Open Access Policy

All research articles published in European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences are fully open access: immediately freely available to read, download and share. Articles are published under the terms of a Creative Commons license which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium (not for commercial use), provided the original work is properly cited. Articles can be freely downloaded from our website and no subscription and/or login is required.

A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials is deposited immediately upon initial publication in a suitable standard electronic format in CLOCKSS repository.

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

 

Description of Peer-Review

All contributions are initially handled by the Editor-in-Chief (EiC) who, together with Associate Editors (AE) and the Editorial Team, make the initial evaluation of the manuscript by verifying whether it falls within the aims and scope of the journal; decision may then be peer-reviewing or rejected. To facilitate either authors or peer-reviewers, only those papers that seem most likely to meet our editorial criteria are sent for formal review. Those papers judged by the editors as weak or otherwise inappropriate, are rejected promptly without external review (although these decisions may be based on informal advice from specialists in the field). After this step, the EiC or an AE assigns the manuscript to 2 or 3 reviewers, among the editorial board members or external reviewers who are expert in the field. To be selected, reviewers must not have published papers in the last 5 years with none of the authors of the manuscript, must belong to different institutions from authors and must not have any conflict of interest with the content of the manuscript. Following the recommendations from the reviewers, the EiC, or an AE, will evaluate them and have final authority on acceptance, revision or rejection. In the final editorial decision, we try to evaluate the strength of the arguments raised by each reviewer and by the authors, and we may also consider other information not available to either party. We may return to reviewers for further advice, particularly in cases where they disagree with each other, or where the authors believe they have been misunderstood on points of fact. We take reviewers’ criticisms seriously; in particular, we are very reluctant to disregard technical criticisms. In cases where one reviewer alone opposes publication, we may consult the other reviewers as to whether she/he is applying an unduly critical standard.

Reviewer selection is critical to the publication process, and we base our choice on many factors, including expertise, reputation, specific recommendations and our own previous experience of a reviewer’s characteristics.

Reviewers should bear in mind that these messages contain confidential information, which should be treated as such.

European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences adopts a single-blind peer review. Reviewers are anonymous unless they want to identify themselves by including their names in the review on our submission system. Selected reviewers need to declare the absence of conflict of interest in order to proceed with the review process.

 

Authorship

Submission to European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences is taken by the journal to mean that all the listed authors have agreed on all the contents, including the authors’ list and authors’ contribution statements. The corresponding author is responsible for having ensured that this agreement has been achieved, that all authors have agreed to the submission, and is in also in charge for managing all communication between the journal and all co-authors, before and after publication. Any changes to the author list after submission need to be approved by every author.

The author list should include all appropriate researchers and no others. Authorship provides credit for a researcher’s contributions to a study and carries accountability. European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences does not prescribe the kinds of contributions that warrant authorship but encourages transparency by publishing author contributions statements since the Journal is not in a position to investigate or adjudicate authorship disputes before or after publication. Such disagreements, if they cannot be resolved amongst authors, should be brought up to the relevant institutional authority. Authors are required to include a statement of responsibility in the manuscript that specifies the contribution of every author.

The primary affiliation for each author should be the institution where the majority of their work was done. If an author has subsequently moved, the current address may also be stated.

 

Corresponding Authors’ Responsibilities

The corresponding author is solely responsible for communicating with the journal and with managing communication between co-authors. Before submission, the corresponding author ensures that all authors are included in the author list, its order has been agreed by all authors, and that all authors are aware that the paper was submitted.

At submission, the corresponding author must include written permission from the authors of the work about the mention of any unpublished material included in the manuscript. The corresponding author also must clearly identify at submission any material within the manuscript that has previously been published elsewhere by other authors (for example, figures) and provide written permission from those authors and/or publishers for the re-use of such material.

After acceptance, the proof is sent to the corresponding author, who shares it with all coauthors and deals with the journal on their behalf; the journal will not necessarily correct errors after publication if they result from errors that were present on a proof that was not shown to co-authors before publication. The corresponding author is responsible for the accuracy of all contents in the proof, in particular, that names of coauthors are present and correctly spelled, and that affiliations are right.

  • The name and e-mail address of the corresponding author are published in the paper.
  • Authors of published material have a responsibility to inform the journal promptly if they become aware of any part that requires correcting. Any published correction requires the consent of all authors, so time is saved if requests for corrections are accompanied by a signed agreement by all authors. In cases where one or some authors do not agree with the correction statement, the coordinating author must include correspondence to and from the dissenting author(s).

 

Licensing

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences applies the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license to articles. If you submit your paper for publication to our journal, you agree to have the (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license applied to your work as follows:

  1. BY)Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
  2. NC)NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
  3. ND)NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material.

No additional restrictions – You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Notices: you do not have to comply with the license for elements of the material in the public domain or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation.
No warranties are given. The license may not give you all the permissions necessary for your intended use. For example, other rights such as publicity, privacy, or moral rights may limit how you use the material.

 

Confidential Process

European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences editors treat the submitted manuscript and all communication with authors and referees as confidential. Authors must also treat communication with the journal as confidential: correspondence with the journal, reviewers’ reports and other confidential material must not be posted on any website or otherwise publicized without prior permission from the editors, whether or not the submission is eventually published.

 

Plagiarism or Other Types of Unethical Publication Practice

About plagiarism or other types of unethical publication practice, we follow the guidelines on Good Publication Practice as reported in COPE and Council of Science Editors. These guidelines aim to ensure that articles are published in a responsible and ethical manner.

On a practical level, the first thing we do is conduct an early investigation using our anti‐plagiarism software. Our Journal makes a plagiarism checker by certificate software (iThenticate® and Grammarly®) on all the articles. Also, articles that are related to the suspected case of plagiarism or other unethical practice are checked accuracy by either the reviewer feedback and observations or the Editors own observations. Our anti‐plagiarism software, however, will not identify “salami slicing”. Therefore, it is imperative that each case is looked at individually and, therefore, we do not advocate the use of one statement of actions to penalize the offender. Each case is considered separately and, as editors, we will need to decide if it is a deliberate action on the part of the author or it is due to lack of understanding of the requirements of ethical writing. This can happen for new authors or some authors where translation to English is often difficult. An example of this is where there are no words/phrases in that language that translate into English, and a developing practice that we noted is the ‘borrowing’ of words, phrases or often sentences that are considered appropriate for what authors mean to say.

European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences disapproves any kind of malpractice and unethical practice.

 

Duplicate Publication

Material submitted to European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences must be original and not published or submitted for publication elsewhere. This rule applies to material submitted elsewhere while the European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences contribution is under consideration.

If part of a contribution that an author wishes to submit to European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences has appeared or will appear elsewhere, the author must specify the details in the cover letter accompanying the submission.

If an author of a submission is re-using a figure or figures published elsewhere, or that is copyrighted, the author must provide documentation that the previous publisher or copyright holder has given permission for the figure to be re-published. European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences editors consider all material in good faith that their journal has full permission to publish every part of the submitted material, including illustrations.

 

Image Integrity

Images submitted with a manuscript for review should be minimally processed (for instance, to add arrows to a micrograph). Authors should retain their unprocessed data and metadata files, as editors may request them to aid in manuscript evaluation. All digitized images submitted with the final revision of the manuscript must be of high quality.

  • Positive and negative controls, as well as molecular size markers, should be included on each gel and blot – either in the main figure or an expanded data supplementary figure.
  • Authors should provide the editors with original data on request. Cells from multiple fields should not be juxtaposed in a single field; instead, multiple supporting fields of cells should be shown as Supplementary Information. Threshold manipulation, expansion or contraction of signal ranges and the altering of high signals should be avoided. If “pseudo-colouring” and nonlinear adjustment (for example “gamma changes”) are used, this must be disclosed. Adjustments of individual color channels are sometimes necessary on “merged” images, but this should be noted in the figure legend.

 

Ethics

An Ethics Committee should have approved human and animal studies but in questionable matters, the Editors reserve the right to reject papers.

All investigators should ensure that the planning conduct and reporting of human research are in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. All authors should seek approval to conduct research from an independent local, regional or national review body (e.g., ethics committee, institutional review board). If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach and demonstrate that the local, regional or national review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. Approval by a responsible review body does not preclude editors from forming their own judgment whether the conduct of the research was appropriate.

  • Helsinki Declaration

When reporting experiments on human subjects, all investigators should ensure that the planning conduct and reporting of human research are in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Declaration of Helsinki of 1975 (as revised in 2013).

  • Animal Ethics

When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether institutional and national standards for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed. This statement is mandatory for acceptance and publication of the manuscript. Animal species/strain, sex, and source (vendor name, location) should be indicated. Please note that we encourage the use of both male and female animals. The use of a single sex should be scientifically justified.

 

Informed Consent

Appropriate consents, permissions and releases must be obtained where authors wish to include case details or other personal information or images of patients and any other individuals in their publication. This is to comply with all applicable laws and regulations concerning the privacy and/or security of personal information, including, but not limited to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU) 2016/679.

Patients have a right to privacy that should not be violated without informed consent. Identifying information, including names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, or pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that an identifiable patient be shown the manuscript to be published. Authors should disclose to these patients whether any potential identifiable material might be available via the Internet as well as in print after publication.

The following statement should be included in each manuscript submitted to our journal:

Informed consent: Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Please note that photographs of patients or research subjects should not be used unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and explicit permission has been given by the patient or research subject as part of the informed consent. Such photographs should be anonymized using boxes or dots or shades covering eyes and/or other identifying details. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, authors should provide assurance that such alterations do not affect the scientific meaning. If consent has not been obtained, it is not sufficient to anonymize a photograph simply by using eyebars or blurring the face of the subject. Formal consents are not required for the use of entirely anonymized images from which the individual cannot be identified (e.g., X-rays, ultrasound images, computed tomography/magnetic resonance scans, etc.).

All research on humans must have approval from the IRB (Institutional Review Board) or from equivalent local Ethics Committees. Age and gender of all subjects should be provided in the main text or in the Supplementary Material.

 

Conflict of Interest (COI)

Definition

Competing interests are defined as those of a financial nature that, through their potential influence on behavior or content or from perception of such potential influences, could undermine the objectivity, integrity or perceived value of a publication.

  • Funding:Research support (including salaries, equipment, supplies, reimbursement for attending symposia, and other expenses) by organizations that may gain or lose financially through this publication.
  • Employment:Recent (while engaged in the research project), present or anticipated employment by any organization that may gain or lose financially through this publication.
  • Personal Financial Interests:Stocks or shares in companies that may gain or lose financially through publication; consultation fees or other forms of remuneration from organizations that may gain or lose financially; patents or patent applications whose value may be affected by publication.

At the time of submission, European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences policy requires that authors reveal any COI, including financial interests or connections, direct or indirect, or any other situations that could raise questions of bias in either the reported work or the conclusions, implications, or opinions stated. Disclosed potential COIs should include any relevant commercial or other source of funding for either author(s), or the sponsoring institution, the associated department(s) or organization(s). When considering whether you should declare a COI please consider the following question: Is there any arrangement that would embarrass you or any of your co-authors did not declare and that would emerge after publication and you had not declared it?

As an integral part of the online submission process, corresponding authors are required to confirm whether they or their co-authors have any conflicts of interest to declare, and to provide details of these. If the corresponding author is unable to confirm this information on behalf of all co-authors, the authors in question will then be required to submit a completed COI form to the Editorial Office. It is the corresponding author’s responsibility to ensure that all authors adhere to this policy.

If the manuscript is submitted, COI information needs to be communicated in a statement within the work (e.g., The authors declare they have no conflict or financial interests).

About unethical publication practice, we follow the guidelines on Good Publication Practice as reported in COPE and Council of Science Editors.

Information on potential COI must be reported in the manuscript (see Instructions for authors – Authors’ guidelines). 

COI: Application to Reviewers and Editors

Reviewers must disclose to editors any conflicts of interest that could bias their opinions of the manuscript, and they should disqualify themselves from reviewing specific manuscripts if they believe it to be appropriate. As in the case of authors, silence on the part of reviewers concerning potential conflicts may mean either that such conflicts exist that they have failed to disclose, or that conflicts do not exist. Reviewers must therefore also be asked to state explicitly whether conflicts do or do not exist. COI for a given manuscript exists when a participant in the peer review and publication process – author, reviewer, and editor – has ties to activities that could inappropriately influence his or her judgment, regardless of whether judgment is, in fact, affected. Financial relationships with industry (for example, employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, expert testimony), either directly or through immediate family, are usually considered the most important conflicts of interest. However, conflicts can occur for other reasons, such as personal relationships, academic competition, and intellectual passion. External peer reviewers should disclose to editors any conflicts of interest that could bias their opinions of the manuscript and they should disqualify themselves from reviewing specific manuscripts if they believe it appropriate. The editors must be made aware of reviewers’ COI to interpret the reviews and judge for themselves whether the reviewer should be disqualified.” (From the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors Annals of Internal Medicine 118, (8) 646-647).

Competing Financial Interests

Authors submitting their manuscripts are required to make their declaration as part of this process and to specify the competing interests in cases where they exist. Authors are required to include a statement at the end of their article to declare whether or not they have any competing financial interests. Information on potential competing financial interest must be reported in the manuscript (see Instructions for authors).

 

COI in Industry Sponsored Research

Authors whose manuscripts are submitted for publication must declare all relevant sources of funding in support of the preparation of a manuscript. European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences requires full disclosure of financial support as to whether it is from the tobacco industry, the pharmaceutical or any other industry, government agencies, or any other source. This information should be included in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript.

Authors are required to specify sources of funding for the study and to indicate whether or not the text was reviewed by the sponsor prior to submission, i.e., whether the study was written with full investigator access to all relevant data and whether the sponsor exerted editorial influence over the written text. This information should also be included in the cover letter. In addition to disclosure of direct financial support to the authors or their laboratory and prior sponsor-review of the paper, authors are asked to disclose all relevant consultancies within the 12 months prior to submission, since the views expressed in the contribution could be influenced by the opinions they have expressed privately as consultants. This information should be included in the Acknowledgments section of the manuscript.

In the event that a previously undisclosed potential competing interest for an author of a published paper comes to the attention of the editors and is subsequently confirmed with the authors, the undeclared interest will be published as an erratum in a future issue.

 

COI: Application to Publishing Policy

European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences thrives on its independence. Our strict policy is that editorial independence, decisions and content should not be compromised by commercial or financial interests, or by any specific arrangements with advertising clients or sponsors.

 

Confidentiality and Pre-Publicity

Editors, authors and reviewers are required to keep confidential all details of the editorial and peer review process on submitted manuscripts. The peer review process is confidential and conducted anonymously; identities of reviewers are not released. Reviewers must maintain confidentiality of manuscripts. Correspondence with the journal, referees’ reports and other confidential material must not be published, disclosed or otherwise publicized without prior written consent. It is our policy to keep their names confidential and that we do our utmost to ensure this confidentiality. We cannot, however, guarantee to maintain this confidentiality in the face of a successful legal action to disclose identity.

 

Pre-Publicity

Authors of papers that contain taxonomy should be aware that it is possible for third parties to exploit the prior publication of nomenclature at any time between online posting of a preprint and the print publication date in a journal. European Review for Medical and Pharmacological Sciences takes no responsibility for such assertions of priority in the case of manuscripts that it publishes if the content of those manuscripts has previously appeared in the public domain as online preprints or other form of online posting.

 

Specific Policies

  • Submission by one of the Editors in Chief: A paper submitted by an Editor in Chief will be handled by one of the other editors who does not have a conflict with the review and who is not at the same institution as the submitting editor. The other editor with the Editorial Board Members will select referees and make all decisions on the paper.
  • Submission by an author with the same institution as one of the editors: A paper submitted by an author with a potential conflict for being at the same institution as one of the Editors in Chief will be handled by one of the other Editors. The other editor will select referees and make all decisions on the paper. A paper submitted by a family member of one of the editors, or by an author whose relationship with one of the editors might create the perception of bias (e.g., in terms of close friendship or conflict/rivalry), will be handled by another editor. The other editor will select referees and make all decisions on the paper.
  • Potential COI for Reviewers: The invitation letter to reviewers includes the following paragraph: “If you know or think you know the identity of the author, and if you feel there is any potential COI in your refereeing this paper because of your relationship with the author (e.g., in terms of close friendship or conflict/rivalry) or for any other reason, please declare it. By accepting this invitation, it is assumed there is no potential COI”. Standard policy will be not to use a referee if a COI has been declared, but the editors may use their discretion after consulting with one another.