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Policies

 

Contents

 

Philosophy of Journal of Mind and Medical Sciences

Journal of Mind and Medical Sciences starts from the idea that mental and medical sciences should be better interrelated, offering thus an integrated (if not unitary) perspective regarding the study and understanding of mental and physical health and diseases. For more information, please see Journal of Mind and Medical Sciences Aims and Scope page.

 

Who Can Submit?

Anyone may submit an original article to be considered for publication in Journal of Mind and Medical Sciences provided he or she owns the copyright to the work being submitted or is authorized by the copyright owner or owners to submit the article. Authors are the initial owners of the copyrights to their works (an exception in the non-academic world to this might exist if the authors have, as a condition of employment, agreed to transfer copyright to their employer).

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Rights for Authors and ValpoScholar

As further described in our submission agreement (the Submission Agreement), in consideration for publication of the article, the authors assign to ValpoScholar all copyright in the article, subject to the expansive personal--use exceptions described below.

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Attribution and Usage Policies

Reproduction, posting, transmission or other distribution or use of the article or any material therein, in any medium as permitted by a personal-use exemption or by written agreement of ValpoScholar, requires credit to ValpoScholar as copyright holder (e.g., ValpoScholar © 2024).

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Personal-use Exceptions

The following uses are always permitted to the author(s) and do not require further permission from ValpoScholar provided the author does not alter the format or content of the articles, including the copyright notification:

  • Storage and back-up of the article on the author's computer(s) and digital media (e.g., diskettes, back-up servers, Zip disks, etc.), provided that the article stored on these computers and media is not readily accessible by persons other than the author(s);

  • Posting of the article on the author(s) personal website, provided that the website is non-commercial;

  • Posting of the article on the internet as part of a non-commercial open access institutional repository or other non-commercial open access publication site affiliated with the author(s)'s place of employment (e.g., a Phrenology professor at the University of Southern North Dakota can have her article appear in the University of Southern North Dakota's Department of Phrenology online publication series); and

  • Posting of the article on a non-commercial course website for a course being taught by the author at the university or college employing the author.

People seeking an exception, or who have questions about use, should contact the editors.

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General Terms and Conditions of Use

Users of the ValpoScholar website and/or software agree not to misuse the ValpoScholar service or software in any way.

The failure of ValpoScholar to exercise or enforce any right or provision in the policies or the Submission Agreement does not constitute a waiver of such right or provision. If any term of the Submission Agreement or these policies is found to be invalid, the parties nevertheless agree that the court should endeavor to give effect to the parties' intentions as reflected in the provision, and the other provisions of the Submission Agreement and these policies remain in full force and effect. These policies and the Submission Agreement constitute the entire agreement between ValpoScholar and the Author(s) regarding submission of the Article.

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Ethical Policies

Submitted articles cannot have been previously published, nor be forthcoming in an archival journal or book (print or electronic). Please note: "publication" in a working-paper series does not constitute prior publication. In addition, by submitting material to Journal of Mind and Medical Sciences, the author is stipulating that the material is not currently under review at another journal (electronic or print) and that he or she will not submit the material to another journal (electronic or print) until the completion of the editorial decision process at Journal of Mind and Medical Sciences. If you have concerns about the submission terms for Journal of Mind and Medical Sciences, please contact the editors.

We strongly recommend to all contributors to respect internationally accepted ethical standards related to publications. Contrary, the Editors reserve the right to reject the concerned paper on ethical grounds. Take into consideration the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors.

  • Conflict-of-Interest Statement

    Conflict of interest exists when an author (or the author's institution), reviewer, or editor has financial or personal relationships that inappropriately influence (bias) his or her actions (such relationships are also known as dual commitments, competing interests, or competing loyalties). These relationships vary from those with negligible potential to those with great potential to influence judgment, and not all relationships represent true conflict of interest. The potential for conflict of interest can exist whether or not an individual believes that the relationship affects his or her scientific judgment. Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony) are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and of science itself. However, conflicts can occur for other reasons, such as personal relationships, academic competition, and intellectual passion.

  • Informed Consent

    Where appropriate, the informed consent must be obtained and mentioned by authors.
    Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information, including patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and 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 a patient who is identifiable be shown the manuscript to be published. Authors should identify individuals who provide writing assistance and disclose the funding source for this assistance.
    Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve, however, and informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt. For example, masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate protection of anonymity. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, such as in genetic pedigrees, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning.

  • Human and Animal Rights

    When reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (5). If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach, and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should be asked to indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.

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Malpractice Statement

  • Authors/ authorship

    All persons that are listed as authors on the paper accept that they have been directly implied in the main aspects related to the study and writing the paper, meeting the general criteria for authorship as declared by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). Generally, an author has to fulfill at least three major conditions: that made a substantial contribution to the progress of the study, that written or revised essentially the manuscript, and that read and approved the final version of the manuscript. The full responsibility for all presented data in the article belongs to authors.

  • Editorial Board

    All submitted manuscripts will be evaluated according to their intellectual content without regard to race, gender and sexual orientation, ethnic origin/ citizenship, political and religious affiliation of the authors. Members of Editorial Board must not disclose any data related to a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, and the publisher. Unpublished/ rejected papers must not be used by any member of Editorial Board.

  • Reviewers

    Reviewers assist the Editor-in-Chief in taking editorial decisions and, if the case, also assist the author(s) in improving the manuscript quality. Reviewer comments must be objectively, personal criticism of the contributors being inacceptable. Any article received for review will be considered as a confidential document, which means that it must not be presented/ discussed with others.

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Peer review process

Journal of Mind and Medical Sciences evaluates the quality of submitted papers using the peer review process, an integral part of scientific publishing. Each final response is supervised at least by one of the two editors, based on preliminary editorial evaluation and reviewer’s comments.

Any submitted paper undergoes a preliminary editorial evaluation that verifies the minimal requirements. In this stage articles can be rejected due to poor grammar or English language, lack of proper structure (do not provide enough details/ materials and methods to allow other scientists to repeat the study, lack of up-to-date references, etc.), are outside the aims and scope of the journal or having no new science (does not clearly explain which parts of the findings are new science, versus what was already known). To avoid any delay or rejection due to such reasons, please see Final Manuscript Preparation Guidelines before submission. Authors of manuscripts rejected at this stage will usually be informed within two weeks of receipt.

Articles that meet the minimum criteria are normally passed on to at least two expert referees (selected according to their expertise) for reviewing. The referees remain anonymous to the authors, and the identity of the authors is unknown to the reviewers. Referees are asked to evaluate whether the manuscript is original and methodologically adequate (materials and methods, statistical data), has results which are clearly presented and support the conclusions, presents correct and exhaustive references (related to previous relevant work), that contributes to the knowledge and development of the field respecting appropriate ethical guidelines (especially/ but not necessarily limited to plagiarism).

Referees advise the Chief Editor, who is responsible for the final decision to accept or reject the article. If decision implies a revision, this must be made by authors according to received comments. Perform/ address all points raised by reviewers and editor, highlighting the changes and additions in the text (with a different color text, or with Microsoft Word's Track Changes feature). Contrary, provide a scientific rebuttal to points or comments you disagree, describing all these revisions in a response letter. Your revision must be returned within the time period the editor tells you.

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Instructions for Authors - Final Manuscript Preparation Guidelines

Journal of Mind and Medical Sciences recommends to authors to verify - prior to submission - the general rules related to formatting requirements of scientific articles. For details, please go to: Final Manuscript Preparation Guidelines. Although bepress can provide limited technical support, it is ultimately the responsibility of the author to produce an electronic version of the article as a high-quality Word or RTF file that can be converted to a PDF file.

It is understood that the current state of technology of Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) is such that there are no, and can be no, guarantees that documents in PDF will work perfectly with all possible hardware and software configurations that readers may have.

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