The journal adheres to the guidelines and best practices published by professional organizations, including ICMJE Recommendations and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (joint statement by the Committee on Publication Ethics, COPE; the Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ; the World Association of Medical Editors, WAME; and Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA; https://doaj.org/bestpractice). Furthermore, all processes of handling research and publication misconduct shall follow the applicable COPE flowchart (https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts).
1. Statement of human and animal right
Clinical research should be done in accordance of the WMA Declaration of Helsinki: Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/). Clinical studies that do not meet the Helsinki Declaration will not be considered for use in the publication. Human subjects should not be identifiable, such that the confidentiality of the patient’s names, initials, hospital numbers, dates of birth, or other protected healthcare information should not be disclosed. For animal subjects, research should be performed based on the National or Institutional Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, and the ethical treatment of all experimental animals should be maintained.
2. Statement of IRB/IACUC approval
A written statement must be described in the original articles, case reports, and brief communications indicating whether or not Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval was obtained or equivalent guidelines followed in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration; if not, an explanation must be provided. In addition, a statement of IRB status (approved, waived, or other) must be included in the Methods section of the manuscript. Similarly, a written statement confirming approval by appropriate Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) must be included for research involving animals. Any manuscript submitted without appropriate IRB or IACUC approval will not be reviewed and be returned to the authors.
3. Registration of clinical trial research
Any researches that deal with clinical trial should be registered to the primary national clinical trial registration site such as Korea Clinical Research Information Service (CRiS, http://cris.nih.go.kr), other primary national registry sites accredited by World Health Organization (https://www.who.int/ictrp/network/primary/en/) or ClinicalTrial.gov (https://clinicaltrials.gov/), a service of the Unite States National Institutes of Health.
4. Authorship
The CERM follows the recommendations for authorship by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE, http://www.icmje.org). Authors should have made significant conceptual, intellectual, experimental, and analytical contributions to the research, as well as having participated in writing and revising the manuscript. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for its content. Authorship credit should be based on: (1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, and/or analysis and interpretation of data; (2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; (3) final Enacted: December 31, 1974 Revised: November 31, 2018 ii 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 it are appropriately investigated and resolved. Every author should meet all 4 of these conditions. Copyright assignment must also be completed by every author.
5. Process for scientific misconduct
When the journal faces suspected cases of research and publication misconduct such as redundant (duplicate) publication, plagiarism, fraudulent or fabricated data, changes in authorship, an undisclosed conflict of interest, ethical problems with a submitted manuscript, a reviewer who has appropriated an author’s idea or data, complaints against editors, and so on, the resolution process will be completed following the procedures outlined in the flowchart provided by the COPE (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). The discussion and decision on the suspected cases will be carried out by the Editorial Board.
6. Conflict-of-interest statement
The corresponding author must inform the editor of any potential conflicts of interest that could influence the authors’ interpretation of the data. Examples of potential conflicts of interest are financial support from or connections to pharmaceutical companies, political pressure from interest groups, and academically related issues. In particular, all sources of funding applicable to the study should be explicitly stated.
7. Process for handling cases requiring corrections, retractions, and editorial expressions of concern
Cases that require editorial expressions of concern or retraction shall follow the COPE flowcharts (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). If a correction is required, the procedure to provide the correction will follow the ICMJE Recommendation (http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorialissues/corrections-and-version-control.html).
8. Editorial responsibilities
The Editorial Board will continuously work to monitor and safeguard spublication ethics: guidelines for retracting articles; maintenance of the integrity of the academic record; preclusion of business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standards; publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed; and excluding plagiarism and fraudulent data. The editors maintain the following responsibilities: responsibility and authority to reject and accept articles; avoiding any conflict of interest with respect to articles they reject or accept; promoting publication of corrections or retractions when errors are found; and the preservation of the anonymity of reviewers. Submitted manuscripts are screened for possible plagiarism or duplicate publication by the use of Similarity Check powered by iThenticate (https://www.crossref.org/services/similaritycheck/), a plagiarism-screening tool upon arrival. If plagiarism or duplicate publication related to the papers of this journal is detected, the manuscripts may be rejected, the authors will be announced in the journal, and their institutions will be informed of this situation. There will also be penalties that will be assessed and applied for the authors if this incident occurs.