted online until after the paper has been fully published in the APJCB.
Permission to use copyrighted materials: Use of previously published or copyrighted material reproduced from another source must be properly cited. The corresponding author is responsible for obtaining written permission from the appropriate authors and/or copyright holders to use previously published or copyrighted material. Signed permission statements from the copyright holder for both print and online reproduction, must be sent to the APJCB Editorial Office upon manuscript submission. Permission statements must also be obtained from at least one author when citing “in press” articles.
Authors' Professional and Ethical Responsibilities: The APJCB reserves the right to forward any claim of scientific misconduct to the sponsoring or funding institution, or to any other appropriate authorities for investigation. The author will be notified if the APJCB forwards any manuscript to the sponsoring or funding institution for such a claim.
Corrections and Retractions: APJCB make all efforts to avoid any errors in the published material however error can happen. Errors within a published article can come to notice by either of the followings:
In each category, correction differs If the error is a “minor ” or small errors that do not substantially change the contents of the published work such as typos, spellings etc. These categories of errors will be corrected to the published material available to the journal’s authorities (the journal is an open and electronic journal and contents are viable to the journals authorities to make corrections of minor nature) or if the material has been indexed in the indexing databases, a request will be sent to the indexing authorities to apply the minor changes.
Some errors are of “substantive” nature. These are errors that impact the content. For example: addition or removal of meaningful sentences / paragraphs, changes to figures or data. The correction to these categories of errors will be handled either by publishing an erratum or by retraction.
In the case of Errata, an erratum is published when the change to the original publication affects the article’s metadata or the article text’s meaning. when an erratum is published, the original article will be updated to reflect the change when possible.
In the case of retraction, the article is completely removed from the body of research
Literature and a notice of retraction is left instead (different indexing companies may have different retraction policies that the journal will follow their gudeline). Retraction normally happened when there are grave and gross ethical breaches, fabrication of data, large amounts of plagiarism, or other reasons. APJCB follows the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) for Retraction. Retracted cases are thoroughly investigated by a special committee or refer to independent ethical committee or may be consulted by university authorities or other relevant bodies where the article or author of article is affiliated. The final decision, to retract an article, is upon the independent body’s recommendation and approval of editorial board and final approval of the Editor-in-chief. In case of a retracted article, the original publication is tagged with a “RETRACTED” label in the journal’s website.
Article Processing Charges (APCs): Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Biology does not charge any article processing charges (APCs). The publishing cost of APJCB is funded and supported by West Asia Organization for Cancer Prevention (WAOCP).
Article Submission Charges: Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Biology (APJCB ) does not charge any Submission Charges.