Publication

About the Journal

In response to the increasing growth of knowledge and the need to publish new research findings and create an appropriate space for sharing knowledge and experiences, the Iranian Association of Orthodontists has undertaken the task of regularly publishing the Iranian Journal of Orthodontics (IJO). IJO is an open access journal with a continuous publication model that aims to provide a trusted source of information for clinicians and orthodontic researchers. Since the Iranian Association of Orthodontists funds all the publication costs of OIJ, the article writing costs and all other publication costs in the Journal are free for the authors. The journal is indexed in Index Copernicus, DOAJ, Google Scholar, WHO Emro, Ricest, ICMJE, Road, Worldcat, SID, ISC, Civilica, Citefactor, and ESJI.

Management

The director of the Journal is Dr. Mahtab Noori and the previous editors-in-chief were Dr. Mohsen (2006-2012), Shirazi, Iran and Dr. Allahyar (2012-2020) Geramy, and presently it is Dr. Arezoo Jahanbin (2020-now).

Publication Committee:

The purpose of the Committee is to define, manage and monitor the publications in the Iranian Journal of Orthodontics to provide high-quality publications based on the needs of the members.

The Committee will actively monitor the activities of authors and reviewers and formulate strategies for editorial functions, production, promotion and advertising, and explore opportunities to optimize editorial activities. It also operates within the budget and policies established by the board of directors.

  • Committee members serve staggered three-year terms, with three members appointed each year.
  • The editor-in-chief is appointed for four years and his/her total term may be exceeded. The editor should have committee experience.
  • The composition of the Journal’s publication board should reflect the diversity of the organization and discipline within each Journal and should include all related fields of orthodontics. Committee members are selected by the editor-in-chief.

Policies

Editorial Policies

The editor-in-chief, in conjunction with the Dean of the Association, develops guidelines and continuously monitors the Journal. These guidelines require the Journal to have editorial staff with international affiliations. Editorial board members should play an active role in manuscript review and decision-making. Members may only submit one article per year as an author.

International submissions are encouraged. The Journal has its own exclusive open-access website. All articles go through a double-blind peer review process.

Everything published in the Journal is the responsibility of the editor. This means that publishers must strive to meet the needs of the readers and authors, strive to constantly improve the Journal, have processes in place to ensure the quality of the material published, advocate free speech, maintain the integrity of academic records, prevent business requirements from compromising intellectual and ethical standards, and always be prepared to post corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed. Best practices for publishers is to actively seek the opinions of authors, readers, reviewers, and editorial board members on ways to improve their Journal processes, encourage and be aware of research peer review and publications and reassess their review processes in light of new knowledge, support initiatives to reduce misconduct in research and publication, support initiatives to educate researchers on the ethics of publication, evaluate the impact of the Journal’s policies on author and reviewer behavior and, if necessary, revise policies to encourage responsible behavior and discourage misconduct, and make sure that all press releases issued by the Journal reflect and contextualize the message of the reported article. The decision of editors to accept or reject an article for publication should be based on the importance, originality and clarity of the article, the validity of the study, and its relevance to the mission of the Journal. Publishers should not reverse their decision to accept submissions unless serious problems with the submission are identified. New editors should not reverse decisions to publish the previous editor’s posts unless serious issues are identified. A description of the peer review processes should be published and publishers should be prepared to justify any significant deviation from the described processes. The Journal should have an explained mechanism for authors to appeal editorial decisions. Publishers should issue guidelines for authors on what is expected of them. This guide should be updated regularly and should reference or link to this code. Publishers should provide guidance on criteria for authorship and/or who should be accredited as a contributor to standards within the relevant field. Best practices for publishers are: Regularly read the author’s instructions and provide links to relevant guidelines. Post relevant competing interests to all contributors and post corrections if competing interests are disclosed after posting. Ensure that appropriate reviewers are selected for submission, i.e. individuals who can review the work and are free to disqualify competing interests. Comply with the authors’ requests that no one review their submissions if they are sound and workable.

Open Access Policies

IJO is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC 4.0). Licensees may copy, distribute, display and make derivative works only if they cite the original published article.
As the Iranian Association of Orthodontists supports all of the publishing costs of the IJO, the article processing charges and any other publication fees in the Journal are free for the authors.

Archiving Policy

Backup files for the content of the Journal including “Publications”, “Submissions” and “Journal Image and Other Data” are generated every seventh day. The backup files are stored in DropBox storage.

Data Availability Policy

The IAO encourages authors to make data and other materials related to the methodology and findings of articles submitted available to readers at the request of the author or as open access supplements to the article. Therefore, manuscripts submitted to the IJO must be accompanied by a data sharing statement. A data sharing statement describing if and how the data will be made available is required as per the ICMJE guidelines for manuscripts reporting clinical trial results. See the ICMJE recommendations for more details. (http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorial-issues/clinical-trial-registration.htm).

Ethical Policies

The ethical policy of the Iranian Journal of Orthodontics follows the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) to conduct, report, edit and publish scientific papers in medical journals. Therefore, the journal website recommends that authors read these recommendations before submitting their manuscript. Readers, authors, reviewers, and editors must follow this ethics policy whenever working with the Journal. If there are any suspicions of misconduct, fraud or plagiarism, the publishers follow the COPE guidelines and reserve the right to notify the authors or their institutions. Visit https://publicationethics.org for publication information and ethics guidelines.

The Journal’s ethics policy determines which of the typical research papers or articles submitted to the Journal should be published in that issue. The decision to publish is based on a proposal from the reviewers and members of the Journal’s editorial board. The ethics policy insists that the editor may consult with other editors or reviewers in making the decision. Reviewers are required to confidentially assess research work based on submitted content. Reviewers also suggest that authors improve the quality of research work through their review comments. Authors must ensure that the research work submitted is original and has not been published elsewhere in any language. Applicable copyright laws and conventions must be followed by the authors. Plagiarism of any kind constitutes unethical editorial behavior and is unacceptable.

  1. Authorship Criteria

To ensure authorship for the submitted manuscripts, the contributors should meet the following three conditions:

Conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data have been made by the author.

Either drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content has been done by the author.

The final approval of the version to be published has been given by the author. Each contributor should have participated sufficiently in the work to be allowed to take public responsibility for suitable portions of the content.

  1. Study design and ethical approval

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

  1. Data analysis

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

  1. Conflicts of interest

Conflicts of interest comprise those which may not be fully apparent and which may influence the judgment of the author, reviewers, and editors. They have been described as those that, 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.

  1. Data Fabrication and Falsification

Data fabrication means the researcher did not really carry out the study, but made up data or results and had 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.

  1. Duplicate Publication

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

  1. 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.

  1. Peer-review

This Journal uses double-blind peer review, which means that the identities of both the reviewer and author 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 three reviewers.

  1. Redundant Publication

Redundant publication occurs when two or more papers, without full cross-reference, share the same hypothesis, data, discussion points, or conclusions. In such cases, the manuscript will be rejected.

  1. Plagiarism

Plagiarism ranges from the unreferenced use of others’ published and unpublished ideas, including research grant applications to submission under “new” authorship of a complete paper, sometimes in a different language. It may occur at any stage of planning, research, writing, or publication: it applies to print and electronic versions. All of the manuscript submitted to the Journal is checked by iThenticate for possible plagiarism (https://www.ithenticate.com/). The authors are expected to check their manuscripts for plagiarism before submission.

If plagiarism is detected during peer review, the submission can be rejected. If plagiarism is detected after publication we reserve the right, as necessary, to issue a correction or retract the article. We reserve the right to notify the institutions of the authors about the plagiarism that was found before or after publication.

  1. Corrections and retractions

To maintain the integrity of academic records, the Journal may have to publish corrections or retractions of papers published in the Journal. According to agreed academic community norms, corrections or corrections of published articles 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 in the exceptional event 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 making a comment on the published article. It will only be accepted if the modifications do not affect the article’s results or conclusions.

  1. 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.

  1. Retractions

If the scientific information in an article is significantly compromised, on rare occasions 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.

  1. Privacy and Confidentiality

All manuscripts must be reviewed with the utmost regard for the authors’ confidentiality. Authors entrust editors with the results of their scientific work and creative effort when they submit manuscripts for review, and their reputation and career may be at stake. Disclosure of confidential details during the review of an author’s manuscript may be a violation of their rights. Reviewers have the right to confidentiality, which the editor must respect. If there is a suspicion of dishonesty or fraud, confidentiality may have to be breached, but it must be honored otherwise. Besides the authors and reviewers, editors are prohibited from disclosing information about manuscripts (including their receipt, content, status in the reviewing process, reviewer criticism, or ultimate fate). Requests to use the materials in legal proceedings are included in this category.

Editors must clarify to reviewers that manuscripts sent for review are privileged communications and the authors’ private property. As a result, reviewers and editorial staff must respect the authors’ rights by refraining from publicly discussing or appropriating the authors’ work before the manuscript is published. Reviewers should not be allowed to make copies of the manuscript for their files, and they should not be allowed to share it with others except if the editor permits them. After submitting reviews, reviewers should return or destroy copies of the manuscripts. Editors should not keep copies of manuscripts that have been rejected. Without the permission of the reviewer, author, and editor, reviewer comments should not be published or otherwise made public.

  1. Authorship and Author’s Responsibility

During the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication process, the corresponding author is typically responsible for communicating with the Journal and ensuring that all of the Journal’s administrative requirements, such as authorship details, ethics committee approval, clinical trial registration documentation, and conflict of interest statements, are properly completed. Throughout the submission and peer review process, the corresponding author should promptly respond to editorial queries and cooperate with any requests from the Journal after publication.

After an article has been accepted for publication in the IJO, no additional authors or changes to the first or corresponding authors are allowed. If an author wishes to be removed from the byline, he or she must submit a letter signed by the author and all other authors indicating their wish to be removed from the list of authors. Any change in the authors’ order in the byline requires a letter signed by all authors indicating their agreement.

  1. 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 the subject’s guardian. All animal or human studies should be used after approval of the experimental protocol by a local ethics committee.

The submitted manuscripts that are not as per the “Instructions to Authors” will be returned to the authors for technical correction before they undergo editorial/peer-review. Generally, the manuscript should be submitted in the form of two separate files.

  1. Peer Review Process

The Journal is a double-blind peer-review electronic and print biannual publication concerned with all aspects of Orthodontics and Dentofacial Orthopedics, Facial Growth and Development, Orthognathic Surgery, and Cleft Lip/Palate. This process, as well as any policies related to the Journal’s peer review procedures, is clearly described on the Journal’s website (https://www.ijorth.com/journal/process).

  1. Process for Identification of and Dealing with Allegations of Research Misconduct

The 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, among others.

 

Advertising Policy

The IJO journal do not accept advertising or direct marketing.