Research and Publication Ethics Policies of the Korean Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association

I. General

1. Purpose

1) These policies aim to ensure the integrity of the process for all research and journal publications related to the Korean Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association and to present the fundamental principles and objectives to avoid any research misconduct or inappropriate actions.

2. Concept and Application of Research Ethics

1) Research ethics refers to a concept including research integrity related to research conduct and publication integrity related to the publication of results of research.

2) These provisions are applied to all actions directly or indirectly relevant to the research and publications of the Korean Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association .

3. Research Ethics Committee

1) A temporary research ethics committee may be established if needed to deliberate or resolve matters related to research ethics.

2) The board of directors appoints the chairperson of the research ethics committee; the chairperson is in charge of the convocation of the committee and presides over it.

3) The members of the research ethics committee are appointed by request of the chairperson of the committee, including experts in the relevant field, for a total of 5 people.

4) The research ethics committee is organized and held when a matter of deliberation is proposed.

II. Research and Publication Ethics

The journal adheres to the guidelines and best practices published by professional organizations, including the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf) from the ICMJE and Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (joint statement by COPE, DOAJ, WAME, and OASPA; http://doaj.org/bestpractice/).

1. Registration of Clinical Trial Research

It is recommended that any research that deals with a clinical trial be registered with a primary national clinical trial registration site, such as http://cris.nih.go.kr, or other sites accredited by the WHO as listed at http://www.who.int/ictrp/en/.

2. 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 pharmaceutical companies, political pressure from interest groups, and academically related issues. In particular, all sources of funding applicable to the study should be explicitly stated.

3. Statement of Informed Consent

Copies of written informed consent and Institutional Review Board (IRB)/Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) approval for clinical research should be kept. If necessary, the editor or reviewers may request copies of these documents to resolve questions about IRB approval and study conduct. In addition, for studies conducted with human subjects, the method by which informed consent was obtained from the participants (i.e., verbal or written) also needs to be stated in the Methods section.

4. Patient Photographic and Videographic Consent

Patients described in the manuscripts should be informed and aware that their photographs, videotapes, and other images (imaging records) will be published by the authors, and the authors should attach the Authorization and Release Form available at the ACFS website (http://submit.e-acfs.org) including each patient's signature.

5. Statement of Human and Animal Rights

Clinical research should be conducted in accordance with the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki: Medical Research Involving Human Subjects (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/).

6. Authorship

Authors are responsible for the entire content of each article. Co-authorship should be based on the following 4 criteria: (1) substantial contributions to the conception or designing of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; (2) drafting or critically revising the work for important intellectual content; (3) final approval of the version to be published; and (4) agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. Any persons who do not meet the four criteria above should be listed as contributors in the Acknowledgments section.

• • A description of co-first authors or co-corresponding authors is accepted if the corresponding author believes that their roles involved an equal contribution.
• • Correction of authorship: Any requests for such changes in authorship (adding author(s), removing author(s), or re-arranging the order of authors) after the initial manuscript submission and before publication should be explained in writing to the editor in a letter or e-mail from all authors. This letter must be signed by all authors of the paper. A copyright assignment must be completed by every author.
• • Contributors: Any researcher who does not meet all four ICMJE criteria for authorship discussed above but contributed substantively to the study in terms of idea development, manuscript writing, conducting research, data analysis, and financial support should have their contributions listed in the Acknowledgments section of the article.

7. Originality and Duplicate Publication

All submitted manuscripts should be original and should not be considered by other scientific journals for publication at the same time. No part of the accepted manuscript should be duplicated in any other scientific journal without the permission of the editorial board. The duplication will be checked through Similarity Check (https://app.ithenticate.com/) before submission. If a duplicate publication related to papers in this journal is detected, the manuscript may be rejected, the authors will be announced in the journal, and their institutions will be informed. There will also be penalties for the authors. A letter of permission is required for any and all material that has been published previously. It is the responsibility of the author to request permission from the publisher for any material that is being reproduced. This requirement applies to text, illustrations, and tables.

8. Secondary Publication

It is possible to republish manuscripts if the manuscripts satisfy the conditions of secondary publication of the ICMJE Recommendations (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf).

9. Management Procedures for the Research and Publication Misconduct

When the journal faces suspected cases of research and publication misconduct such as 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., the resolving process will follow the flowchart provided by the COPE (https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). The editorial board conducts and decides upon suspected cases.

10. Editorial Responsibilities

The editorial board will continuously work to monitor/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; no plagiarism, no fraudulent data. The editorial board checks manuscripts to confirm the originality of the text through Similarity Check. If the value of the similarity index is unexpectedly high, it will be screened to determine whether it is a duplicate publication. Editors always have the following responsibilities: the responsibility and authority to reject/accept articles; to ensure no conflicts of interest with respect to the articles they reject/accept; to accept a paper only when reasonably certain; to promote the correction or retraction of publications when errors are found; and to preserve the anonymity of the reviewers.

III. Peer Review Process

All manuscripts will be evaluated by three peer reviewers who are selected by the editors. All papers are accepted or rejected based on the quality and originality of the research and its clinical and scientific significance. An initial decision will normally be made within 3 weeks after reviewers agree to evaluate a manuscript, and the reviewers’ comments will then be sent to the corresponding authors. Revised manuscripts must be submitted online by the corresponding author. The corresponding author must indicate the alterations that have been made in response to the referees’ comments item by item in a response note and the submitted original file with track changes enabled. Failure to resubmit the revised manuscript within 8 weeks of the editorial decision is regarded as a withdrawal. The editorial office should be notified if additional time is needed or if an author chooses not to submit a revision. The editorial committee makes decisions concerning editing, revision, and acceptance or rejection, and editing may include shortening an article, reducing the number of illustrations or tables, or changing the paper’s format or the order of the manuscript. Authors can track the progress of a manuscript on the journal’s website. Articles that are accepted for publication are moved from the “Manuscripts Accepted” to the “Manuscripts in Publication” section of the journal’s website.

IV. Editorial Policies

1. Copyright

A manuscript, when published, will become the property of the journal. All published papers become the permanent property of the Korean Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons and must not be published elsewhere without written permission. The copyright of all published materials is owned by the Korean Society of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgeons.

2. Open Access Policy

The journal is an open-access journal distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited. Authors do not need to receive permission for the use of tables or figures published in this journal in other journals, books, or media for scholarly and educational purposes. This is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative's definition of open access.

3. Data Sharing

The journal encourages data sharing wherever possible, unless this is prevented by ethical, privacy, or confidentiality matters. Authors wishing to do so may deposit their data in a publicly accessible repository and include a link to the DOI in the text of the manuscript.
• Clinical Trials: ACFS accepts the ICMJE Recommendations for data sharing statement policy (http://icmje.org/icmjerecommendations.pdf). Authors may refer to the editorial entitled “Data Sharing Statements for Clinical Trials: A Requirement of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors” (https://doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2017.32.7.1051).

4. Archiving Policy

This journal provides an electronic backup and preservation of access to the journal content in the event the journal is no longer published by archiving in PubMed Central (PMC) and National Library of Korea (https://www.nl.go.kr/). According to the deposit policy (self-archiving policy) of Sherpa/Romeo (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/), authors cannot archive pre-prints (i.e., pre-refereeing), but they can archive post-prints (i.e., final draft post-refereeing). Authors can archive publisher’s versions/PDFs.