Data Sharing Policy

KSV Journal of Pharmacy and Health Sciences E-JOURNAL 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]”.

Appeals

Journals should consider establishing and publishing a mechanism for authors to appeal editorial decisions, to facilitate genuine appeals, and to discourage repeated or unfounded appeals.

• Editors should allow appeals to override earlier decisions following appropriate reconsideration of the editorial process and decision making (for example, additional factual input by the authors, revisions, extra material in the manuscript, or appeals about conflicts of interest and concerns about biased peer review).
• Editors should mediate all exchanges between authors and peer reviewers during the peer-review process. Editors may seek comments from additional peer reviewers to help them make their final decision. Journals state in their guidelines that the editor’s decision following an appeal is final.

Authors and contributors

Authorship gives recognition and credit for work done, accountability for reported research, confers moral and legal rights (copyright) and plays an important role in shaping academic careers. However, authorship issues remain a common concern faced by editors. COPE’s discussion document on authorship explores the issues in detail and provides practical advice.

There is no universal definition of authorship, and practices vary by discipline and communities especially when individuals collaborate across subject areas. Different disciplines adopt their own criteria, for example, the ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) guidelines are well-known in the biomedical fields, the APA (American Psychological Association) guidelines are used in Psychology, the EuChemS (European Chemical Society) guidelines are adopted in Chemistry, whereas in the arts, humanities and social sciences, publications by single authors are more common. However, the minimum recognized requirements for authorship are making a substantial contribution to the research and being accountable for the work undertaken.

Many journals require authors to confirm, on submission, that they and their co-authors meet the requirements for authorship and typically provide an ORCID (Open Researcher Contributor ID). An ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier to distinguish individuals from others with similar names and links individuals to their research outputs.

Journals should notify all authors that they have received a submission and confirm that emails are not invalid. To increase transparency, it is helpful for journals to publish “author contribution statements” that explain how each author contributed to a piece of work. This approach has been recently extended by the CRediT “Contributor Roles Taxonomy” an open standard of 14 item terms that allows for a standardized description of each author’s individual contribution to an manuscript.

An individual who does not meet authorship criteria for a specific piece of work but has contributed in some capacity should be acknowledged, with their approval. Minors who have been involved in a piece of research (for example, children using technology) are typically acknowledged as they cannot be fully accountable for all aspects of the research.

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) tools—such as ChatGPT and others based on large language models (LLMs)—cannot be considered capable of initiating an original piece of research without direction by human authors. They also cannot be accountable for a published work or for research design, which is a generally held requirement of authorship nor do they have legal standing or the ability to hold or assign copyright. If an author has used this kind of tool to develop any portion of a manuscript, its use must be described, transparently and in detail, in the Methods or Acknowledgements section. The author is fully responsible for the accuracy of any information provided by the tool and for correctly referencing any supporting work on which that information depends. Tools that are used to improve spelling, grammar, and general editing are not included in the scope of these guidelines. 

Deceased authors

If a manuscript is submitted with a deceased author listed, or an author passes away while the manuscript is being peer reviewed, then a footnote or similar should be added to the published article to indicate this. Often journals use a dagger symbol (†) with a footnote explaining the situation. A co-author should vouch for the contribution made by the deceased author and their potential conflicts of interest. If the deceased author was a corresponding author then another co-author should be nominated. Note that copyright is considered personal property under the law. If the author had not yet signed a copyright transfer agreement or license, or granted a co-author the right to do so on his/her behalf in writing, permission would need to be obtained from the author’s inheritor.

Editor and journal staff as author:

Editors or board members should not be involved in editorial decisions about their own scholarly work. Editors and editorial team members are excluded from publication decisions when they are authors or have contributed to a manuscript.

Commercial consideration and editorial independence

It is impossible to completely insulate editorial decisions from issues that may influence them, such as commercial considerations. Even so, editors, journal owners, and publishers follows processes that minimize the risk of editorial decisions being influenced by commercial, personal, or political factors. Following point are considered.

• Editors should be free to judge all submissions on their scholarly merit and on their potential importance to the community that the journal serves.
• Editorial decisions about individual papers should remain separate from the sale of advertising.
• Journal that publish special issues, conference abstract, supplements, or similar material that is funded or sponsored or under agreement of publisher of this journal by third-party organizations.
• Journal does not permit funding organizations to make decisions beyond which publications they choose to fund. Decisions about the selection and editing of contents to be published should be made by the editor (or co-editors) of the funded publication.
• A journal editor may elect to use “guest” or external editors to support the publishing of supplements, special issues, or similar publications.
• Editors’ decisions about whether to publish individual manuscripts submitted to their journal does/should not be influenced by pressure Ideally, the principles of editorial independence is set out.

Further discussion of editorial independence is presented by the Council of Science Editors and in COPE’s Core Practices.