Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement
The NSC Nursing Journal adheres to the most discerning ethical publication practices, according to the COPE’s Principles of Transparency and Best Practice Guidelines and the COPE’s Code of Conduct. More details are available here: https://publicationethics.org
The COPE, along with the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), have drawn up a basic set of criteria by which journals are evaluated. NSC Nursing is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), proving that NSC Nursing adheres to all the criteria of highly ethical publishing practices.
NSC Nursing takes its duties of guardianship over all phases of publishing extremely seriously and our Editors know how to respond in such cases with a zero-tolerance policy. To check the originality of content submitted to our journal, the Editorial Team use DupliChecker software.
Duties and responsibilities of editors
Fair play
Editors should evaluate manuscripts solely on the basis of their academic merit without regard to the authors’ gender, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, political views or citizenship. Decisions taken by editors to accept or reject a paper for publication should be based solely on the importance, originality and clarity of the paper, plus the relevance of the study to the journal’s purpose.
Confidentiality
Editors and editorial staff must not reveal any details about a manuscript to anyone else than the corresponding author, reviewers, possible reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher. In addition, editors must make sure that any submitted material is kept confidential while under review.
Disclosure and conflicts of interest
Editors and editorial board members will not use unpublished details found in a manuscript for their own research purposes without explicit written authorisation from the authors.
Unpublished materials found in a submitted manuscript must not be used in an editor’s private research without explicit written authorisation from the author. Confidentiality must be guaranteed for any privileged information or ideas gained through peer review.
Likewise, said information or ideas must not be used for personal gain.
Editors must not accept manuscripts in which they have any type of conflicts of interest.
Publication decisions
Editors must ensure that all manuscripts undergo peer review by at least two experts.
Independent researchers in the research field will evaluate manuscripts for originality, validity and significance. This is to help editors decide whether they should be published in our journal.
Editors will take measures in the event of ethical concerns regarding a manuscript or published paper. After investigation, if the ethical concern is well-founded, we will publish a correction, retraction, expression of concern or another note (as relevant) in the journal.
Duties of Reviewers
Contribution to editorial decisions
Peer review helps editors make editorial decisions and may help authors enhance their manuscripts. Peer review is the system used to evaluate the quality of a manuscript prior to publication. Independent researchers in the research area evaluate the submitted manuscripts for originality, validity and significance so as to help editors determine whether the manuscript should be published in our journal.
Confidentiality
Peer-reviewed manuscripts will be kept strictly confidential. Reviewers must not share manuscripts or discuss their contents with anyone outside the peer review process. Upon request to the Editor-in-Chief of NSC Nursing, reviewers may consult with research colleagues only if the confidentiality of the manuscript is kept and will inform the Editor-in-Chief of the name(s) of their colleagues in their report.
Standards of objectivity
Reviews should be objective, and observations should clear and with supporting arguments so that authors can use them to enhance the manuscript. Personal criticism of the authors is inappropriate.
Acknowledgement of sources
Reviewers should identify relevant published sources that have not been cited by the authors. Any statement that an observation, derivation, or argument had previously reported should be accompanied by the relevant citation. A reviewer should also inform the Editor of any major similarity or coincidence between the manuscript and any other published paper they know of.
Disclosure and conflicts of interest
Reviewers should refuse to review an article, communicating the reason to the Editor-in-Chief, if they have:
- A recent publication or current submission with any author
- A shared affiliation with any author
- Collaborated with any author
- A financial interest in the subject of the work
- Difficulty in remaining objective in their judgment
Duties of Authors
Publication and Submission fee
NSC Nursing promotes and disseminates the progress of scientific research in nursing, with a view to integrating the results of research into the everyday activities of nurses, so no fees or charges are required from authors for processing manuscripts. Authors do not pay a submission fee or a publication fee.
Ethical/legal considerations
The manuscript must be an original and unpublished contribution (unless it is an abstract or preliminary report) and must not be submitted simultaneously for publication to another journal. In addition, if an article is published in NSC Nursing, it may not be published elsewhere in a similar form, in any language, without the Scientific Committee’s explicit authorisation. Although the Editorial Board and reviewers strive to guarantee the validity of published manuscripts, the authors are responsible for any unethical behaviour, such as manipulation of data, plagiarism or duplication of results, and possible conflicts of interest. Therefore, the corresponding author must, on behalf of all authors, sign the NSC Nursing cover letter, which will be submitted together
with the manuscript in PDF format. It is available at the following link:
Download Cover LetterCover Letter
Use of Artificial Intelligence Tools and Technologies
Contributions using artificial intelligence (AI) tools and technologies in the content of an article must be clearly reported in a separate section of Materials and Methods, or in the Acknowledgements section for article types without a Materials and Methods section. This section should include the name(s) of any tools used, including links to websites, and a description of how the authors used the tool(s) and evaluated the validity of the tool’s outputs. Finally, authors must provide a clear statement on which aspects of the study, article content, and supporting data or files have been modified/generated with AI tools.
Data access and retention
Authors may be required to provide the raw data of their study along with the manuscript for editorial review, so they should be prepared to provide said data. In any event, authors should ensure accessibility to data on reasonable request and retain said data for a reasonable time after publication.
Patient consent and permission to publish
Studies involving experiments on human beings require the approval of their local ethics committee, as well as an informed consent form signed by the patients. In this case, the manuscript must include the protocol number of the study approval and explicit mention of the consent of the patients involved in the study. For example, the Materials and Methods section could include the following:
“Informed consent was signed by all study participants. Anonymity was guaranteed for all participants. No financial incentives were offered for participation in the study. This study was approved by the Local Ethics Committee (name of the Ethics Committee, protocol number and permission date) “.
In addition, if there is an unavoidable risk of breach of privacy, for example in a clinical photograph or case details, the authors will need to obtain signed consent from the patients or relatives. In such cases, authors will need to send the signed consent form to NSC Nursing prior to publication.
Originality and plagiarism
The authors should guarantee that their papers are entirely original. If they have used the work and/or words of other authors, this should be appropriately cited or quoted. Plagiarism takes many forms, such as ‘passing off’ another person’s paper as the author’s own paper, copying or paraphrasing substantial parts of another person’s paper (without citation), or taking results from research conducted by others. Plagiarism in all its forms is an unethical publishing behaviour and totally unacceptable.
NSC Nursing’s Editorial Board will evaluate the type of plagiarism committed by the authors. Subsequent action will be according to the severity of the attempted plagiarism, but may include correction or withdrawal of the published article. NSC Nursing will not accept subsequent articles from authors who have engaged in serious plagiarism.
All articles submitted to NSC Nursing are checked for plagiarism and artificial intelligence (AI) contributions using DupliChecker software.
Multiple, duplicate, redundant or concurrent submission/publication
Authors should not publish manuscripts describing essentially the same research in more than one journal or primary publication. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal at the same time is considered unethical. In general, an author should not submit a previously published paper for consideration in another journal. Copyright remains with the authors (CC-BY), so they can decide about the eventual republication of their text. All primary references must be cited in the secondary publication.
Authorship of the manuscript
Authorship must be limited to anyone who has significantly contributed to conceiving, designing, executing or interpretating the reported study. Significant contributors should be listed as co-authors. If others have taken part in certain substantive aspects of the research project, they should be acknowledged or listed as contributors. The corresponding author should make sure that all appropriate co-authors (and no inappropriate co-authors) are included in the paper, and that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version and agreed to its submission for publication.
Disclosure and conflicts of interest
In their manuscripts, all authors should report any financial or other substantive conflict of interest that might be construed as influencing the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project must be stated.
Peer review
Authors are obliged to take part in the peer review process and fully cooperate by responding promptly to editors’ requests for raw data, clarifications, and proof of ethics approval, patient consents and copyright permissions. In the case of a first decision of “reviews necessary”, authors should respond to the reviewers’ comments systematically, point by point, and in a timely manner, duly reviewing and re-submitting their manuscript to the journal within the deadline given.
Fundamental errors in published works
If authors find significant errors or inaccuracies in their own published work, they must promptly notify the journal’s editors or publisher and cooperate with them to either correct the paper in the form of an erratum or to retract the paper. If the editors or publisher learn from a third party that a published paper has a significant error or inaccuracy, the author must promptly correct or retract the paper or provide evidence to the editors of the correctness of the paper. For further information on the procedure for retracting or correcting articles, please contact the Editor-in-Chief.
Digital content preservation policy
NSC Nursing is committed to the permanent availability and preservation of scholarly research and ensures accessibility by partnering with organisations and maintaining our own digital archive.
NSC Nursing is digitally preserved by LEGALGED (an authorised Italian company).
Email: legalged@gmail.com
Web page: www.legalged.it
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.