Ethics and security

Health Technology Assessment in Action editor may seek advice about submitted papers on any aspect of a paper that raises concerns, for example, ethical issues or issues of data or materials access. It is important to agree upon standards of expected ethical behavior for all parties involved in the act of publishing: the author, the journal editor, the peer reviewer, etc. All research must have been carried out within an appropriate ethical framework.

Authorship and Author’s Responsibility

The corresponding author takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process, and typically ensures that all the journal’s administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and gathering conflict of interest statements, are properly completed. The corresponding author should respond to editorial queries throughout the submission and peer review process in a timely manner, and should cooperate with any requests from the journal after publication.

Health technology assessment in action does not allow adding authors or changing the first or the corresponding authors after the final acceptance of the article. If any author wishes to be removed from the byline, he or she should submit a letter signed by the author, as well as all other authors, indicating his or her wish to be deleted from the list of authors. Any change in the name order in the byline requires a letter signed by all authors indicting agreement with the same.

Conflict of Interest

Authors are required to disclose all relationships or interests in relation to their work. All submitted manuscripts must include a ‘Conflict of Interest’ section at the end of the manuscript listing all financial and non-financial conflict of interests. Where authors have no conflict of interests, the statement should read “The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.” A competing interest exists when the authors’ interpretation of data or presentation of information may be influenced by their personal or financial relationship with other people or organizations.

 Authors should disclose any financial competing interests but also any non-financial competing interests that may cause them embarrassment if they were to become public after the publication of the article. Financial competing interests include (but are not limited to):

• Research grants from funding agencies (The research funder and the grant number are required)
• Financial support for educational programs
• Employment or consultation
• Position on advisory board or board of directors or other type of management relationships
• Financial relationships, for example Receiving reimbursements, fees, funding, or salary from an organization that may in any way gain or lose financially from the publication of the article, either now or in the future.
• Intellectual property rights (e.g. patents, copyrights and royalties from such rights)
• Holdings of spouse and/or children that may have financial interest in the work

In addition, non-financial interests that may be important to readers should be disclosed. These may include but are not limited to political, personal, religious, ideological, academic, and intellectual competing interests.

Editors may ask for further information relating to competing interests. Editors and reviewers are also required to declare any competing interests and will be excluded from the peer review process if a competing interest exists.

Human and animal rights

Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, should include a statement that the studies performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and approved by an appropriate ethics committee. If a study has been granted an exemption from requiring ethics approval, this should also be detailed in the manuscript (including the name of the ethics committee that granted the exemption). Authors will be expected to have obtained ethics committee approval and informed patient consent for any experimental use of a novel procedure or tool where a clear clinical advantage based on clinical need was not apparent before treatment.

Also, the welfare of animals used for research must be respected. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether the international, national, and/or institutional guidelines for the care and use of animals have been followed, and that the studies have been approved by a research ethics committee at the institution or practice at which the studies were conducted (where such a committee exists).

Health Technology Assessment in Action encourages authors submitting manuscripts reporting from a clinical trial to register the trials registries & bear a clinical trial registration number and name of the trial. Reports of randomized clinical trials should present information on all major study elements, including the protocol, assignment of interventions (methods of randomization, concealment of allocation to treatment groups), and the method of masking (blinding), based on the CONSORT statement (Moher D, Schulz KF, Altman DG: The CONSORT Statement: Revised Recommendations for Improving the Quality of Reports of Parallel-Group Randomized Trials).

Manuscripts may be rejected if the Editor considers that the research has not been carried out within an appropriate ethical framework. In rare cases, Editors may contact the ethics committee for further information.

 

Informed consent

For all research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study should be obtained from participants. For all manuscripts that include details, images, or videos relating to individual participants, written informed consent for the publication of these must be obtained from the participants. A statement to this effect should appear in the manuscript. Identifying details (names, dates of birth, identity numbers and other information) of the participants that were studied should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and genetic profiles unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the participant (or parent or guardian if the participant is incapable) gave written informed consent for publication. The final decision on whether consent to publish is required lies with the Editor.

Originality and Duplicate Publication

Manuscripts under review or published by other journals will not be accepted for publication in AHealth technology assessment in action, and articles published in this journal are not allowed to be reproduced in whole or in part in any type of publication without permission of the Editorial Board in English, Persian or any other language. Figures and tables can be used freely if original source is verified according to Creative Commons Non-Commercial License. It is mandatory for all authors to resolve any copyright issues when citing a figure or table from a different journal that is not open access.

Process to Manage Research and Publication Misconduct

The editorial board will incessantly work towards observing publication misconduct such as redundant (duplicate) publication, plagiarism, fraudulent or fabricated data, changes in authorship, undisclosed conflict of interest, ethical problem with a submitted manuscript, a reviewer who has appropriated an author’s idea or data, complaints against editors, and etc. When the journal faces suspected cases of research and publication misconduct, the resolving process will be followed by guidelines provided by the "Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)". The complete guidelines appear on COPE website: http://www.publicationethics.org.

Plagiarism

All authors are strongly recommended to check their manuscripts content before its submission to the journal for publication. The Authors may use trustable valid "Plagiarism Checking software’s" to make sure that their manuscripts are Plagiarism free. Anyway, all submitted papers to the journal will be checked against Plagiarism upon receiving and also before publishing finally using iThenticate & other Plagiarism Detection Software’s. If the Reviewers, Editor-in-Chiefs, Readers or Editorial Staffs suspect or notice any types of plagiarism at any stage of publication process, the manuscript will be rejected and all authors including the corresponding author will be notified then. Self-plagiarism is also considered & managed accordingly.