Publication Ethics & Malpractice Statement (PEMS)

The principal purpose of editorial action under this policy is to protect research participants, readers, authors, reviewers, and the reliability of the scholarly record.

Editorial action is not primarily intended to punish individuals. Universities, employers, research institutions, ethics committees, professional regulators, funders, courts, and other competent bodies may have authority to determine disciplinary, professional, contractual, or legal consequences. JPMHR retains independent responsibility for deciding what action is required in relation to a submission or publication.

This policy applies to all content submitted to, accepted by, or published in JPMHR, including original research, reviews, meta-analyses, protocols, diagnostic and prognostic studies, case reports, commentaries, letters, critiques, responses, corrections, retractions, special-issue content, and other scholarly material.

Applicable requirements continue to apply to invited, commissioned, editorial, or special-issue content even where the ordinary external peer-review process differs.

No person is exempt from the journal's ethical requirements because of academic seniority, professional reputation, institutional status, editorial office, publisher relationship, ownership interest, financial importance, or personal relationship.

Integrity of the Scholarly Record

Submitted and published research should provide an honest, sufficiently transparent, and reliable account of the work conducted. Where a material problem is identified, JPMHR will take the editorial action reasonably necessary to maintain an accurate and interpretable scholarly record.

Fairness and Due Process

Persons materially affected by an allegation will ordinarily be given a reasonable opportunity to respond before an adverse conclusion is reached, except where immediate temporary action is required to protect participants, confidential information, legal rights, or the scholarly record.

Allegations Are Not Findings

JPMHR distinguishes an allegation, concern, irregularity, or warning sign from an established finding. Unresolved allegations will not be represented publicly as proven misconduct.

Proportionality

Editorial action will be proportionate to the nature, evidence, and likely consequences of the problem identified. Honest errors, legitimate scientific disagreement, and reasonable differences in interpretation are not, by themselves, misconduct.

Conflict-Free Handling

A person with a material competing interest must not control an investigation, appeal, or final editorial decision concerning that matter.

Confidentiality

Information relating to allegations and investigations is restricted to persons who reasonably require access for evaluation, due process, legal compliance, institutional cooperation, or protection of the scholarly record.

Non-Retaliation

JPMHR will not disadvantage a person merely because they raise a publication-integrity concern in good faith or cooperate with a legitimate investigation.

Deliberately fabricated allegations or falsified evidence may themselves constitute misconduct. However, anonymity, persistence, criticism, uncertainty, or an ultimately unsubstantiated good-faith concern do not by themselves establish bad faith.

Originality and Attribution

Authors must ensure that submitted work is original and that material derived from other sources is appropriately cited, quoted, paraphrased, attributed, or licensed as required.

Plagiarism, inappropriate paraphrasing, unattributed copying, misleading text recycling, and reuse of data, images, figures, or other material in a manner that misrepresents originality are not acceptable.

Similarity-detection software and editorial assessment may be used to identify potentially inappropriate overlap. Similarity percentages are interpreted in context and are not treated as automatic evidence of misconduct.

Accuracy and Data Integrity

Authors must present data, analyses, methods, and findings honestly. Fabrication, falsification, selective alteration intended to mislead, inappropriate image manipulation, fabricated references, and deceptive reporting are prohibited.

Methods and analyses should be described with sufficient clarity to permit appropriate scientific evaluation and, where feasible, verification or reproduction.

Where necessary to assess a credible concern, JPMHR may request de-identified underlying data, analysis outputs, original images, protocols, ethics documentation, consent records, registration information, or other supporting material, subject to legitimate ethical and legal restrictions.

Duplicate and Redundant Publication

Authors must not submit substantially the same manuscript simultaneously to more than one journal.

Previously published or substantially overlapping material must be disclosed and appropriately referenced. Fragmentation of a study into multiple publications in a manner that materially misrepresents the independence, novelty, or completeness of the findings is not acceptable.

Legitimate prior dissemination, including eligible preprints, theses, abstracts, registries, or conference presentations, should be disclosed according to the journal's Prior Publication Policy.

Authorship and Contributorship

Authorship must reflect genuine scholarly contribution and accountability. JPMHR expects authors to satisfy applicable ICMJE authorship criteria and supports transparent description of contributions through the CRediT Contributor Role Taxonomy where appropriate.

Gift, honorary, guest, ghost, purchased, fabricated, brokered, or coercive authorship is not permitted.

The corresponding author must ensure that the author list, author order, affiliations, contributor information, disclosures, and approvals accurately represent the participating authors.

Material authorship changes after submission may require written explanation and agreement from affected authors and may be referred for institutional clarification where a genuine dispute cannot be resolved by the journal.

Competing Interests and Funding

Authors must disclose financial and non-financial relationships that could reasonably influence, or appear to influence, interpretation of the research or publication process.

Funding sources must be disclosed, together with the role of the funder where relevant to study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, manuscript preparation, or the decision to submit.

Ethical Approval and Participant Protection

Research involving human participants, identifiable human data, biological material, animals, or other ethically regulated activities must comply with applicable ethical and regulatory requirements.

Where required, approval or exemption from an appropriately constituted ethics committee or institutional review body must be obtained before research begins and accurately reported in the manuscript.

Informed consent and consent for publication of identifiable information must be obtained where applicable. Authors are responsible for protecting confidentiality and avoiding unnecessary disclosure of identifying information.

Clinical-Trial and Study Registration

Prospective registration is required where applicable under the journal's Author Guidelines and recognised biomedical publishing standards. Registration information must be accurate and consistent with the submitted manuscript.

Reporting Standards

Authors should use the reporting guideline appropriate to their study design, including relevant guidance available through the EQUATOR Network.

Data Availability and Research Transparency

Research articles should include an appropriate Data Availability Statement. Data sharing must comply with consent, confidentiality, ethics, intellectual-property, contractual, legal, and security obligations.

Post-Publication Responsibility

Authors must notify JPMHR promptly if they identify a material error in submitted or published work and must cooperate reasonably with legitimate requests for clarification, correction, or integrity assessment.

Confidentiality

Manuscripts, supplementary files, reviewer correspondence, and unpublished information received through peer review are confidential. Reviewers must not disclose, distribute, exploit, or use manuscript content for personal or professional advantage.

External consultation or co-review should occur only with appropriate editorial permission and disclosure.

Objectivity and Professional Conduct

Reviewer comments must be based on the scholarly content of the manuscript. Reviews should identify strengths, limitations, methodological concerns, reporting deficiencies, and practical improvements in a professional and evidence-based manner.

Personal attacks, discriminatory comments, coercive behaviour, and irrelevant criticism are not acceptable.

Competing Interests

Reviewers must disclose relationships or circumstances that could reasonably impair, or appear to impair, independent judgement. Where a material conflict exists, the reviewer should decline the invitation or seek guidance from the editor.

Timeliness

Reviewers should complete reviews within the agreed period or notify the Editorial Office promptly where this is not possible.

Ethical Vigilance

Reviewers should confidentially alert the editor where they identify credible concerns involving plagiarism, duplicate publication, manipulated data or images, fabricated information, unethical research, undisclosed interests, inappropriate citation practices, authorship problems, or peer-review manipulation.

Citations Requested by Reviewers

Reviewers must not request citations primarily to increase citations to themselves, colleagues, journals, institutions, or preferred publications. Citation suggestions should have a legitimate scholarly purpose.

Artificial Intelligence and Confidentiality

Reviewers must not upload, paste, transmit, or otherwise disclose confidential manuscript content to generative-AI services or other third-party systems where confidentiality, intellectual property, or unpublished information cannot be adequately protected.

Reviewers remain personally responsible for the substance and integrity of their review.

Editorial Independence

Manuscripts must be assessed on scholarly merit, methodological quality, ethical acceptability, transparency, reporting quality, relevance to scope, and reliability.

Editorial decisions must not be influenced by an author's ability to pay publication charges, institutional prestige, nationality, geographic origin, professional status, personal relationships, commercial interests, sponsorship, or anticipated citation value.

Fair Peer Review

Editors must select reviewers with appropriate expertise, manage competing interests, protect reviewer and author confidentiality, and assess reviewer recommendations critically rather than treating them as votes.

Editorial Conflicts

Editors must disclose and appropriately manage interests that could affect their judgement. A conflicted editor must not control the decision concerning the relevant manuscript.

Manuscripts submitted by editors, Editorial Board members, publisher representatives, or closely associated persons must be handled through an appropriately independent editorial pathway.

Confidentiality

Editors must protect unpublished manuscript information, reviewer identities where anonymity applies, editorial deliberations, and integrity-case information from unauthorised disclosure.

Handling Integrity Concerns

Editors must assess credible integrity concerns regardless of whether those concerns arise before publication, during peer review, during production, or after publication.

Editors may request explanations, supporting data, ethics documentation, independent expert assessment, or institutional assistance where appropriate.

No Reliance on Automated Scores Alone

An automated similarity score, AI-detection score, image-analysis output, statistical anomaly, or other automated warning must not by itself establish misconduct. Such outputs may support screening but require appropriate human assessment and contextual evaluation.

Post-Publication Stewardship

Editors must take appropriate action where a material concern affects a published article. Depending on the circumstances this may include clarification, correction, addendum, Expression of Concern, retraction, or exceptional removal.

The publisher is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure necessary for journal operations, supporting stable access to published content, implementing approved editorial notices, and maintaining appropriate administrative and technical controls.

The publisher must not direct editors to accept or reject individual manuscripts for financial, commercial, institutional, personal, political, or reputational reasons.

Publication charges are administered separately from scientific assessment and do not purchase acceptance or favourable editorial treatment.

Where a correction, Expression of Concern, retraction, or other scholarly-record action is required, the publisher will support its technical implementation even where that action may be commercially inconvenient.

External indexing, preservation, accreditation, membership, or technical-service claims must not be represented as operational unless the relevant status can be verified.

Research or publication misconduct may include, depending on the evidence and circumstances:

• fabrication of data, participants, results, documents, or research events;
• falsification or deceptive alteration of data or analyses;
• plagiarism or substantial unattributed use of another person's work;
• inappropriate manipulation of images or other research materials;
• duplicate or redundant publication;
• undisclosed simultaneous submission;
• misrepresentation of authorship or contributorship;
• fabricated, purchased, guest, ghost, or coercive authorship;
• fabricated or materially misleading citations;
• citation manipulation or coercive citation practices;
• fabricated peer reviewers or false reviewer identities;
• peer-review manipulation;
• undisclosed material competing interests;
• misrepresentation of ethical approval or informed consent;
• fabricated trial or study registration;
• deliberate concealment of material research limitations or findings;
• unauthorised use or disclosure of confidential peer-review material;
• fabrication of AI-generated evidence, references, participants, or data;
• material misrepresentation of funding or sponsor involvement;
• deceptive use of journal or institutional identities; and
• other serious conduct capable of compromising the integrity of the publication process or scholarly record.

Honest error, legitimate methodological disagreement, unsuccessful replication, negative results, unconventional findings, or reasonable differences in scientific interpretation are not misconduct merely because they generate disagreement.

Concerns should ordinarily be submitted to:

Editorial Office
editor@jpmhr.com

A report should provide, where available:

• the article title, DOI, URL, or manuscript identification;
• a clear description of the concern;
• the specific data, text, image, declaration, or process involved;
• supporting documents, screenshots, references, or evidence where relevant; and
• reliable contact information where the reporting person is willing to provide it.

Anonymous and Pseudonymous Reports

A concern will not be dismissed solely because the reporting person is anonymous or uses a pseudonym. The decision to proceed depends on the specificity, credibility, evidential basis, and potential significance of the information provided.

A reporting person is not required to prove misconduct before JPMHR considers a concern. Sufficient information should, however, be provided to identify a credible issue or a reasonable route through which the issue may be assessed.

The journal cannot guarantee absolute anonymity where disclosure is required by law, fairness, or the requirements of an effective investigation, but will seek to protect identities as far as reasonably possible.

1. Receipt and Case Registration

A credible concern is recorded and the affected manuscript, publication, editorial records, correspondence, reviewer information, and other relevant materials may be preserved to prevent routine deletion or alteration during assessment.

2. Preliminary Assessment

The journal determines whether the issue falls within its editorial responsibilities, whether sufficient information exists to proceed, whether urgent protective action is necessary, and whether another policy or competent organisation should also be involved.

3. Competing-Interest Check

Editors or other persons with material interests in the matter are excluded from controlling its assessment or outcome. An independent editor or other appropriately authorised person may be assigned.

4. Evidence Assessment

Relevant material may include manuscript versions, peer-review records, similarity reports, raw or de-identified data, images, analytical outputs, ethics approvals, consent documentation, registration records, correspondence, contributor declarations, and other evidence reasonably necessary to understand the concern.

5. Opportunity to Respond

Authors, reviewers, editors, or other persons materially affected by a concern will ordinarily be given a reasonable opportunity to explain or respond to relevant issues.

6. Independent Expertise

Where specialist assessment is required, JPMHR may obtain an independent methodological, statistical, clinical, ethical, image, data, or publication-integrity opinion.

7. Institutional or External Referral

Where the matter requires powers, records, or disciplinary authority beyond those reasonably available to the journal, JPMHR may refer or communicate relevant information to an author's, reviewer's, or editor's institution, ethics committee, funder, regulator, another journal, publisher, or other competent body.

The journal ordinarily determines what editorial action is required for the manuscript or publication. Institutions and competent authorities ordinarily determine employment, professional, disciplinary, or regulatory consequences.

8. Editorial Outcome

Depending on the evidence and publication stage, outcomes may include:

• no further action;
• request for clarification or documentation;
• correction of declarations or metadata;
• replacement of a reviewer or handling editor;
• additional independent review;
• return of a manuscript for correction;
• rejection;
• rescission of acceptance before publication;
• correction after publication;
• addendum;
• Expression of Concern;
• retraction;
• exceptional removal where legally or ethically necessary;
• notification to an appropriate institution or authority; or
• other proportionate action necessary to protect the scholarly record.

9. Documentation and Closure

Material integrity cases and resulting decisions should be documented sufficiently to support accountability, continuity, future review, appeals, and implementation of any required scholarly-record action.

Relevant organisations may include universities, employers, research organisations, ethics committees, funders, professional regulators, other journals, publishers, or competent authorities.

Information sharing will be limited to what is reasonably relevant to the integrity concern and will be undertaken with due regard for confidentiality, privacy, fairness, and applicable legal obligations.

JPMHR will not indefinitely postpone an urgent correction, Expression of Concern, privacy intervention, or other necessary action merely because an external investigation has not yet concluded.

Corrections

A correction may be issued where a material error affects part of a publication but the work remains sufficiently reliable overall.

Expression of Concern

An Expression of Concern may be appropriate where there is a serious unresolved issue that could materially affect confidence in a publication but available information is insufficient for a final determination.

Retraction

Retraction may be appropriate where findings are materially unreliable because of major error, fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, unethical research, duplicate publication, compromised peer review, serious authorship problems, or another integrity failure that cannot adequately be addressed through correction.

Retraction is intended primarily to correct the literature and alert readers, not to serve as a disciplinary penalty.

Transparency of Notices

Material post-publication notices should be freely accessible, clearly identified, and linked with the affected publication wherever technically possible.

Material changes to the Version of Record should not be made silently.

Generative-AI systems cannot qualify for authorship because they cannot assume responsibility, approve publication, manage competing interests, or be accountable for scholarly work.

Authors remain responsible for verifying the accuracy, originality, citations, evidence, data, analysis, and integrity of AI-assisted material.

AI must not be used to fabricate participants, data, references, analyses, ethical approvals, consent documentation, reviewer identities, authorship contributions, images, or other scholarly evidence.

Reviewers and editors must protect confidential manuscripts and unpublished material from disclosure to unauthorised generative-AI or third-party systems.

Automated AI-detection tools may support editorial screening but their output alone does not constitute proof that content was generated improperly or that misconduct occurred.

An editorial appeal may be considered where there is credible evidence of a material factual misunderstanding, procedural irregularity, unmanaged competing interest, discriminatory conduct, or significant information that was not adequately considered.

An appeal is not automatically a second round of peer review and does not create a right to acceptance.

A person whose decision or conduct is directly challenged will not be the sole decision-maker concerning the resulting complaint or appeal.

Integrity allegations involving a published article may proceed independently of an author's appeal concerning an editorial decision.

Manuscripts, reviewer reports, reviewer identities where protected, editorial correspondence, unpublished evidence, and integrity-case documentation are shared only with persons who reasonably require access.

Where a manuscript or publication becomes subject to an integrity concern, complaint, appeal, legal matter, or institutional inquiry, relevant records may be retained beyond routine administrative periods to protect the integrity of the process.

Records will be handled consistently with the journal's privacy and confidentiality obligations.

Guest editors may contribute to topic development and reviewer identification, but editorial decisions must remain subject to appropriate journal oversight.

A guest editor must not control the assessment of their own work or a manuscript where a material competing interest exists.

Manuscripts authored or co-authored by serving editors or persons directly involved in journal operations must be handled through an independent editorial pathway.

Invited or commissioned status does not exempt content from applicable requirements concerning originality, authorship, competing interests, accuracy, ethics, or correction of the scholarly record.

Relevant resources include:

• Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
• COPE Guidance and Topic-Specific Resources
• Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing
• ICMJE Recommendations
• World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki
• EQUATOR Network
• CRediT Contributor Role Taxonomy

These resources inform journal practice but do not transfer editorial responsibility to an external organisation.

Reference to COPE, DOAJ, ICMJE, EQUATOR, the World Medical Association, CRediT, or another external organisation does not imply membership, accreditation, certification, approval, or endorsement unless JPMHR separately publishes independently verifiable evidence of such status.