Peer review process: APJEC is a peer-reviewed journal. All manuscripts submitted to APJEC will be reviewed by independent reviewers who are experts in the subject of the manuscript. An independent reviewer is not part of APJEC’s editorial team nor has any conflict of interest toward the manuscript. The independent reviewers are mainly chosen from the long list of authors who have published in one of the West Asia Organization for Cancer Prevention's journals or have been suggested by the author and have declared no conflict of interest.
Governing Body: APJEC is scientifically governed by a team of scientists from all over the Asia and Pacific region acting as editorial team members and a group of senior scientists who act as the International advisory board and give policy advice to the editorial team. APJEC’s editorial management, editing, full-text production, preservation, and website maintenance are outsourced to professionals in the publishing industry. The financial aspect of the production and outsourcing is handled by the general secretary of the West Asia Organization for Cancer Prevention (WAOCP) who acts as the principal contact for APJEC. WAOCP is a not-for-profit, non-governmental scientific organization under the auspices of Sabsevar University of Medica Sciences, Sabzevar/Iran. The WAOCP has been assigned the responsibility of acting as a chapter of the Asian Pacific Organization for Cancer Prevention (APOCP). APOCP was established as a cancer control association in 2000 and has been involved in promoting cancer control measures throughout Asia and the Pacific region by holding scientific conferences and seminars, as well as publishing scientific journals (APJEC is one of these journals).
Editorial team/contact information: The full name, affiliation, and CVs of the editorial and international advisory board are provided to the public on the journal website (click here to visit). The physical address and the contact information of the principal contact are provided on APJEC’s website (Click Here to see).
Article Submission or Processing Charges (APCs): The Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Environment and Cancer does not charge any article processing charges (APCs) or article submission charges (APCs). The publishing cost of APJEC is funded and supported by the West Asia Organization for Cancer Prevention (WAOCP).
Copyright: All manuscripts published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Environment and Cancer are under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This permits anyone to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the published work, provided the original work and source are appropriately cited. The Copyright and licensing information is clearly described on the journal’s Website's landing page and stated on all published articles since Oct. 2017.
Process for identification of and dealing with allegations of research misconduct: The editorial team of APJEC shall take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct (plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication) may occur. In addition, APJEC’s authors, editors, reviewers, and English editors are responsible for reporting any scientific misconduct that may happen.
Ownership and management: The journal‘ owner is the West Asia Organization for Cancer Prevention (WAOCP), a not-for-profit, non-governmental scientific organization under the Auspuise of the Sabzevar University of Medical Sciences. The WAOCP has been assigned the responsibility of acting as a chapter of the Asian Pacific Organization for Cancer Prevention (read about WAOCP here). The WAOCP has outsourced the journal management tasks (editorial system, XML generation, page designing...) to different third parties. The fund for the management of the journal originates from public donations and government subsidies.
Website: The editorial workflow of the APJEC is managed by Open Journal System software. The system is widely used by many journals and provides a coherent means to manage all aspects of the publishing process; submission, review, and publishing.
Name of journal: The Journal name, Asia Pacific Journal of Environment and Cancer is unique and the uniqueness of the name has been verified when an ISSN was assigned to the journal (see journal in ISSN portal). The Journal is considered the official publication of the Asia Pacific Organization for Cancer Prevention and its subsidiary, the West Asia Organization for Cancer Prevention (WAOCP).
Conflicts of interest: APJEC has clear policies on conflicts of interest for editors, authors, and reviewers. All the editorial team members, reviewers, or authors must declare a conflict-of-interest statement prior to commenting, reviewing, recommending (for editors and reviewers), and submitting (for authors).
Access and copyright policy: All the journal contents and individual articles are available to readers free of charge under the term of Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source.
Revenue sources: The journal does not generate revenue. Its expenses are managed by the WAOCP, and donations from other organizations including government subsidies. WAOCP as the financial supporter of the journal may seek funding from different bodies to help the journal keep its good standing. WAOCP shall not seek funding from the tobacco industry or industries whose operation increases the risk of cancer to the public.
Advertising: APJEC does not advertise and all logos and names on the journal website are for informing our clients, and they shall not be considered as advertising.
Publication Ethics: APJEC is very sensitive to research misconduct and uses all means available to prevent publishing miscounted research. Though there is no standard definition of research misconduct, the Council of Science Editors defines research misconduct broadly into three categories of action and conduct. APJEC uses this definition of misconduct and follows
Protection of human subjects: APJEC observes the principles governing research on human subjects outlined by the Declaration of Helsinki. APJEC does not publish manuscripts that do not declare a statement about the protection of human subjects and the acquisition of informed consent when the subject of research is human (as it is required by the Declaration of Helsinki) Normally, the journal requires that a statement is declared that research has been reviewed by an institutional review board (IRB) either in the material method section of the manuscript or in the acknowledgment section of the manuscript. APJEC encourages authors to report the registry number of the IRB in countries where a central registrar of the IRB exists as is the case in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Falsification and Fabrication of data: Fabrication is defined as making up data without actually collecting or synthesizing scientific data. Falsification is defined as the manipulation of research material in order to reach a favorable result. Fabrication and falsification could happen at any stage of research (in the field) up to the publication of the manuscript where a misuse of citation can happen (referencing to a citation when the citation does not support the argument). APJEC tries to identify any kind of fabrication or falsification in all levels of manuscript processing, from initial screening to comprehensive evaluation of a revised manuscript and even after a manuscript has been published. Report of any fabrication and falsification is an ethical duty of our authors, co-authors, reviewers, editors, and readers. In any event of falsification or fabrication, APJEC keeps its right to retract or withdraw the fabricated or falsified article. APJEC strictly follows the COPE flowchart in dealing with fabrication and falsification.
Plagiarism: Plagiarism is defined as the appropriation of another person's ideas, processes, results, or words without giving appropriate credit. Another category of plagiarism is self-plagiarism when the author publishes his idea, data, and text in different journals when no need for such duplication exists. APJEC uses all means to detect plagiarism. As a matter of quality assurance, a similarity of more than 30 percent in the text of a manuscript will be returned to the author to remove the similarities and reduce the chance of plagiarism. APJEC strictly follows the COPE follow chart in dealing with plagiarized articles.
APJEC Authorship Consideration and Dispute Management: APJEC considers an author as a person who has substantially contributed in all stages of research which the manuscript reports its result. On the other hand, all authors who are listed in a manuscript have contributed to the research and the manuscript submitted to the journal. There are many different definitions of authorship among different bodies that oversee authorship rights and responsibilities. The COPE defines authorship as “The term authorship can refer to the creator or originator of an idea (eg, the author of the theory of relativity) or the individual or individuals who develop and bring to fruition the product that disseminates intellectual or creative works (eg, the author of a poem or a scholarly article).” The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) bases the authorship on the following four criteria:
APJEC policies in maintaining its high standard of ethics have many provisions that help the editorial to establish the authorship requirement that was defined by COPE or ICMJE. For this, APJEC uses its editorial management system to validate the authorship of a manuscript submitted. APJEC’s initial engagement with authors is through its “Editorial Management System”. The system functionally deals with the corresponding author but informs other authors of any changes or major steps that are taken in the process of submission, review, revision, editing, and final steps of publication. The only means of communication with authors is by email. All listed authors are required to verify their contribution to a submitted manuscript by receiving an email that informs them of the submission and the nature of authorship of the manuscript (author list with the order that is registered in our Editorial Management System). The email clearly validates the contribution of the listed authors in the manuscript. In the case that an author disputes the submitted manuscript or his contribution, the journal returns the manuscript to the corresponding author and asks to resubmit when the dispute is resolved. Any authorship dispute, after the initial step, is managed as the COPE recommends. Authors that may need information on authorship rights and responsibilities and the way to handle disputes are referred to the COPE publication on how to handle authorship disputes at (https://waocp.com/journal/2003pdf12_0.pdf) or to define the Role of Authors and Contributors in ICMJE ‘s web site at (http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/roles-and-responsibilities/defining-the-role-of-authors-and-contributors.html). We expect that all authors listed in a manuscript will receive the journal’s email and read the content of the email that is provided for the purpose of authorship validation.
Protection of Animal Subjects: Researchers must show respect for animals and their intrinsic value and safeguard animal welfare. Researchers have a responsibility to minimize disturbance and impact on natural behavior. All manuscripts reporting animal experimentation must include a statement that the animal experiments were performed only after approval by an Institutional Review Board or ethics committee;
Conflict of Interest: At the time of manuscript submission, the APJEC requires that corresponding authors disclose any conflict of interest. In addition, editors and reviewers need to declare a conflict of interest before dealing with a manuscript.
Photographs with Identifiable Patients: In photographs, sonograms, CT scans, etc., the physical identification of a patient should be masked whenever possible. If a patient is identifiable, written permission to use the photograph must be obtained from the patient or guardian and sent to the Journal’s Editorial Office upon manuscript submission. It must be clearly stated in the manuscript that informed consent was obtained.
Simultaneous Submission and Online Posting: The APJEC will not consider manuscripts that are concurrently submitted elsewhere (except for per-prints) or have been published previously (including online publication). The presentation of research results at scientific conferences or in the abstract book of such a conference does not constitute a previously published article. A manuscript cannot be posted on the author’s or institutional website when it has been submitted to APJEC and during the editorial process. Accepted manuscripts cannot be posted online until after the paper has been fully published in the APJEC.
Permission to use copyrighted materials: Use of previously published or copyrighted material reproduced from another source must be properly cited. The corresponding author is responsible for obtaining written permission from the appropriate authors and/or copyright holders to use previously published or copyrighted material. Signed permission statements from the copyright holder for both print and online reproduction, must be sent to the APJEC Editorial Office upon manuscript submission. Permission statements must also be obtained from at least one author when citing “in-press” articles.
Authors' Professional and Ethical Responsibilities: The APJEC reserves the right to forward any claim of scientific misconduct to the sponsoring or funding institution, or any other appropriate authorities for investigation. The author will be notified if the APJEC forwards any manuscript to the sponsoring or funding institution for such a claim.
Corrections and Retractions: APJEC makes all efforts to avoid any errors in the published material however but errors can happen. Errors within a published article can come to notice by either of the following:
In each category, if correction differs If the error is a “minor ” or small error that does not substantially change the content of the published work, such as typos, spelling, etc. These categories of errors will be corrected to the published material available to the journal’s authorities (the journal is an open and electronic journal and the contents are available to the journal authorities to make corrections of a minor nature) or if the material has been indexed in the indexing databases, a request will be sent to the indexing authorities to apply the minor changes.
Some errors are of a “substantive” nature. These are errors that impact the content. For example: the addition or removal of meaningful sentences/paragraphs, and changes to figures or data. The correction to these categories of errors will be handled either by publishing an erratum or by retraction.
In the case of Errata, an erratum is published when the change to the original publication affects the article’s metadata or the article text’s meaning. when an erratum is published, the original article will be updated to reflect the change when possible.
In the case of retraction, the article is completely removed from the body of research.
Literature and a notice of retraction are left instead (different indexing companies may have different retraction policies that the journal will follow their guidelines). Retraction normally happens when there are grave and gross ethical breaches, fabrication of data, large amounts of plagiarism, or other reasons. APJEC follows the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) for Retraction. Retracted cases are thoroughly investigated by a special committee or referred to an independent ethical committee or may be consulted by university authorities or other relevant bodies to which the article or author of the article is affiliated. The final decision, to retract an article, is upon the independent body’s recommendation and approval of the editorial board and final approval of the Editor-in-chief. In the case of a retracted article, the original publication is tagged with a “RETRACTED” label on the journal’s website.
Privacy Statement: The names and email addresses entered on this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.