Peer review process: APJCP is a peer-reviewed journal. All manuscripts submitted to APJCP will be reviewed by independent reviewers who are experts in the subject of the manuscript. An independent reviewer is not part of APJCP’s editorial team, nor has any conflict of interest with 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: APJCP is scientifically governed by a team of scientists from all over the Asia-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. APJCP’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), which acts as the principal contact for APJCP. WAOCP is a not-for-profit scientific organization registered in 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 Asia-Pacific region by holding scientific conferences and seminars.
Editorial team/contact information: The full name, affiliation, and CVs of the editorial and international advisory boards 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 APJCP’s website (Click Here to see).
Author fees: APJCP does not charge any submission, page, or color fees. However, to defray costs of formatting and preservation, server maintenance, etc., there is a minimal publication charge based on the country of residency’s World Bank classification for accepted manuscripts. The charges are as follows:
To find the category of your country, please download the World Bank Classification Table.
The country of residence is determined by the affiliation of the corresponding author. If more than one corresponding author from different categories of World Bank classification, the charge will be based on the higher income category.
Students (MS, Ph.D., Research fellows)/ visiting faculty from low and lower income categories who study/visit in the upper and high income categories can pay the same as the country of their origin if they are considered as international students/fellows (they must provide a certificate from the international office of the university).
Copyright: All manuscripts published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention are under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. 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 October 2017.
Process for identification of and dealing with allegations of research misconduct: The editorial team of APJCP 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, APJCP’s authors, editors, reviewers, and English editors are responsible for reporting any scientific misconduct that may have occurred. APJCP shall follow COPE’s guidelines in dealing with allegations of research misconduct.
Ownership and management: The journal‘ owner is the West Asia Organization for Cancer Prevention (WAOCP). 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 design...) to third parties. The fund for management of the journal originates from the journal's income, public donations, and government subsidies.
Website: The Editorial processes of the APJCP (journal.waocp.org) are managed by the 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 Cancer Prevention, is unique, and the uniqueness of the name has been verified when an ISSN was assigned to the journal. The Journal is considered the official publication of the Asia Pacific Organization for Cancer Prevention and its subsidiary, West Asia Organization for Cancer Prevention (WAOCP).
Conflicts of interest: APJCP 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: All the journal contents and individual articles are available to readers free of charge under the terms 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 revenue sources of the journal are mainly publication fees charged to authors and donations by the WAOCP, and other organizations, including government subsidies. WAOCP, as the financial supporter of the journal, may seek funding from different bodies to help the journal maintain its good standing. WAOCP shall not seek funding from the tobacco industry or industries whose operations increase the risk of cancer to the public.
Advertising: APJCP 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: APJCP 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 in three categories of action and conduct. APJCP uses this definition of misconduct and follows the COPE follow chart in dealing with research misconduct. In addition, for each component of the research misconduct, APJCP has many assurance policies as follows
APJCP does not publish manuscripts that do not declare a statement about the protection of human subjects. Normally, the journal requires that a statement be declared that research has been reviewed by an institutional review board (IRB) either in the method section of the manuscript or in the acknowledgment section of the manuscript. APJCP encourages authors to report the registry number of the IRB in countries where a central registrar of the IRB exists.
Falsification and Fabrication of data: Fabrication is defined as the making up of 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 a manuscript, where a misuse of citation can happen (referencing a citation when the citation does not support the argument). APJCP tries to identify any kind of fabrication or falsification at all levels of manuscript processing, from initial screening to comprehensive evaluation of a revised manuscript, and even after a manuscript has been published. Reporting any fabrication and falsification is an ethical duty of our authors, co-authors, reviewers, editors, and readers. In any event of falsification or fabrication, APJCP keeps its right to retract or withdraw the fabricated or falsified article. APJCP strictly follows the COPE follow chart 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 an author publishes his own idea, data, and text in different journals when no need for such duplication exists. APJCP 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. APJCP strictly follows the COPE follow chart in dealing with plagiarized articles (Click to download).
APJCP Authorship Consideration and Dispute Management.
APJCP considers an author as a person who has substantially contributed to all stages of the research that the manuscript reports its results. 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:
APJCP policies in maintaining its high standard of ethics have many provisions that help editors establish the authorship requirement that was defined by COPE or ICMJE. For this, APJCP uses its editorial management system to validate the authorship of a manuscript submitted. APJCP’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 the 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 a case where an author disputes the submitted manuscript or their 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 who may need information on authorship rights and responsibility, and the way to handle disputes, are referred to the COPE publication on how to handle authorship disputes, which can be downloaded here. learn more about 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 an email aknowledging thier authorship. The email is provided for the purpose of authorship validation.
Protection of Human and Animal Subjects: The APJCP endorses the principles governing the protection of human subjects in research embodied in the Declaration of Helsinki and expects that all investigations and research involving human subjects have been performed in accordance with these principles. It is expected that all information regarding research involving humans has been approved by an Institutional Review Board.
All manuscripts reporting human experimentation must include the following:
A statement that the human investigations were performed only after approval by an Institutional Review Board or ethics committee;
It was performed in accordance with the ethical principles of the Declaration of Helsinki (click to download the declaration).
A statement that the researchers/investigators obtained informed consent from each participant or each participant’s guardian, prior to conducting any such research.
When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether the institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed.
Conflict of Interest: At the time of manuscript submission, the APJCP 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 APJCP will not consider manuscripts that are concurrently submitted elsewhere (except for pre-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 APJCP and during the editorial process. Accepted manuscripts cannot be posted online until after the paper has been fully published in the APJCP.
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 APJCP 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 APJCP reserves the right to forward any claim of scientific misconduct to the sponsoring or funding institution, or to any other appropriate authorities for investigation. The author will be notified if the APJCP forwards any manuscript to the sponsoring or funding institution for such a claim.
APJCP makes all efforts to avoid any errors in the published material; however, errors can happen. Errors within a published article can come to notice by either of the following:
In each category, correction differs. If the error is a “minor ” or small error that does not substantially change the contents 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 contents are viable to the journal's 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: addition or removal of meaningful sentences/paragraphs, 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’s text 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, and 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. APJCP 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 where the article or the 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 case of a retracted article, the original publication is tagged with a “RETRACTED” label on the journal’s website.