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 Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (http://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf) from 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.cdc.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.

If a member of the editorial board submits a manuscript, they must commit to diligently ensuring that their submission does not create a conflict of interest. To maintain fairness and objectivity throughout the editorial process, they must disclose and manage all related interests in advance, as per the guidelines.

3. Statement of Informed Consent

For clinical research involving human subjects, copies of written informed consent and institutional review board (IRB) approval should be retained. The editor or reviewers may request these documents if necessary to address any questions regarding IRB approval and study conduct. In the Methods section, the method of obtaining informed consent from participants, whether verbal or written, must be clearly stated.

For clinical research involving human subjects, copies of written informed consent and institutional review board (IRB) approval should be retained. The editor or reviewers may request these documents if necessary to address any questions regarding IRB approval and study conduct. In the Methods section, the method of obtaining informed consent from participants, whether verbal or written, must be clearly stated.

In cases of studies involving humans, including case reports, the authors must indicate whether informed consent was obtained from the study participants. If there are potential privacy concerns, authors are required to obtain a second informed consent from participants, confirming permission to publish the final print version of the article and its contents, including images, text, and data.

For participants belonging to vulnerable populations (e.g., children), a separate research participant consent form is required. This may necessitate the signature of parents, guardians, or legal representatives, and it should be specified whether the consent form is written in a language that the participant can sufficiently understand.

For research involving animal subjects, approval from an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) is necessary.

The editor of ACFS may request submission of copies of informed consents from human subjects in clinical studies or IRB approval documents, as per the guidelines provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE, http://publicationethics.org/) for addressing any misconduct

4. Patient Photographic and Videographic Consent

Patients introduced in the manuscripts should be informed and aware that their photographs, videotapes, and other images (imaging records) will be released 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 done in accordance with the Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects, as outlined in the Helsinki Declaration (https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles-for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects/). Clinical studies that do not meet the Helsinki Declaration will not be considered for publication. For publication, the human subjects’ identifiable information, such as the patients’ names, initials, hospital numbers, dates of birth, or other protected healthcare information should not be disclosed. For animal subjects, the research should be performed based on the National or Institutional Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, and the ethical treatment of all experimental animals should be maintained.

6. Authorship

Authorship credit should be based on (1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, and analysis and interpretation of data; (2) drafting the article or revising it critically 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. Authors should meet these four conditions.

• • A list of each author’s role should accompany the submitted paper.
• • Correction of authorship: Any requests for such changes in authorship (adding author(s), removing author(s), or rearranging 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.
• • Role of corresponding author: The corresponding author takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process. The corresponding author typically ensures that all of the journal’s administrative requirements, such as providing the details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and conflict of interest forms and statements, are properly completed, although these duties may be delegated to one or more coauthors. The corresponding author should be available throughout the submission and peer review process to respond to editorial queries in a timely manner, and after publication, should be available to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information or questions about the article.
• • Contributors: Any researcher who does not meet all four ICMJE criteria for authorship discussed above but contribute 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 crosscheck (https://app.ithenticate.com/) or HelioBLAST (https://helioblast.heliotext.com/) before submission. If duplicate publication related to the papers of this journal is detected, the manuscripts may be rejected, the authors will be announced in the journal, and their institutes 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. Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals.

9. Process for Managing Research and Publication Misconduct

When the journal faces suspected cases of research and publication misconduct, such as redundant (duplicate) publication, plagiarism, fraudulent or fabricated data, changes in authorship, undisclosed conflict of interest, ethical problems with a submitted manuscript, appropriation by a reviewer of an author’s idea or data, and complaints against editors, the resolution process will follow the flowchart provided by COPE (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). The discussion and decision on the suspected cases are carried out by the Editorial Board.

10. Editorial Responsibilities

The Editorial Board will continuously work to monitor and safeguard publication ethics: guidelines for retracting articles; maintenance of the integrity of academic records; preclusion of business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standards; publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed; and excluding plagiarized and fraudulent data. The editors maintain the following responsibilities: responsibility and authority to reject and accept articles; avoid any conflict of interest with respect to articles they reject or accept; promote the publication of corrections or retractions when errors are found; and preserve the anonymity of reviewers.

III. 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.