Editorial Policies

Open Access Policy

HBKU Press is committed to supporting open access in the following ways:

Your article will be freely and universally available via the internet
Your article, in its full text format, will be, where possible, deposited in an internationally-recognized third party repository, without embargo
Your article will be in a format which is easily readable by humans and machines, currently XML with a stated DTD (NLM v3.0).
Your article will be archived on many servers worldwide

You agree, via the Creative Commons BY 4.0 licence, to allow anyone to copy, distribute, transmit or adapt your work, provided the original work is attributed.

Ethical guidelines

All authors must declare they have read and agreed to the content of the submitted manuscript.

Experimental research on humans must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee and comply with the Helsinki Declaration.

Informed consent must be documented in cases where information or clinical photographs of a patient are used. Signed copies of consent forms will be required before an article can be considered for review.

Experimental research on animals must follow internationally recognized guidelines.

Manuscripts may be rejected by the editorial office if it is felt that the work was not carried out within an ethical framework.

All authors are asked to complete a declaration of competing interests.

Authors from pharmaceutical companies, or other commercial organizations that sponsor clinical trials, are invited to read GPP3 – Good Publication Practice for Communicating Company-Sponsored Medical Research. These guidelines also apply to companies or individuals that work on industry-sponsored publications, such as freelance writers, contract research organizations and communications companies.

Medical writers, or anyone else who assisted in the preparation of the manuscript, should be acknowledged in the manuscript, either as an author, or in the Acknowledgements section, as per the guidelines of the European Medical Writers Association. Medical writers should list their source of funding and/or employer as appropriate.

All Editors-in-Chief of QScience.com journals are members of COPE – Committee on Publication Ethics. Authors who are concerned about the editorial process may refer their concerns to COPE.

QScience.com endorses the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) statement on Geopolitical Intrusions on Editorial Decisions.

Peer review policy

All submitted manuscripts will be sent for review unless they are out of scope or below the threshold level of the journal.

Unless otherwise stated, the manuscripts will be sent to two experts for an informed recommendation on whether the articles should be accepted for publication.

Typically we employ a 'double-blind' review system where both reviewer and author are anonymous to each other. Check on the specific journal homepage to see which kind of review system is used by that journal.

Reviewers are asked to declare any competing interests.

Generally speaking we are asking reviewers to declare that the work is a coherent and valid addition to the scientific corpus and put less emphasis on the levels of interest. We prefer our readers to determine interest levels.

If the quality of English needs improving, authors can submit their work to the Enago pre-submission editing service at the following link: www.enago.com/qscience

Ultimate responsibility for editorial decisions rests with the Editor-in-chief of that journal.

In cases where the article is deemed by the reviewers to be exceptional, we may use the article prominently on the QScience.com website and issue a press release, in consultation with the author, on his or her work.

Prior publication policy

Any article, or substantial parts of it, submitted to the journal should not be under consideration for publication in another journal and should not have been previously published in another journal.

However, we do not prohibit authors from making use of personal homepages or preprint services to disseminate versions of their work prior to submission. In addition, we are also happy to consider submissions if the paper has previously been issued as a technical report or presented at a conference which does not publish formally-reviewed proceedings.

We will occasionally consider translations from another journal for publication, but only with the written consent of the original publisher.

We specifically do not publish papers which have previously been published in other peer-reviewed forums - including conference proceedings - unless the paper presents new data or results, or is a significantly extended treatise of the previously-published work by the same author.

Retraction policy

HBKU Press adheres to the COPE guidelines for retracting articles. We will only retract an article if there is clear evidence of scientific mispractice (i.e. the article is flawed or misleading) and where a Correction or Erratum will not suffice in clearing the error.

Copyright and licensing

Authors grant HBKU Press the right to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher.

Authors also grant any third party the right to use the article freely (copy, distribute transmit, or adapt) provided the original work is cited and attributed.

Formal terms and conditions can be read at the Creative Commons website for Attribution Licences. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode

Archiving policy

HBKU Press endeavors to make your article available in perpetuity. To facilitate that goal, we aim to do the following:

Your article will be deposited in an internationally recognized, full text subject specific repository, such as PubMed Central, immediately on acceptance (where possible).
Your article will be archived on multiple servers around the world by our archiving and preservation partners (Portico and CLOCKSS).
We work with major national libraries to archive our electronic files for future conversion processes