Journal of Maine Medical Center Ethics Statement
The Journal of Maine Medical Center (JMMC) upholds the highest ethical standards in publishing scholarly work and supports the international promulgation of such standards by voluntarily adopting the recommendations of the International Committee for Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). The full text of the ICMJE “Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals” is available here:http://www.icmje.org/. Authors submitting work to the JMMC are encouraged to review the full text of the recommendations. The JMMC also recognizes the important guidance provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), available at https://publicationethics.org/. The JMMC utilizes both ICMJE and COPE resources when adjudicating ethical issues that arise in publication.
The Journal of Maine Medical Center is devoted to representing the unique experiences, viewpoints and ideals of all of the people who deliver and receive healthcare in communities in Maine and beyond. A diversity of people and perspectives helps to generate innovative approaches that are crucial to the improvement and equitable delivery of healthcare across the globe. We commit to fostering diversity, equity and inclusion – diversity across ranges of race, culture, age, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, abilities, personal histories, hopes and dreams – as we identify and nurture the scholarship that we publish.
Please view our Conflict oF Interest Policy.
The editors of the JMMC pledge to authors, prospective authors and the scholarly community to uphold the following ethical principles.
- Publication Decisions: To base article selection solely on the importance, clarity, originality and intellectual rigor of the empirical research or scholarly arguments.
- Non-discrimination: To promote fairness by not allowing the gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity, ethnicity, political beliefs, race or religion of potential authors to bias article selection. The JMMC seeks to recruit reviewers with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints to help protect against unconscious bias.
- Conflict of Interest: To disclose real or perceived conflict of interest by editorial staff and authors.
- Integrity: To prevent scientific misconduct in its publications. Scientific misconduct includes data fabrication, data falsification (e.g., deceptive manipulation of images) and plagiarism (including concurrent or duplicate publication of one’s own work).
Sometimes after an article has been published it may be necessary to make a change to the published article. This will be done after careful consideration by the Editor to ensure any necessary changes are done in accordance with guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
Any necessary changes will be accompanied by a post-publication notice which will be permanently linked to the original article. This can be in the form of a Correction notice, an Expression of Concern, a Retraction, and in rare circumstances a Removal. The purpose of this mechanism of making changes that are permanent and transparent is to ensure the integrity of the scholarly record.
Authors submitting work to the JMMC are required to comply with the ICMJE standards, including the following.
- Authorship: The following four criteria are necessary and jointly sufficient to be listed as the author on a manuscript
- Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
- Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
- Final approval of the version to be published; AND
- Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
- Non-Author Contributors: JMMC recognizes that some persons may make substantial contributions to the published research, but do not meet the criteria listed above. Such persons should be listed as contributors, with a short statement summarizing each contributor’s role in the research or manuscript preparation. If persons employed or paid by a professional entity (such as a pharmaceutical company, medical device manufacturer or medical publishing company) have been involved in manuscript preparation, these persons along with their professional affiliation must be listed as among the contributors.Non-author contributors can be listed in the Acknowledgment section during initial submission process.
- Disclosure of Conflict of Interest: Authors should provide a list of any and all relationships, circumstances or conditions that present a potential conflict of interest.This should be included in the cover letter either by listing any conflicts of interest or simply stating that none exist. Disclosure of a potential conflict does not preclude the submission from receiving full consideration for publication. All funding sources relevant to the manuscript should be included in the cover letter.
- Scientific Misconduct: Authors should uphold the highest standards of integrity and honesty. Honest errors are an inevitable aspect of publishing and will be handled by correction or retraction of an article. When there is a legitimate debate about whether an error exists in an article, the disagreement may be transparently discussed in an editorial, letter to the editor or posted reader comments. Scientific misconduct includes data fabrication, data falsification (e.g., deceptive manipulation of images) and plagiarism (including concurrent or duplicate publication of one’s own work). Reviewers are instructed to consider issues of scientific misconduct in their reviews, and to bring any concern to the attention of JMMC editors. Potential authors who have a question about whether an aspect of their work might be construed as scientific misconduct are encouraged to proactively raise the issue with JMMC editors for discussion and adjudication.
Preferably, all authors should be identified at the beginning of a research project. In addition, criteria C and D should not be used to exclude persons from authorship who might otherwise qualify for authorship.
