Editorial Policies

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
Journal of Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery (JTO) follows the COPE (Committee for Publication Ethics) Guidelines and decisions about duplicate publication, plagiarism, and article retraction are taken as per COPE Flowcharts. [Click Here to Download COPE Flowcharts]. All Authors need to report that their manuscript is an original publication and should sign the contributor’s form and conflict of interest form for each publication.

The Journal of Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery (JTO) has the following salient points on Ethics and Malpractice

Publication and authorship:
– list of funding agencies, financial support is to be disclosed

– no plagiarism, no fraudulent data;

– forbidden to publish the same research in more than one journal.

Author’s responsibilities:
– All authors are obliged to participate in the peer-review process;

– All authors have to significantly contribute to the research;

– Statement that all data in the article are real and authentic is to be given by all authors

– All authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes.

Peer review/responsibility for the reviewers:
– Judgments should be objective;

– reviewers should have no conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors, and/or the research funders;

– reviewers should point out relevant published work which is not yet cited;

– reviewed articles should be treated confidentially.

More details on Peer Review can be found HERE

Editorial responsibilities:
– e.g. editors have complete responsibility and authority to reject/accept an article;

– editors have no conflict of interest with respect to articles they reject/accept;

– only accept a paper when reasonably certain;

– when errors are found, promote the publication of correction or retraction;

– preserve the anonymity of reviewers.

Journal of Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery (JTO) follows the Editorial responsibilities as noted by COPE guidelines: Click Here

Publishing ethics issues
– Monitoring/safeguarding publishing ethics by editorial board;

– Guidelines for retracting articles are as per the COPE guidelines

– Maintain the integrity of the academic record;

– Journal is always willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed.

– no plagiarism, no fraudulent data.

Open Access Policy
Open Access Publication and Creative Commons Licensing
This is an open-access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.
Self-archiving of pre-print and post-print and publisher’s version/PDF is allowed freely.

The Editorial Process
-The manuscript will be reviewed for possible publication with the understanding that they are being submitted to one journal at a time and has not been published, simultaneously submitted, or already accepted for publication elsewhere. Violation may lead to serious action against authors as per COPE guidelines.

-The Editorial Board will review all submitted manuscripts initially.

-Manuscripts which seem to lack scientific message or content are rejected at first instance. Journal will not return unaccepted manuscripts.

-Manuscripts that are not formatted as per journal guidelines will be sent for correct formatting before the review process

-Manuscripts that get approval from the editorial board and are formatted as per guidelines, will be sent for peer review by at least two expert reviewers [this number may exceed in cases where we do not get a definitive answer by two reviews]. The review process is blinded for the author, Institution, or place of origin of the manuscript. The journal wishes to publish the names of all our reviewers, however, the reviewers’ names will be kept blinded in terms of specific manuscripts

-Editorial team takes a final decision based on the comments received from the reviewers and also from the section editors

-The contributors are usually informed about the reviewers’ comments and acceptance/rejection within a period of 10 to 12 weeks. This period may get extended in cases where more than two opinions are needed.

-Articles accepted would be copy edited for grammar, punctuation, print style, and format. All articles will also be rewritten by the Editorial team and a final copy will be sent to authors for approval

-Page proofs will be sent to the corresponding author, which has to be returned within 4 days.

Authorship Criteria
Authorship credit should be based only on substantial contributions:

To conception and design or acquisition of data or analysis and interpretation of data

Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content

Participation solely in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship

General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship

The order of naming the contributors should be based on the relative contribution of the contributor. Once submitted the order cannot be changed without the written consent of all the contributors

For an original article, the number of contributors should not exceed six; for case reports, letter to the Editor, and review articles, the number of contributors should not exceed four

A justification should be included if the number of contributors exceeds these limits

Only those who have done substantial work in a particular field can write a review article. A short summary of the work done in the field of review should accompany the manuscript.

Online Submission of the Manuscripts
The manuscript is to be submitted only online using submission software “Scripture” [Click Here]

New authors will have to register as “author”, which is a simple two-step procedure

Ethics
When reporting experiments on human subjects, indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional or regional) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (available at http://www.wma.net/e/policy/17-c_e.html).

Do not use patients’ names, initials, or hospital numbers, especially in illustrative material.

When reporting experiments on animals, indicate whether the institution’s or a national research council’s guide for or any national law on the care and use of laboratory animals were followed.

All human and animal studies should be accompanied by a certificate of Ethics clearance, issued by an appropriate Institutional Review Board/Ethics Committee/ Departmental Board of Study or an equivalent authority of competence.

Redundant or duplicate publication
We ask the author and confirm that your paper is original, has not been published in its current form or a substantially similar form (in print or electronically, including on a website), that it has not been accepted for publication elsewhere, and that it is not under consideration by another publication. The ICMJE has provided details of what is and what is not duplicate or redundant publication. If you are in doubt (particularly in the case of material that you have posted on a website), we ask you (author) to proceed with your submission but to include a copy of the relevant previously published work or work under consideration by other journals. Authors must draw attention to any published work that concerns the same patients or subjects as the present paper in a covering letter with their article.

Statistics
Statistical methods should be described in detail.

The statement “no significant difference was found between two groups” cannot be made unless a power study was done and the value of alpha or beta is reported. Use of the word significant requires reporting of a p-value.

Ninety-five percent confidence intervals are required whenever the results of survivorship analysis are given in the text or graphs.

Use of the word correlation requires reporting of the correlation coefficient.

Acknowledgments
As an appendix to the text, one or more statements should specify
Contributions that need acknowledging but do not justify authorship, such as general support by a departmental chair.
Acknowledgments of technical help.
Acknowledgments of financial and material support, which should specify the nature of the support.
This should be included on the title page of the manuscript.

Financial disclosure
Manuscripts should include details about the funding agency/ sponsors, grant number, and the role of funders. If the funders have no role to play or the study did not receive funding, a statement declaring the same should be mentioned.

Conflict of interest
All manuscripts for articles, original research reports, editorials, comments, reviews, book reviews, and letters submitted to the journal must include a conflict-of-interest disclosure statement or a declaration by the authors that they do not have any conflicts of interest to declare.

Protection of Patients’ Rights to Privacy
Authors should remove patients’ names from figures unless they have obtained informed consent from the patients. The journal abides by ICMJE guidelines.
If the manuscript contains patient images that preclude anonymity or a description that has an obvious indication of the identity of the patient, a statement about obtaining informed patient consent should be indicated in the manuscript.
Identifying information should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, sonograms, CT scans, etc., and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication.
Informed consent for this purpose requires that the patient be shown the manuscript to be published. When informed consent has been obtained, it should be indicated in the article and a copy of the consent should be attached with the cover letter

Sending a revised manuscript
The revised version of the manuscript should be submitted online in a manner similar to that used for the submission of the manuscript for the first time. However, there is no need to submit the “First Page” or “Covering Letter” file while submitting a revised version. When submitting a revised manuscript, contributors are requested to include, the ‘referees’ remarks along with point-to-point clarification at the beginning of the revised file itself. In addition, they are expected to mark the changes as underlined or colored text in the article.

Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
Journal of Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery (JTO) follows the COPE (Committee for Publication Ethics) Guidelines and decisions about duplicate publication, plagiarism, and article retraction are taken as per COPE Flowcharts. [Click Here to Download COPE Flowcharts]. All Authors need to report that this is an original publication and should sign the contributor’s form and conflict of interest form for each publication.

The Journal will check every article for plagiarism using ‘iThenticate” and google search.

Open Access Policy: All articles of the journal will be available for open access immediately after publication.


For any queries contact at editor.JTO@gmail.com