Contents:

Open Access Policy

Archiving Policy

Policy Statement – Human and Animal Rights

Policy Statement – Conflict of Interest

Policy Statement – Informed Consent

Plagiarism Policy

Waiver Policy for Article processing charges (APC)

Data Sharing Policy

Advertisement Policy

 

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Archiving Policy

This journal utilizes the OJS/PKP platform to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

This Journal works on OJS/PKP platform and provides interface for metadata harvesting and XML for Articles & Issues.

Policy Statement – Human and Animal Rights

Any investigations involving humans and animals should be approved by the Institutional Review Board and Animal Care Committee, respectively, of the institution where the study took place. Himalayan Journal of Health Sciences will not consider any studies involving humans or animals without the appropriate approval. If no formal ethics committee is available, the authors should indicate whether the procedures were compliant with the Helsinki Declaration as revised in 2008. Informed consent should be obtained, unless waived by the Institutional Review Board, from patients who participated in clinical investigations. Human subjects 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 Himalayan Journal of Health Sciences that address any investigation involving humans and animals should include a description about whether the study was conducted under an approval by the Institutional Review Board (with or without patient informed consent) and animal care committee, respectively, of the institution where the study was conducted.

Policy Statement – Conflict of Interest

All Authors publishing in Himalayan Journal of Health Sciences must declare all financial disclosures and conflicts of interest in the article file of manuscripts submitted for publication.

For more information on Conflict of Interest, see the guidelines from the ICMJE.

Policy Statement – Informed Consent

All human studies submitted for publication in Himalayan Journal of Health Sciences require informed consent and ethics committee approval. If waiver of consent was granted by the ethics committee in the case of retrospective studies not impacting on patient confidentiality or patient rights, this must be clearly stated in the cover letter and manuscript.

Plagiarism Policy

The Himalayan Journal of Health Sciences is dedicated to publishing only original material. The journal staff has a policy of screening for plagiarism. All articles in this publication are original: the content (either in full or in part) in each article has not been knowingly republished without specific citation to the original release.

HJHS usesCrossref Similarity Check (iThenticate) and our own software to detect submissions that overlap with published and submitted manuscripts. Editors can see our Similarity Check page for more information on how to interpret these reports.

Manuscripts that are found to have been plagiarized from a manuscript by other authors, whether published or unpublished, will be rejected and the authors may incur sanctions. Any published articles may need to be corrected or retracted.

If any manuscript is found to be plagiarized, immediate action will be taken, which will include and not limited to the following:

1. Retraction of paper in question, from online system, review, and from all other processing.
2. Black listing of concerned author(s) in question.
3. Rejection of all other manuscripts submitted by the author(s) in question.
4. Reporting of the issue to the concerned authorities, including the authors' institution.

Note: HJHS encourages the submission of original articles by authors. Acts of plagiarism will not be condoled by the journals. Submitted work if discovered to be plagiarized will be withdrawn from the journal's website and legal action may be taken against such author if deemed necessary.

Waiver Policy for Article processing charges (APC)

HJHS is an open access journal with no subscription or Article submission charges, a fee is payable by the author or research funder to cover the costs associated with publication. This ensures your article will be immediately and permanently free to access by everyone.

Publishing an article in this Journal requires Article Processing Charges that will be billed to the submitting author following the acceptance of an article for publication.

We provide a waiver of Article Processing Charges to authors based on country classification by World Bank as Low-income economies or Lower-middle-income economies as of July 2017. We can also waive 100% in some special condition depend on if there is no funding and author not able to charge any fees. In order to apply for a waiver, please request one before submitting your manuscript by sending an email to hjhsjournal@gmail.com

You can find the list of country as per classification of World Bank.

Waiver Application Process:

• Author(s) requesting for waiver must strongly demonstrate why their waiver applications should be granted.
• Request for a waiver must be sent on same day a manuscript is submitted to HJHS Online.
• We reserve the right to approve or reject a waiver application. Waiver decision will be communicated to the corresponding author within one week after the application is received.
• Waiver request should contain the following information:

Manuscript ID and Title

Corresponding Author Affiliation and Country

List co-author(s) Affiliation(s) and Country

Reason for requesting a waiver for processing fees

Data Sharing Policy

HJHS journal uses the Basic Data Sharing Policy. Authors are encouraged to share or make open the data supporting the results or analyses presented in their paper where this does not violate the protection of human subjects or other valid privacy or security concerns.

Authors are encouraged to deposit the dataset(s) in a recognized data repository that can mint a persistent digital identifier, preferably a digital object identifier (DOI) and recognizes a long-term preservation plan.

Authors are further encouraged to cite any data sets referenced in the article and provide a Data Availability Statement.

At the point of submission, you will be asked if there is a data set associated with the paper. If you reply yes, you will be asked to provide the DOI, pre-registered DOI, hyperlink, or other persistent identifier associated with the data set(s). If you have selected to provide a pre-registered DOI, please be prepared to share the reviewer URL associated with your data deposit, upon request by reviewers.

Where one or multiple data sets are associated with a manuscript, these are not formally peer reviewed as a part of the journal submission process. It is the author’s responsibility to ensure the soundness of data. Any errors in the data rest solely with the producers of the data set(s).

Please note: As you are submitting your manuscript to HJHS journal where submissions are double-blindpeer reviewed, the main text file should not include any information that might identify the authors (i.e. Author Name, Address, Conflict of Interest and fund related information). As a data availability statement could reveal your identity, we recommend that you remove this from the anonymized version of the manuscript.

There are several benefits to sharing data:

• Sharing data publicly improves the robustness of the research process, supporting validation, research transparency, reproducibility and replicability of results. This can in turn, advance discovery and knowledge.
• Sharing data can lead to re-use and discovery, with greater opportunities for carrying out meta-analyses and the extraction of new knowledge.
• Depositing data in a repository that mints a permanent identifier such as a DOI, allows authors and others to cite the data set, allowing researchers to get appropriate credit for their work.
• Data deposition supports the preservation of data long term.
• Wider public availability of research data supports the translation of research into practice.

Data Policies

HJHS offers the following standardized data sharing policies across our journals:

• Basic – Journal encourages authors to share and make data open where this does not violate protection of human subjects or other valid subject privacy concerns. Authors are further encouraged to cite data and provide a data availability statement.
• Share upon reasonable request– Authors agree to make their data available upon reasonable request. It’s up to the author to determine whether a request is reasonable.
• Publicly available– Authors make their data freely available to the public, under a license of their choice.
• Open data– Authors must make their data freely available to the public, under a license allowing re-use by any third party for any lawful purpose. Data shall be findable and fully accessible.
• Open and fully FAIR (Findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable)– Authors must make their data freely available to the public, under a license allowing re-use by any third party for any lawful purpose. Additionally, data shall meet with FAIR standards as established in the relevant subject area.

The diagram above shows the typical workflow of an author submitting a paper to a journal with the basic data sharing policy.

Data Citation

There are numerous referencing styles available and each journal’s Instructions for Authors will include information on the recommended style – always check there before referencing data in your article.

Generally, all reference styles will include: a persistent identifier (e.g. DOI) where this is available, the location of the data and the name(s) of the individual(s) responsible for the creation of the data, and the tag “[dataset]”.

Advertisement Policy

While advertisements are crucial to this journal to be able to keep all content free for everyone, ethical considerations are in place to ensure the integrity of the journal and its content:

• "Pop-up" and "banner" ads appear on a random, rotating basis. The advertiser has no control or input over the pages where their ads appear.
• The Editorial Board has full and final approval over the content of all advertisements.
• Advertisers will never be shown any manuscripts or other content prior to publication.

This Journal carries an advertisement, which generates income, but journal not be dominated by advertisements, and advertising must not be allowed to influence editorial decisions.

Journal follows advertising policies as per International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).

Updated 28-07-2019