Publication Ethics

RII spontaneously maintains ethical guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). RII takes the responsibility to enforce a rigorous peer-review together with strict ethical policies and standards to ensure to add high quality scientific works to the field of scholarly publication. Unfortunately, cases of plagiarism, data falsification, inappropriate authorship credit, and the like, do arise. RII takes such publishing ethics issues very seriously and our editors are advised to proceed in such cases with a zero tolerance policy.

Research Involving Human Subjects

When reporting on research that involves human subjects, human material, human tissues, or human data, authors must declare that the investigations were carried out following the rules of the Declaration of Helsinki of 1975 (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/), revised in 2013. According to point 23 of this declaration, an approval from an ethics committee should have been obtained before undertaking the research. At a minimum, a statement including the project identification code, date of approval, and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board should be cited in the Methods Section of the article. Data relating to individual participants must be described in detail, but private information identifying participants need not be included unless the identifiable materials are of relevance to the research (for example, photographs of participants’ faces that show a particular symptom). Editors reserve the right to reject any submission that does not meet these requirements.

Example of an ethical statement: "All subjects gave their informed consent for inclusion before they participated in the study. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of XXX (Project identification code)."

A written informed consent for publication must be obtained from participating patients who can be identified (including by the patients themselves). Patients’ initials or other personal identifiers must not appear in any images. For manuscripts that include any case details, personal information, and/or images of patients, authors must obtain signed informed consent from patients (or their relatives/guardians) before submitting to a RII journal. Patient details must be kept anonymous as far as possible, e.g., do not mention specific age, ethnicity, or occupation where they are not relevant to the conclusions. A template permission form is available to download. A blank version of the form used to obtain permission (without the patient names or signature) must be uploaded with your submission.

Alternatively, you may provide a detailed justification of why informed consent is not necessary. For the purposes of publishing in RII journals, a consent, permission, or release form should include unlimited permission for publication in all formats (including print, electronic, and online), in sublicensed and reprinted versions (including translations and derived works), and in other works and products under open access license.

Publication Ethics Statement

RII journals fully adheres to the Code of Conduct and the Best Practice Guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

The editors of this journal enforce a rigorous peer-review process together with strict ethical policies and standards to ensure to add high quality scientific works to the field of scholarly publication. Unfortunately, cases of plagiarism, data falsification, image manipulation, inappropriate authorship credit, and the like, do arise. The editors of RII Journals take such publishing ethics issues very seriously and maintain a zero tolerance policy.

Authors wishing to publish their papers in RII Journals must abide by the following:

• Any facts that might be perceived as a possible conflict of interest of the author(s) must be disclosed in the paper prior to submission.
• Authors should accurately present their research findings and include an objective discussion of the significance of their findings.
• Data and methods used in the research need to be presented in sufficient detail in the paper, so that other researchers can replicate the work.
• Raw data should preferably be publicly deposited by the authors before submission of their manuscript. Authors need to at least have the raw data readily available for presentation to the referees and the editors of the journal, if requested. Authors need to ensure appropriate measures are taken so that raw data is retained in full for a reasonable time after publication.
• Simultaneous submission of manuscripts to more than one journal is not accepted at all.
• Republishing content that is not novel is not tolerated (for example, an English translation of a paper that is already published in another language will not be accepted).
• If errors and inaccuracies are found by the authors after publication of their paper, they need to be promptly communicated to the editors of this journal so that appropriate actions can be taken.
• Your manuscript should not contain any information that has already been published. If you include already published figures or images, please obtain the necessary permission from the copyright holder to publish under the CC-BY license.
• Plagiarism, data fabrication and image manipulation are not tolerated.
• Plagiarism is not acceptable in RII Journals submissions.

Plagiarism includes copying text, ideas, images, or data from another source, even from your own publications, without giving any credit to the original source.

Reuse of text that is copied from another source must be between quotes and the original source must be cited. If a study's design or the manuscript's structure or language has been inspired by previous works, these works must be explicitly cited.

If plagiarism is detected during the peer review process, the manuscript may be rejected. If plagiarism is detected after publication, we may publish a correction or retract the paper.

• Image files must not be manipulated or adjusted in any way that could lead to misinterpretation of the information provided by the original image.

Irregular manipulation includes: 1) introduction, enhancement, moving, or removing features from the original image; 2) grouping of images that should obviously be presented separately (e.g., from different parts of the same gel, or from different gels); or 3) modifying the contrast, brightness or color balance to obscure, eliminate or enhance some information.

If irregular image manipulation is identified and confirmed during the peer review process, we may reject the manuscript. If irregular image manipulation is identified and confirmed after publication, we may correct or retract the paper.

Our in-house editors will investigate any allegations of publication misconduct and may contact the authors' institutions or funders if necessary. If evidence of misconduct is found, appropriate action will be taken to correct or retract the publication. Authors are expected to comply with the best ethical publication practices when publishing with RII.

Reproducing Published Material from other Publishers

It is absolutely essential that authors obtain permission to reproduce any published material (figures, schemes, tables or any extract of a text) which does not fall into the public domain, or for which they do not hold the copyright. Permission should be requested by the authors from the copyright holder (usually the Publisher, please refer to the imprint of the individual publications to identify the copyright holder).

Permission is required for:

1. Your own works published by other Publishers and for which you did not retain copyright.
2. Substantial extracts from anyone’s' works or a series of works.
3. Use of Tables, Graphs, Charts, Schemes and Artworks if they are unaltered or slightly modified.
4. Photographs for which you do not hold copyright.

Permission is not required for:

1. Reconstruction of your own table with data already published elsewhere. Please notice that in this case you must cite the source of the data in the form of either "Data from..." or "Adapted from...".
2. Reasonably short quotes are considered fair use and therefore do not require permission.
3. Graphs, Charts, Schemes and Artworks that are completely redrawn by the authors and significantly changed beyond recognition do not require permission.

Obtaining Permission

In order to avoid unnecessary delays in the publication process, you should start obtaining permissions as early as possible. If in any doubt about the copyright, apply for permission. RII cannot publish material from other publications without permission.

The copyright holder may give you instructions on the form of acknowledgement to be followed; otherwise follow the style: "Reproduced with permission from [author], [book/journal title]; published by [publisher], [year].' at the end of the caption of the Table, Figure or Scheme.