Table of Contents

Authorship and Authors’ Responsibilities

Authorship

Author is the one who has made a substantive intellectual contribution to a paper (for example, to the research question, design, analysis, interpretation, and written description) and also understands his/her role in taking responsibility and being accountable for what is published.
Authorship is a way of making explicit both credit and responsibility for the contents of published articles. Credit and responsibility are inseparable. The guiding principle for authorship decisions is to present an honest account of what took place. Criteria for authorship apply to all intellectual products, including print and electronic publications of words, data, and images. Journals should make their policies on authorship transparent and accessible (https://wame.org/authorship ).
Authorship has important academic, social, and financial consequences which implies responsibility and accountability for the published work. Since authorship does not normally communicate what contributions make an individual qualified to be an author. Editors are strongly encouraged to develop and implement a contributorship policy, as well as a policy that identifies who is responsible for the integrity of the work as a whole. Such policies remove much of the ambiguity surrounding contributions but leave unresolved the question of the quantity and quality of contribution that qualify an individual for authorship. Rovedar Publication has thus developed criteria for authorship that can be used by Rovedar journals, including those that distinguish authors from other contributors.

Criteria for Authorship

The author is the only one who has made substantial intellectual contributions to the manuscript. Collaborations like technical services, translation, preparation of patients for the study, supplying materials, funding, or facility administrative oversight where the work was done are not, in themselves, sufficient for authorship; however, these contributions may be acknowledged in the manuscript. One author (a “guarantor”) should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole. It is often the corresponding author who submits the manuscript and receives reviews although other authors can play this role. All authors should approve the final version of the manuscript. It is preferable that all authors be familiar with all aspects of the work. However, modern research is often done in teams with complementary expertise so every author may not be equally familiar with all aspects of the work. Therefore, some authors’ contributions may be limited to specific aspects of the work as a whole.

Number and Order of Authors

Editors should not arbitrarily limit the number of authors. There are legitimate reasons for multiple authors in some kinds of research, such as multi-center, randomized controlled trials. In these situations, a subset of authors may be listed with the title, with the notation that they have prepared the manuscript on behalf of all contributors, who are then listed in an appendix to the published article. Alternatively, a “corporate” author (e.g., a “Group” name) representing all authors in a named study may be listed, as long as one investigator takes responsibility for the work as a whole. In either case, all individuals listed as authors should meet the criteria for authorship whether or not they are listed explicitly on the byline. If editors believe the number of authors is unusually large, relative to the scope and complexity of the work, they can ask for a detailed description of each author’s contributions to the work. If some do not meet the criteria for authorship, editors can ask for the removal of their names as a condition of publication.
The authors themselves should decide the order in which authors are listed in an article. No one else knows as well as they do their respective contributions and the agreements they have made among themselves. Many different criteria are used to decide the order of authorship. Among these are relative contributions to the work and, in situations where all authors have contributed equally, alphabetical or random order. Readers cannot know, and should not assume, the meaning of the order of authorship unless the approach to assigning order has been described by the authors. Authors may want to include with their manuscript a description of how the order was decided. If so, editors should welcome this information and publish it with the manuscript.

Retained Author’s Rights and Obligations

All authors who publish their research papers in Rovedar journals are entitled to the following rights and obligations:

  1. Authors hold full copyright and self-archiving rights, they transfer the publishing rights to Rovedar Publication
  2. We do decline to publish material where a pre-print or working paper has been previously mounted online.
  3. We allow authors to get their seminar papers published with a note about the seminar if the paper is not mounted online.
  4. The research and review papers published in Rovedar Publication can be archived in any private or public archives online or offline. For this purpose, authors need to use the final published papers downloaded from the Website
  5. Authors are allowed to archive their article in open access repositories as “post-prints”. (Please note that: a post-print is the version incorporating changes and modifications resulting from peer-review comments.)
  6. The authors need to acknowledge the original reference to the published paper when used in some other format like ePub or audio files.
  7. Rovedar journals offers Creative Commons attribution license (CC BY; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 )  to researchers and scholar who uses the content of the published papers.
  8. Authors are free to use a link to our published papers and share the published papers online or offline in the final format printed on the Journal website.
  9. Authors can index and store the published papers in private or public archives or repositories like university database, internet archives, academia, researchgate etc.
  10. We promote sharing of knowledge with due credit to the authors and researchers of the papers published with Rovedar Publication.

Authorship Changes, Disputes, and Agreement

After the manuscript is submitted or accepted for publication, the corresponding author is required to send a request through the signed change of authorship form to add or remove an author or to rearrange the author names of the submitted/accepted manuscript. All the authors should approve any change in authorship (i.e., adding, removing or reordering existing authors) after initial submission. Authors should determine the order of authorship among themselves. In addition, any alterations must be clarified to the Editor/Editor-in-chief via the AAF – Authorship Agreement Form.
Disputes about authorship are best settled at the local level before the journal reviews the manuscript. However, at their discretion, editors may become involved in resolving authorship disputes. Changes in authorship at any stage of manuscript review, revision, or acceptance should be accompanied by a written request and explanation from all of the original authors. In this case, the Editor also asks the authors for a filled-out and signed Authorship Agreement Form. In order to disseminate the authors’ research work, the publishers need publishing rights. For open access articles, the publisher uses an exclusive licensing agreement in which authors retain copyright in their manuscripts.

Reporting Standards

Authors of original research should present their study and its data accurately as well as discussing the results and significance of the work, so that sufficient detail and references permit others to replicate the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable. Review and professional publication articles should also be accurate and objective, and editorial ‘opinion’ works should be clearly identified as such.

Data Access and Retention

Authors should provide the research data supporting their paper for editorial review and/or comply with the open data requirements of the journal. Also, they should provide public access to such data, for a reasonable number of years after publication. Authors may refer to their journal’s Guide for Authors for further details.

Originality and Acknowledgement of Sources

The authors should write entirely original works, but in case the authors have used others’ work and words, they should ensure that this has been appropriately cited or that permission has been obtained as well as a proper acknowledgment of the work of others. Authors should cite the most influenced publications. Conversation, correspondence, or discussion with third parties, is allowed only if permission has been obtained from the source.
Plagiarism takes many forms, and in all its forms constitutes unethical behavior and is unacceptable.

Multiple, Redundant or Concurrent Publication

Confidentiality

Information obtained during confidential services, such as reviewing manuscripts or grant requests, should not be used without the express written permission of the author.


Human and Animal Subjects and Possible Hazards

User License Agreement

Conflict of Interest

Authors are requested to evident whether impending conflicts do or do not exist by signing conflict of interest disclosure form (Rovedar journals prefer to use the ICMJE Disclosure of Interest Form available here: http://www.icmje.org/downloads/coi_disclosure.docx ).

Responsibilities on Conflicts of Interest

Reporting Conflicts of Interest

Articles should be published with statements or supporting documents, such as the Rovedar Publication conflict of interest form, declaring:
1. Authors’ conflicts of interest; and
2. Sources of support for the work, including sponsor names along with explanations of the role of those sources if any in study design; collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; writing of the report; the decision to submit the report for publication; or a statement declaring that the supporting source had no such involvement; and
3. Whether the authors had access to the study data, with an explanation of the nature and extent of access, including whether access is on-going.

To support the above statements, editors may request that authors of a study sponsored by a funder with a proprietary or financial interest in the outcome sign a statement, such as “I had full access to all of the data in this study and I take complete responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.

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Fundamental Errors

If the authors see any inconsistency, inaccuracy and significant error or in their own published article, they should promptly notify the journal editor or publisher. If an error is informed by a third party to the editor or publisher, the author should cooperate with the editor, in this regards.

Image Integrity

Move, remove, or introducing a specific feature within an image is not allowed. Adjustments of brightness, contrast, or color balance are acceptable if they do not eliminate any information from original source. Manipulating images for improved clarity is accepted. Authors should comply with any specific policy for graphical images applied by the relevant journal, e.g. providing the original images as supplementary material with the article, or depositing these in a suitable repository.