Diabetes & Metabolism Journal (dmj) adheres to the guidelines and best practices published by professional organizations, including ICMJE Recommendations (https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/); Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Guidelines (https://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines); and the Good Publication Practice Guideline for Medical Journals (https://www.kamje.or.kr/board/view?b_name=bo_publication&bo_id=13/). Furthermore, all processes of handling research and publication misconduct shall follow the applicable COPE flowchart (https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Flowcharts/).

Table of Contents

• 1. Authorship and Contribution
• 2. Disclosure of Conflict of Interest
• 3. Statement of Human and Animal Rights
• 4. Statement of Informed Consent and Institutional Review Board Approval
• 5. Registration of Clinical Trial Research
• 6. Originality and Duplicate Publication
• 7. Secondary Publication
• 8. Process to Manage the Research and Publication Misconduct
• 9. Editorial Responsibilities

1. Authorship and Contribution

1) Author’s qualifications

According to ICMJE Recommendations, the authors of the paper must have the following criteria: (1) substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition, or analysis and interpretation of data; (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and (3) final approval of the version to be published; and (4) agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. All authors should meet all four criteria. The author list should include all appropriate researchers, and no others, who provide credit for a researcher’s contributions to a study and carries accountability.

2) Author contributions statements

Authors are required to include a statement of responsibility in the manuscript that specifies the contribution of every author at the end of the manuscript, in a section entitled “Author contributions,” including review-type articles. Any persons who do not meet the above four criteria may be listed as contributors in the Acknowledgments section.

3) Correction of authorship

After the initial submission of a manuscript, any changes in authorship (adding author(s), deleting author(s), or rearranging the order of authors) must be explained by a letter to the editor from the authors concerned. This letter must be signed by all authors of the paper. dmj does not correct authorship after publication unless a mistake has been made by the editorial staff.

4) Role of corresponding author

The corresponding author takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process, and typically ensures that all the journal’s administrative requirements, such as providing details of authorship, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and gathering conflict of interest statement forms, are properly completed. The corresponding author should be available throughout the submission and peer review process to respond to editorial queries in a timely manner, and after publication, should be available to respond to critiques of the work and cooperate with any requests from the journal for data or additional information or questions about the article.

5) Recommendations for working with people with personal connections

Authors who intend to include minors (under the age of 19 years) or their family members (such as spouses, children, or relatives) in their research, including publishing or presenting papers together, should clearly indicate this in the cover letter. For further information, please refer to the Guidelines for Preventing Illegitimate Authorship by the National Research Foundation of Korea (https://www.cre.re.kr/).

2. Disclosure of Conflict of Interest

dmj requires authors to declare all competing interests in relation to their work. All submitted manuscripts must include a Conflict of Interest section at the end of the manuscript listing all competing interests (financial and non-financial). Financial relationships, such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, and paid expert testimony, are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest. However, conflicts can occur for other reasons as well, such as personal relationships, academic competition, and intellectual passion (https://www.icmje.org/conflicts-of-interest/). Where authors have no competing interests, the statement should read “No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.” If the study was sponsored by a third party, authors should describe the role of the study sponsor in study design; collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; writing the report; and the decision to submit the report for publication. If the supporting source had no such involvement, the authors should so state. The potential conflicts of interest of editorial board members should also be disclosed in the manuscript.

3. Statement of Human and Animal Rights

All studies performed on humans must comply with the principles laid down in the World Medical Association (WMA) Declaration of Helsinki: Medical Research Involving Human Subjects (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/). Studies involving experiments with animals must state that their care was in accordance with national laws and institutional regulations. The ethical treatment of all experimental animals must conform to the guidelines provided by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC). The experiment plans approved by the experimental animal ethics committee must be available for submission upon request when deemed necessary by the editors or reviewers.

4. Statement of Informed Consent and Institutional Review Board Approval

Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. A statement about this, including the name of the ethics committee and the reference number, must appear in all manuscripts reporting such research. If a study has been granted an exemption from requiring ethics approval, this should also be detailed in the manuscript (including the name of the ethics committee that granted the exemption). In the process of review, the Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval document may be requested, if necessary. For all research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study should be obtained from participants, and a statement to this effect should appear in the manuscript. For publication, the human subjects’ identifiable information, such as the patients' names, initials, hospital numbers, dates of birth, or other protected healthcare information, should not be disclosed. In the case of an animal study, a statement should be provided indicating that the experiment process, such as the breeding and the use of laboratory animals, was approved by the Research Ethics Committee (REC) of the institution where the experiment was performed or that it does not violate the rules of the REC of the institution or the NIH Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (Institute of Laboratory Animal Resources, Commission on Life Sciences, National Research Council). The authors should preserve raw experimental study data for at least 1 year after the publication of the paper and should present this data if required by the editorial board.

5. Registration of Clinical Trial Research

Any research involving clinical trials should be registered with the primary national clinical trial registry site, such as the Korea Clinical Research Information Service (CRiS; https://cris.nih.go.kr/), a primary national registry site accredited by the World Health Organization (https://www.who.int/clinical-trials-registry-platform/network/primary-registries), or ClinicalTrials.gov (https://clinicaltrials.gov/), a service of the United States National Institutes of Health. Please be sure to include the Clinical Trial Registration number on the title page of the manuscript.

6. Originality and Duplicate Publication

The submitted manuscripts must be original. The manuscript may not be considered for publication in another magazine or journal. Additionally, no part of the manuscript may be published elsewhere without permission from the editorial board. Figures and tables can be used freely if the original source is verified according to the Creative Commons Non-Commercial License. It is mandatory that all authors resolve any copyright issues when citing a figure or table from a different journal that is not open-access. Similarity Check is used to screen submitted manuscripts for possible plagiarism or duplicate publication upon arrival. If plagiarism or duplicate publication is detected, the journal will be notified, the offenders may be penalized, and the institutions affiliated with the authors will be notified.

7. Secondary Publication

It is possible to republish manuscripts if the manuscripts satisfy the condition of secondary publication of the Recommendations by ICMJE (https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorial-issues/overlapping-publications.html) as follows:

• • The authors have received approval from the editors of both journals (the editor concerned with the secondary publication must have access to the primary version).
• • The priority for the primary publication is respected by a publication interval negotiated by editors of both journals and the authors.
• • The paper for secondary publication is intended for a different group of readers; an abbreviated version could be sufficient.
• • The secondary version faithfully reflects the data and interpretations of the primary version.
• • The secondary version informs readers, peers, and documenting agencies that the paper has been published in whole or in part elsewhere—for example, with a note that might read, “This article is based on a study first reported in the [journal title, with full reference]”—and the secondary version cites the primary reference.
• • The title of the secondary publication should indicate that it is a secondary publication (complete or abridged republication or translation) of a primary publication. Of note, the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) does not consider translations to be “republications” and does not cite or index them when the original article was published in a journal that is indexed in MEDLINE.

8. Process to Manage the Research and Publication Misconduct

dmj is a member of Similarity Check’s plagiarism detection initiative and takes all cases of publication misconduct seriously. If the dmj staff discover suspected cases of research and publication misconduct, such as a redundant (duplicate) publication, plagiarism, fabricated data, changes in authorship, undisclosed conflicts of interest, and an ethical problem, the resolution process will follow the flowchart provided by the COPE (https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). All reviewers have a responsibility to report any suspected issues with the manuscript to the editor. If the investigation proves scientific misconduct, a retraction of the article will be published. If warranted, the authors will be invited to prepare the retraction, which should be submitted with an assignment of copyright statement that has been signed by all authors. If the paper has not been published, then the editor can always reject the paper. Instances of misconduct in the publication process will be shared with the editorial board of the dmj. The editor may wish to impose sanctions, notify editors of other biomedical journals, and depending on the severity of the allegation, notify the author’s institution. dmj will not hesitate to publish errata, corrigenda, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when the misconduct is founded.

9. Editorial Responsibilities

The Editorial Board is committed to maintaining high standards of publication ethics and will continuously work towards this goal by providing guidelines for retracting articles; preserving the integrity of academic records; prioritizing intellectual and ethical standards over commercial interests; publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when necessary; and preventing plagiarism and fraudulent data. The responsibilities of editors include the authority to accept or reject articles; ensuring that there is no conflict of interest with regard to the articles they accept or reject; promoting the publication of corrections or retractions when errors are discovered; and preserving the anonymity of reviewers.