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  • Research and publication ethics
1. Research Ethics
  • 1) All of the manuscripts should be prepared in strict observation of research and publication ethics guidelines recommended by the Council of Science Editors (CSE), International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) , World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), and the Korean Association of Medical Journal Editors (KAMJE).
  • 2) Any study including human subjects or human data must be reviewed and approved by a responsible institutional review board (IRB). Please refer to the principles embodied in the Declaration of Helsinki (https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles-for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects/) for all investigations involving human materials.
  • 3) Animal experiments also should be reviewed by an appropriate committee (Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, IACUC) for the care and use of animals. Also studies with pathogens requiring a high degree of biosafety should pass review of a relevant committee (Institutional Biosafety Committee, IBC). The editor of Neurospine always request submission of copies of informed consents from human subjects in clinical studies or IRB approval documents.
2. Conflict of Interest
  • 1) The corresponding author of an article is asked to inform the Editor of the authors’ potential conflicts of interest possibly influencing their interpretation of data. A potential conflict of interest should be disclosed in the cover letter even when the authors are confident that their judgments have not been influenced in preparing the manuscript. Such conflicts may be financial support or private connections to pharmaceutical companies, political pressure from interest groups, or academic problems. Disclosure form shall be same with ICMJE Uniform Disclosure Form for Potential Conflicts of Interest (http://www.icmje.org/coi_disclosure.pdf).
  • 2) The Editor will decide whether the information on the conflict should be included in the published paper. Before publishing such information, the Editor will consult with the corresponding author. In particular, all sources of funding for a study should be explicitly stated. The Neurospine asks referees to let its Editor know of any conflict of interest before reviewing a particular manuscript.
3. Journal Policies on Authorship and Contributorship
  • 1) Authors are required to make clear of their contribution to their manuscript in cover letter. To be listed as an author one should have contributed substantially to all three categories established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE): (1) 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.
  • 2) When a large, multicenter group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript. When submitting a manuscript authored by a group, the corresponding author should clearly indicate the preferred citation and identify all individual authors as well as the group name. Journals generally list other members of the group in the Acknowledgments. Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship. Authors are responsible for replying to all questions asked by reviewers or editors that relate to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work. All persons who have made a substantial contribution, but who are not eligible as authors, should be named in the acknowledgments. Authors are expected to consider carefully the way authors should be listed and ordered before submitting their manuscripts, and to provide a definitive list of authors with their original submission. Any addition, deletion, or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should be made before the manuscript has been accepted—and only if approved by the journal Editor. To request such a change, the Editor must receive the following from the corresponding author: (a) the reason for requesting a change in the list of authors; and (b) written confirmation (by e-mail or letter) from all authors to say that they agree with the addition, removal, or rearrangement.
4. Redundant Publication and Plagiarism
  • 1) Redundant publication is defined as “reporting (publishing or attempting to publish) substantially the same work more than once, without attribution of the original source(s)”. Characteristics of reports that are substantially similar include the following: (a) “at least one of the authors must be common to all reports (if there are no common authors, it is more likely plagiarism than redundant publication),” (b) “the subject or study populations are often the same or similar,” (c) “the methodology is typically identical or nearly so,” and (d) “the results and their interpretation generally vary little, if at all.”
  • 2) When submitting a manuscript, authors should include a letter informing the editor of any potential overlap with other already published material or material being evaluated for publication and should also state how the manuscript submitted to Neurospine differs substantially from this other material. If all or part of your patient population was previously reported, this should be mentioned in the Materials and Methods, with citation of the appropriate reference(s).
  • 3) The editorial committee checks the similarity by using the iThenticate (http://www.ithenticate.com/) program for all submitted articles to prevent plagiarism. The editorial committee rejects the article suspected of plagiarism and asks the author to check whether it is plagiarized and make a resubmission.
5. Readership
  • It is primarily for clinicians and researchers who care patients with spine and spinal cord diseases. They are able to obtain tailored information to adopt for their research and practice. Its readership can be expanded to other positions: • Researchers can get the recent topics of clinical research in spine and spinal cord field and detailed research methods; • Clinicians in the field can get the new information and recent development for care of patients; • Medical teacher can access and adopt a variety of data in medical education; • Allied health professionals including nurses are able to get the recent information for care of patients with spine and spinal cord diseases; • Medical health students can understand the recent trends of the field and interesting cases for their work; • Policy makers are able to reflect the results of the articles to the nation-wide health care policies for patients with spine and spinal cord diseases; • The public, especially family of patients with spine and spinal cord diseases are able to read the advancement in their family’s diseases so that they have a better knowledge on the diseases and a confidence in the clinicians’ devotion to their family.
    • 6. Obligation to Register Clinical Trial
    7. Process for Identification of and Dealing With Allegations of Research Misconduct
    When the Journal faces suspected cases of research and publication misconduct such as a redundant (duplicate) publication, plagiarism, fabricated data, changes in authorship, undisclosed conflicts of interest, an ethical problem discovered with the submitted manuscript, a reviewer who has appropriated an author’s idea or data, complaints against editors, and other issues, the resolving process will follow the flowchart provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). The Editorial Board will discuss the suspected cases and reach a decision. We will not hesitate to publish errata, corrigenda, clarifications, retractions, and apologies when needed.
    Neurospine adheres to the research and publication ethics policies outlined in International Standards for Editors and Authors (http://publicationethics.org) and the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (http://icmje.org). Any studies involving human subject must comply with the principles of the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki. Clinical research should be approved by the Institutional Review Board, as well through patient consent. A patient’s personal information cannot be published in any form. However, if it is absolutely necessary to use a patient’s personal information, the consent of the patient or his/her guardian will be needed before publishing. Animal studies should be performed in compliance with all relevant guidelines, observing the standards described in the NIH Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals.
    Cases that require editorial expressions of concern or retraction shall follow the COPE flowcharts available from: http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts. If correction is needed, it will follow the ICMJE Recommendation for Corrections, Retractions, Republications and Version Control available from: http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorial-issues/corrections-and-version-control.html as follows:
    Honest errors are a part of science and publishing and require publication of a correction when they are detected. Corrections are needed for errors of fact. Minimum standards are as follows: First, it shall publish a correction notice as soon as possible, detailing changes from and citing the original publication on both an electronic and numbered print page that is included in an electronic or a print Table of Contents to ensure proper indexing; Second, it shall post a new article version with details of the changes from the original version and the date(s) on which the changes were made through CrossMark; Third, it shall archive all prior versions of the article. This archive can be either directly accessible to readers; and Fourth, previous electronic versions shall prominently note that there are more recent versions of the article via CrossMark.
    8. Handling Complaints and Appeals
    The policy of the journal is primarily aimed at protecting the authors, reviewers, editors, and the publisher of the journal. If not described below, the process of handling complaints and appeals follows the guidelines of the Committee of Publication Ethics available from:

    https://publicationethics.org/appeals
    Who complains or makes an appeal?

    Submitters, authors, reviewers, and readers may register complaints and appeals in a variety of cases as follows: falsification, fabrication, plagiarism, duplicate publication, authorship dispute, conflict of interest, ethical treatment of animals, informed consent, bias or unfair/ inappropriate competitive acts, copyright, stolen data, defamation, and legal problem. If any individuals or institutions want to inform the cases, they can send a letter to editor through https://www.e-neurospine.org/about/contact.php. For the complaints or appeals, concrete data with answers to all factual questions (who, when, where, what, how, why) should be provided.

    Who is responsible to resolve and handle complaints and appeals?

    The Editor, Editorial Board, or Editorial Office is responsible for them.

    What may be the consequence of remedy?

    It depends on the type or degree of misconduct. The consequence of resolution will follow the guidelines of the Committee of Publication Ethics (COPE).
    9. Postpublication Discussions and Corrections
    The postpublication discussion is available through letter to the editor. If any readers have a concern on any articles published, they can submit letter to the editor on the articles. If there founds any errors or mistakes in the article, it can be corrected through errata, corrigenda, or retraction.
    10. Policies on data sharing and reproducibility
    Until 2020, authors will be encouraged to share their data openly, but starting in 2021, they will be mandated to do so. The related regulation follows the open data sharing policy outlined below.
    • 1) Open data sharing policy

      For clarification on result accuracy and reproducibility of the results, raw data or analysis data will be deposited to a public repository, for example, Harvard Dataverse (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/) after acceptance of the manuscript. Therefore, submission of the raw data or analysis data is mandatory. If the data is already a public one, its URL site or sources should be disclosed. If data cannot be publicized, it can be negotiated with the editor. If there are any inquiries on depositing data, authors should contact the editorial office.

    • 2) Clinical data sharing policy

      This journal follows the data sharing policy described in “Data Sharing Statements for Clinical Trials: A Requirement of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors” (https://doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2017.32.7.1051). As of July 1, 2018 manuscripts submitted to ICMJE journals that report the results of interventional clinical trials must contain a data sharing statement as described below. Clinical trials that begin enrolling participants on or after January 1, 2019 must include a data sharing plan in the trial’s registration. The ICMJE’s policy regarding trial registration is explained at http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorial-issues/clinical-trial-registration.html. If the data sharing plan changes after registration this should be reflected in the statement submitted and published with the manuscript, and updated in the registry record. All of the authors of research articles that deal with interventional clinical trials must submit data sharing plan of example 1 to 4 in Table 1. Based on the degree of sharing plan, authors should deposit their data after deidentification and report the DOI of the data and the registered site.

    • Table. Examples of Data Sharing Statements That Fulfill These ICMJE Requirements*
      Element Example 1 Example 2 Example 3 Example 4
      Will individual participant data be available (including data dictionaries)? Yes Yes Yes No
      What data in particular will be shared? All of the individual participant data collected during the trial, after deidentification. Individual participant data that underlie the results reported in this article, after deidentification (text, tables, figures, and appendices). Individual participant data that underlie the results reported in this article, after deidentification (text, tables, figures, and appendices). Not available
      What other documents will be available? Study protocol, statistical analysis plan, informed consent form, clinical study report, analytic code Study protocol, statistical analysis plan, analytic code Study protocol Not available
      When will data be available (start and end dates)? Immediately following publication. No end date. Beginning at 3 months and ending 5 years following the article publication. Beginning at 9 months and ending 36 months following the article publication. Not applicable
      With whom? Anyone who wishes to access the data. Researchers who provide a methodologically sound proposal. Investigators whose proposed use of the data has been approved by an independent review committee (learned intermediary) identified for this purpose. Not applicable
      For what types of analyses? Any purpose To achieve aims in the approved proposal. For individual participant data meta-analysis. Not applicable
      By what mechanism will available? Data are available indefinitely at (Link to be included). Proposals should be directed to xxx@yyy. To gain access, data requestors will need to sign a data access agreement. Data are available for 5 years at a third party website (Link to be included). Proposals may be submitted up to 36 months following article publication. After 36 months the data will be available in our University's data warehouse but without investigator support other than deposited metadata. Information regarding submitting proposals and accessing data may be found at (Link to be provided). Not applicable

    • * These examples are meant to illustrate a range of, but not all, data sharing options.
    For the policies on the research and publication ethics not stated in this instructions, International standards for editors and authors (https://publicationethics.org/resources/resources-and-further-reading/international-standards-editors-and-authors) can be applied.
    All correspondences, business communications and manuscripts should be mailed to:
    Editor-in-Chief: Inbo Han
    Editorial Office
    Department of Neurosurgery, CHA Bundang Medical Center, CHA University School of Medicine, 59 Yatap-ro, Bundang-gu, Seongnam 13496, Korea
    Tel: +82-31-780-1924, Fax: +82-31-780-5269
    E-mail: support@e-neurospine.org
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    Editorial Office
    Department of Neurosurgery, CHA Bundang Medical Center,
    CHA University School of Medicine,
    59 Yatap-ro, Bundang-gu, Seongnam 13496, Korea
    Tel: +82-31-780-1924  Fax: +82-31-780-5269  E-mail: support@e-neurospine.org
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