Any investigations involving humans and animals should be approved by the institutional review board (IRB) or institutional animal care and use committee (IACUC), respectively, of the institution where the study took place. In addition, investigations with pathogens requiring a high degree of biosafety should obtain approval by relevant committee (institutional biosafety committee). Informed consent should be obtained, unless waived by the IRB, from patients (or legal guardians) who participated in clinical investigations. Human participants should not be identifiable, such that patients' names, initials, hospital numbers, dates of birth or other protected healthcare information should not be disclosed. If experiments involve animals, the research should be based on national or institutional guidelines for animal care and use. Original articles submitted to PEMJ that address any investigation involving humans and animals should include a description about whether the study was conducted under an approval by the IRB (with or without patient informed consent) or IACUC, respectively. IRB no. is required for submission process, and if absent, the process cannot proceed. PEMJ can request an approval by the IRB or IACUC when necessary. It is noteworthy that a Korean act of bioethics and biosafety was revised on November 11, 2014.
The corresponding author takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process, and typically ensures that all the journal’s administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and gathering conflicts of interest (COI) forms and statements, are properly completed, although these duties may be delegated to one or more coauthors. The corresponding author should be available throughout the submission and peer review process to respond to editorial queries in a timely manner, and should be available to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information or questions about the paper even after publication. Authors may appeal against the editorial decisions by e-mail (pemoffice@kspem.org).
Manuscripts under review or published by other journals will not be accepted for publication in PEMJ, and articles published in this journal are not allowed to be reproduced in whole or in part in any type of publication without permission of the editorial board. Figures and tables can be used freely if original source is verified according to Creative Commons Non-Commercial License. It is mandatory for all authors to resolve any copyright issues when citing a figure or table from a different journal that is not open access.
It is possible to republish manuscripts if the manuscripts satisfy the condition of secondary publication of ICMJE as followings: certain types of articles, such as guidelines produced by governmental agencies and professional organizations, may need to reach the widest possible audience. In such instances, editors sometimes deliberately publish material that is also being published in other journals, with the agreement of the authors and the editors of those journals. Secondary publication for various other reasons, in the same or another language, especially in other countries, is justifiable and can be beneficial provided that the following conditions are met. The authors should receive approval from the editors of both journals (the editor concerned with secondary publication must have a photocopy, reprint, or manuscript of the primary version). The priority of the primary publication is respected by a publication interval of at least 1 week (unless specifically negotiated otherwise by both editors).
COI may exist when an author (or the author’s institution or employer) has financial or personal relationships or affiliations that could bias the author’s decisions regarding the manuscript. Authors are expected to provide detailed information about all relevant financial interests and relationships or financial conflicts, particularly those present at the time the research was conducted and through publication, as well as other financial interests (such as patent applications in preparation), that represent potential future financial gain. All disclosures of any potential COI, including specific financial interests and relationships and affiliations (other than those affiliations listed in the title page of the manuscript) relevant to the subject of their manuscript will be disclosed by the corresponding author on behalf of each coauthor, if any, as part of the submission process. Likewise, authors without COI will be requested to state so as part of the submission process. If authors are uncertain about what constitutes a relevant financial interest or relationship, they should contact the editorial board. Failure to include this information in the manuscript will prohibit commencement of the review process of the manuscript. For all accepted manuscripts, each author’s disclosures of COI, relevant financial interests and affiliations, and declarations of no such interests will be published. The policy requesting disclosure of COI applies for all manuscript submissions. If an author’s disclosure of potential COI is determined to be inaccurate or incomplete after publication, an erratum will be published to rectify the original published disclosure statement. Authors are also required to report detailed information regarding all financial and material support for the research and work, including but not limited to grant support, funding sources, and provision of equipment and supplies as part of the submission process. For all accepted manuscripts, each author’s source of funding will be published. The authors should disclose all potential COI. If there is a disclosure, the editors, reviewers, and readers can interpret the manuscripts with this understanding. The authors should disclose all potential COI. If there is a disclosure, the editors, reviewers, and readers can interpret the manuscripts with this understanding.
When the editorial board faces suspected cases of research and publication misconduct such as duplicate publication, plagiarism, fraudulent or fabricated data, changes in authorship, undisclosed COI, ethical problem, a reviewer who has appropriated an author’s idea or data, complaints against editors, and etc., the resolving process will follow the flowchart provided by COPE (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). The Research and Publication Ethics Subcommittee makes a decision on suspected cases. In this process, a debatable matter may be consulted to KAMJE.
The journal encourages authors to state the data sharing in their submission. Authors may state linking to a repository or declaring confidentiality of the data. All manuscripts reporting clinical trials must be submitted with a data sharing statement. If authors describe this in their manuscripts, the description will be published alongside their manuscripts.
All published articles become permanent intellectual properties of the KSPEM, and they may not be published elsewhere without written permission. Copyrights of the articles are owned by the KSPEM. PEMJ is an open access journal. All articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The post-publication discussion is available via the correspondences. Readers can express a concern about a published article by submitting a correspondence on the article within 8 weeks of publication. In a case of error in the article, it can be corrected through the author’s reply to the correspondence, erratum or retraction.
The editorial board will continuously work towards monitoring and safeguarding publication ethics: guidelines for retracting articles; plagiarism screening for all manuscripts (https://crosscheck.ithenticate.com/en_us/login), maintenance of the integrity of the academic record; preclusion of business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standard; publishing errata, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed; avoiding plagiarism, and fraudulent data. The responsibilities of the editorial board shall include: responsibility and authority to reject or accept article; avoid COI with respect to articles they reject/accept; acceptance of a paper when reasonably certain; promoting publication of erratum or retraction when errors are found; preservation of the anonymity of reviewers.