Personalized and Precision Medicine Journal

• The Personalized & Precision Medicine Journal's ethical policy is based on the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines and complies with the International Committee of Journal Editorial Board codes of conduct.
• Readers, authors, reviewers, and editors should follow these ethical policies when working with the journal.

For information on this matter in publishing and ethical guidelines, please visit http://publicationethics.org.

Responsibilities for Publisher 

• The publisher should ensure that editorial decisions on manuscript submissions are final, are only made based on professional judgment, and will not be affected by commercial interests.
• The publisher should monitor the ethics of the Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editors, Editorial Board Members, Reviewers, Authors, and Readers.
• The publisher is always willing to publish corrections, clarifications, and retractions involving its publications as and when needed.

Responsibilities for the Editorial Team

(https://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors_1.pdf)

• The editorial team holds complete authority over accepting or rejecting submitted manuscripts.
• Manuscripts under review, or until the point of publication, must be treated with strict confidentiality.
• Reviewer identities must remain anonymous and protected throughout the peer review process.
• Editors are expected to disclose any conflicts of interest and avoid situations that may compromise impartiality.
• The team is responsible for addressing cases of plagiarism or data manipulation and for issuing corrections, retractions, or statements of concern when required.
• Confidentiality of manuscript content must be preserved until official publication.
• Final publication decisions are made by the Editor-in-Chief, taking into account the reviewers’ reports and advice from the editorial board.
• In line with the journal’s double-blind review policy, the anonymity of both authors and reviewers must always be respected.
• Information regarding manuscripts may only be shared with the corresponding author, assigned reviewers, and essential editorial staff when necessary.

Responsibilities for Reviewers 

(https://publicationethics.org/files/u7140/Peer%20review%20guidelines.pdf)

• Reviewers must maintain strict confidentiality regarding all manuscript information. The peer review process should be conducted anonymously.
• They are expected to evaluate manuscripts on time and support the editorial team in making publication decisions.
• Reviewer feedback should be provided through the official review form and by adding constructive comments for both the editor and the author.
• Reviewers must decline to assess manuscripts where a conflict of interest exists and promptly notify the editorial office of any such conflicts.
• Assessments should be fair, professional, and based solely on the scientific merit and quality of the work.

Authorship Criteria and Authors’ Responsibilities

https://publicationethics.org/media/372/download?attachment

Criteria for Authorship

Individuals listed as authors must satisfy all of the following conditions:

1. Contributed substantially to the study design, data collection, or data analysis and interpretation.
2. Took part in drafting the manuscript or revising it for important intellectual content.
3. Gave final approval of the version to be published.

Each author should have been involved sufficiently to take public responsibility for the integrity of the work in its relevant parts.

Responsibilities of Authors

• The corresponding author is responsible for all communications with the journal during submission, peer review, and publication, ensuring that requirements such as authorship information, ethics approval, clinical trial registration, and conflict of interest statements are accurately completed.
• Authors must adhere to the journal’s formatting and submission guidelines, and the corresponding author must confirm that all co-authors are aware of and agree with the submission via the authorship declaration form.
• All authors share responsibility for the content and should disclose their institutional affiliations, funding sources, and any potential conflicts of interest.
• Authors are expected to cooperate with the journal in maintaining scientific integrity, which includes acting as peer reviewers when invited, acknowledging research sponsors, and promptly notifying the editor of significant errors in their published work.
• Manuscripts are screened for similarity using plagiarism detection software. Authors must ensure proper citation of all references and sources used.

Authorship Changes

Requests to add, remove, or reorder authors are considered only in exceptional cases. Such requests must come from the corresponding author with a clear explanation and include written consent from all listed authors. The Editor-in-Chief reviews and approves the request in line with COPE guidelines.

The Principles of Transparency

• Study design and ethical approval

Good research should be well-justified, well-planned, appropriately designed, and ethically approved. Conducting research to a lower standard may constitute misconduct. The authors are responsible for the whole scientific content and the accuracy of the bibliographic information.

• Data analysis

Data should be appropriately analyzed, but inappropriate analysis does not necessarily amount to misconduct. Fabrication and falsification of data do constitute misconduct.

• Data Availability

Data availability statements should describe how readers can access the data supporting the study's conclusions and clearly outline why unavailable data cannot be released. The data used to support the findings of study should be available from the corresponding author upon request.

•  Human and animal studies

All manuscripts reporting the results of experimental investigations involving human subjects should include a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from each subject or subject’s guardian. All animal or human studies should be used after a local ethics committee approves the experimental protocol.

• Conflicts of interest

Conflicts of interest comprise those that may not be fully apparent and may influence the judgment of the author, reviewers, and editors. They have been described as those which, when revealed later, would make a reasonable reader feel misled or deceived. They may be personal, commercial, political, academic or financial. “Financial” interests may include employment, research funding, stock or share ownership, payment for lectures or travel, consultancies and company support for staff.

• Peer-review

  • This journal uses Double-blind peer review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process. To facilitate this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give away their identity.
  • Authors have the right to communicate to the editor if they do not wish their manuscript to be reviewed by a particular reviewer because of potential conflicts of interest.
  • No article is rejected unless negative comments are received from at least two reviewers.
  • This process and any policies related to the journal’s peer review procedures are clearly described on the journal’s website (Please see Peer review process).

• Archiving

• • The plan for electronic backup and preservation of access to the journal's content is indicated. This policy outlines how the authors of PPMJ can archive copies of their work on their web pages, corporate web pages, and other subject repositories. 
  • PPMJ  is an open-access license. Articles can be made available immediately according to the terms of their specific Creative Commons license. Suppose an author has published an article under an open-access license. In that case, PPMJ will encourage the author to share the version of the record upon publication instead of the accepted manuscript.
  • Authors may also reuse the Abstract and Citation information (e.g., Title, Author name, Publication dates) of their article anywhere at any time, including social media such as LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, and Twitter, providing that, where possible, a link is included back to the article on the PPMJ site. Preferably, the link should consist of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which can be found in the Citation information about the article online. The accepted version may be placed on the author's website and/or the author's company/institutional repository or archive. Self-archiving of the submitted version is not subject to an embargo period.

PPMJ  is now formally archived at: 

• • National Library and Archives of Iran (NLAI).
  • ISC
  • Magiran

• Publishing schedule

PPMJ publishes four issues per year. From the beginning to the end, all the content will be available forever on the Journal's exclusive website.

• Privacy and Confidentiality

The PPMJ is committed to respecting privacy and confidentiality at all stages of the publication process, including submission, peer review, editorial decision-making, and post-publication handling.

• • All submitted manuscripts must be treated with strict confidentiality to protect the authors’ rights and reputation.
  • Authors entrust editors with their original research and creative work; therefore, editors and reviewers must not disclose any private information during the review process.
  • Confidentiality may only be broken if there is a justified concern about fraud, misconduct, or dishonesty.
  • Editors must not share details about manuscripts—including receipt, content, review status, reviewer reports, or editorial decisions—except with the authors, reviewers, or essential editorial staff.
  • Reviewers and editors must not publicly use, criticize, or appropriate unpublished work. Manuscripts may not be shared with others without prior permission from the editor, and copies should not be retained once a paper is rejected.
  • Reviewer comments or reports must not be disclosed or published without the consent of the author, reviewer, and editor.

• Ownership and management

• • Publisher and Owner: AmitisGen TECH Dev Group

• Copyright and Licensing Statement

PPMJ  is a fully open-access journal, which means that all articles are available on the Web to all users immediately upon publication and licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) which permits use, sharing, adaption, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as the original author(s) and source are properly credited. Under an open-access license, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their content but allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy the content as long as the original authors and source are appropriately cited. In this journal, authors retain copyright ownership for their content without restrictions. 

• copyright holder

The authors are the copyright holders in this journal and retain the copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions.

• Advertising

The policy of the journal is not to have advertising.

• Corrections and retractions

To maintain the integrity of academic records, journals may have to publish corrections or retract papers published in journals and according to agreed academic community norms, published article corrections are made by publishing an Erratum or Retraction article without altering the original article in any other way than by adding a prominent connection to the Erratum / Retraction article. The original article remains in the public domain and should be commonly indexed to the subsequent Erratum or Retraction. We may have to delete the material from our website and archive sites if the material is considered to infringe those rights or is defamatory. It may be necessary for the original author(s) to make minor corrections to published articles by commenting on the published article. It will only be acceptable if the modifications do not affect the article's results or conclusions.

• • Corrections

Changes to published articles that affect the article's meaning and conclusion but do not invalidate the article in its entirety may be corrected, at the discretion of the editor(s), by publishing an Erratum indexed and linked to the original article. Changes in authorship of published articles are corrected through an Erratum.

• •  Retractions

On rare occasions, if the scientific information in an article is significantly compromised, it may be appropriate to retract published articles. In these cases, the Journal must comply with the COPE guidelines. Retracted papers are indexed, and the original article is referred to.

Procedure for Appeals and Complaints

We support legitimate editor judgment challenges. But, you must provide strong backing or new data/information to answer the editor's and reviewers' concerns. Editors seldom reverse their initial decisions. Hence, if your paper is rejected, you should submit it to another publication. Since they are based on the unbiased views of the reviewers, the Editorial Board's final decisions are often irrevocable and cannot be modified. But, if you disagree with the publication's decision and think you have a valid reason to appeal, follow these steps:

• Describe your valid concerns and the reasons you disagree with the decision.
• Any additional material or data that you would like considered throughout the review process should be provided to the journal's editors.
• If you think the reviewers misjudged your manuscript, explain why and provide supporting evidence.
• Provide evidence if there was an interest conflict throughout the arbitration process.
• The editors only consider one appeal for each article. After receiving the appeal, the editors may speak with the referees and editors who read the piece.
• The editors and editorial board's decisions on appeals are final, and they may involve rejecting the article, seeking more peer review, or requiring submission of a revised version of the manuscript.  

Dealing with Allegations of Research Misconduct 

Editor-in-Chief takes reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication.

• The journal editor's first action is to inform the Editorial Office of PPMJ  by supplying copies of the relevant material and a draft letter to the corresponding author, asking for a nonjudgmental explanation.
• If the author’s explanation is unacceptable and it seems that serious unethical conduct has occurred, the matter is referred to the Publication Committee via the Editorial Office.  After deliberation, the Committee will decide whether the case is sufficiently serious to warrant a ban on future submissions. 
• If the infraction is less severe, the Editor, upon the advice of the Publication Committee, sends the author a letter of reprimand and reminds the author of PMJ  publication policies; if the manuscript has been published, the Editor may request the author to publish an apology in the journal to correct the record.
• Notification will be sent to the corresponding author, and any work by the author responsible for the violation or any work these persons coauthored that is under review by the PPMJ  journal will be rejected immediately.
• The authors are prohibited from serving on the PPMJ  editorial board and as reviewers for this Journal.
• PPMJ  reserves the right to take more action.
• In serious cases of fraud that result in the retraction of the article, a retraction notice will be published in the journal and linked to the article in the online version. The online version will also be marked “retracted” with the retraction date.

Possible Misconducts

• Data Fabrication and Falsification

Data fabrication and falsification mean the researcher did not carry out the study but made up data or results and recorded or reported the fabricated information. Data falsification means the researcher did the experiment but manipulated, changed, or omitted data or results from the research findings.

• Duplicate Publication

Duplicate publication occurs when two or more papers, without full cross-referencing, share essentially the same hypotheses, data, discussion points, and conclusions. 

• Citation Manipulation

Excessive citations in a submitted manuscript that do not contribute to the scholarly content of the article and were included solely to increase citations to a given author's work or articles published in a particular journal are referred to as citation manipulation. This is a form of scientific misconduct since it misrepresents the importance of the specific work and publication in which it appears.

• Simultaneous Submission:

Simultaneous submission occurs when a manuscript (or substantial sections from a manuscript) is submitted to a journal while another journal is already considering it.

• Redundant Publications:

Redundant publications involve the inappropriate division of study outcomes into several articles, often in response to the desire to fill a curriculum vitae.

• Improper Author Contribution or Attribution: 

All listed authors must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript and approved all its claims. Don’t forget to list everyone who made a significant scientific contribution, including students and laboratory technicians.

• Plagiarism

• Plagiarism is the use of another person’s ideas, words, or previously published material without appropriate acknowledgment. Copying text, data, figures, or even one sentence from another source—or from the author’s own prior work—without proper citation is considered plagiarism by the PPMJ.

  All submitted manuscripts are screened for similarity using plagiarism-detection software (iThenticate) before or during the review process. Authors are strongly advised to check their work for originality before submission.

  • During review: If plagiarism is identified, the manuscript will be rejected.

  • After publication: If plagiarism is discovered, the journal may issue a correction or retract the article, depending on the severity.

  In cases of confirmed plagiarism, the journal may also inform the authors’ affiliated institutions or funding bodies. These measures are taken in line with COPE guidelines to ensure the integrity of the scholarly record.

COPE’s Guidelines & Flowcharts  

Personalized & Precision Medicine Journal is committed to following and applying guidelines and flowcharts of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) in its reviewing and publishing process and issues. For more information on COPE’s Guidelines & Flowcharts, please see: (https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts-new/translations). 

COPE’s Code of Conduct and Best Practices for Editors

(https://publicationethics.org/files/Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors_Mar11.pdf),

(https://publicationethics.org/files/2008%20Code%20of%20Conduct.pdf)

• Editorial decisions must be based only on the importance, originality, and validity of the work, without influence from financial or personal interests.

• Editors are responsible for ensuring confidentiality, fair peer review by qualified experts, and addressing issues such as plagiarism or data fabrication.

• Journals must publish corrections, retractions, or clarifications when necessary and disclose funding sources and the role of funders in research.

• Editorial policies and guidance for authors, reviewers, and board members should be regularly updated to promote transparency and ethical standards.

• Editors should encourage responsible authorship and contributorship, protect reviewer identities, and ensure impartial evaluation of submissions, including those from staff or board members.