Enacted: April 1, 2020

1. Authorship

Authorship credit should be based on 1) substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; 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. Authors should meet these four conditions. After the initial submission of a manuscript, any changes whatsoever in authorship (adding author(s), deleting author(s), or re-arranging 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 on the paper. Copyright assignment must be completed by every author.

• • Corresponding author and first author: KMJ does not allow multiple corresponding authors for one article. Only one author should correspond with the editorial office and readers for one article. KMJ accepts notice of equal contribution for the first author when the study was clearly performed by co-first authors.
• • Correction of authorship after publication: KMJ does not correct authorship after publication unless any mistake has been made by the editorial staff. Authorship may be changed before publication but after submission when an authorship correction is requested by all authors involved.

2. Redundant Publication and Plagiarism

Redundant publication is defined as reporting (publishing or attempting to publish) substantially the same work more than once, without attribution of the original source. Submitted manuscripts must not been published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere and no part of the accepted manuscript should be duplicated in any other journal without the permission of the Editorial Board. If 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 institutes will be informed. There will also be penalties for the authors. The plagiarism will be checked through crosscheck Ithenticate program (https://app.ithenticate.com/) before submission.

3. Secondary Publication

Secondary publication may be allowed only with the consent of KMJ editing committee and the journal editing committee that published the original article and in this case, the general requirements of ‘Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (http://www.icmje.org)’ apply.

4. Conflicts of Interest Statement

The corresponding author must inform the editor of any potential conflicts of interest that could influence the author’s interpretation of the data. Examples of potential conflicts of interest are financial support from or connections to specific companies, political pressure from interest groups, and academically related issues. In particular, all sources of funding applicable to the study should be explicitly stated.

5. Rules and Regulations for Human and Animal Research

If the research involves human subjects, it must comply with the ethical standards of the Helsinki Declaration adopted in 1964 and be approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB). Description materials including photographs should not disclose the patient’s name, initials, and hospital identification number.
For studies involving animal subjects, regulations relating to the breeding and use of laboratory animals should be observed or the ‘NIH Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals’.

6. Process to Manage Research and Publication Misconduct

In suspected cases of research and publication misconduct, such as redundant (duplicate) publication, plagiarism, fraudulent or fabricated data, changes in authorship, undisclosed conflict of interest, ethical issues with a submitted manuscript, appropriation of an author’s idea or data, and complaints against editors, the resolving process will be as per the flowchart provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). The Editorial Board’s decision on the suspected cases will be final.

7. Editorial responsibilities

Editorial board will continuously work for monitoring/safeguarding publication ethics: guidelines for retracting articles; maintenance of the integrity of the academic record; preclusion of business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standard; publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed; no plagiarism, no fraudulent data. Editors are always keeping following responsibilities: responsibility and authority to rejected/accept article; no conflict of interest respect to articles they reject/accept; acceptance of a paper when reasonably certain; promoting publication of correction or retraction when errors are found; preservation of anonymity of reviewers.