Policies

The Sentinel Journal of Health Sciences (SJOHS) is committed to publishing only high-quality, scientifically sound, and ethically compliant research. To achieve this, the journal employs a rigorous double-blind peer review process where both the reviewers' and authors' identities are kept confidential throughout the evaluation.

Editorial and Peer Review Workflow:

1. Technical Pre-screening: Upon submission, the editorial team reviews the manuscript for basic formatting, adherence to Author Guidelines, completeness, and ethical compliance (including institutional approval and consent details). A preliminary plagiarism check is performed. Manuscripts failing this screen are returned immediately for correction.
2. Initial Editorial Assessment: The Editor-in-Chief or a designated Section Editor evaluates the manuscript's scientific quality, relevance to the journal’s scope, and potential impact. At this stage, the manuscript may be rejected without external review (desk-rejected).
3. External Independent Peer Review: Qualifying manuscripts are sent to at least two (and frequently three) external, independent subject-matter experts. Reviewers are selected globally based on their publications, expertise, and absence of conflicts of interest with the authors.
4. Reviewer Recommendations: Reviewers assess the research design, methodology, data analysis, ethical framework, literature integration, and clarity of findings. They provide detailed feedback and recommend one of the following decisions:
   • Accept without revision
   • Accept with minor revisions (editorial/clarifications)
   • Reconsider after major revisions (additional analyses or restructuring)
   • Reject (scientific flaws or out of scope)
5. Editorial Decision: The handling Editor aggregates the reviews and issues a decision. If revisions are requested, authors must submit a point-by-point response and a marked manuscript.
6. Re-evaluation: Revised manuscripts are typically sent back to the original reviewers to confirm whether their concerns have been comprehensively addressed.

Expected Timelines:

• Initial screening & desk decision: Within 7–10 working days
• First peer review round decision: Within 4–6 weeks
• Revision turnaround by authors: Within 2–4 weeks
• Final decision post-revision: Within 2 weeks

Reviewers are expected to keep all manuscripts strictly confidential and declare any potential conflicts of interest immediately upon receiving a review invitation.

SJOHS maintains strict adherence to the standards and guidelines set by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME). All parties involved in the publishing process—authors, editors, reviewers, and publishers—must comply with these ethical standards.

1. Authorship Criteria (ICMJE Guidelines):

To qualify as an author, an individual must fulfill all four criteria specified by the ICMJE:

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
• Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
• Final approval of the version to be published; AND
• 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.

Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not justify authorship. Individuals who contributed but do not meet all four criteria should be acknowledged in the Acknowledgments section.

2. Human and Animal Rights:

• Human Studies: Research involving human participants, tissues, or data must be conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Authors must obtain approval from an appropriate institutional review board (IRB) or ethical committee and state the approval authority and reference number in the manuscript.
• Informed Consent: Written informed consent must be obtained from all participants prior to research initiation. For case reports containing patient-identifying details, written patient consent for publication must be obtained and confirmed at the time of submission.
• Animal Studies: Research involving animals must adhere to the ARRIVE guidelines and be approved by an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC).

3. Research Misconduct & Misrepresentation:

SJOHS takes allegations of research misconduct seriously. This includes data fabrication, data falsification, selective reporting of results, and image manipulation (e.g., cloning, pasting, or altering graphics to misrepresent data). Confirmed cases will be handled according to COPE Flowcharts, leading to immediate manuscript rejection or post-publication retraction, and notification of the authors' home institutions and regulatory authorities.

4. Role of Editors and Reviewers:

• Editors: Make fair, unbiased, and independent decisions based solely on scientific quality. They protect peer-reviewer anonymity, address conflicts of interest, and handle allegations of misconduct with transparency.
• Reviewers: Treat manuscripts as confidential, provide objective and constructive feedback, and decline reviewing if a conflict of interest is identified or if they cannot complete the review in the allotted timeframe.

SJOHS is a fully Gold Open Access journal. All articles published by SJOHS are made immediately, permanently, and freely available online to read, download, print, distribute, and cite by anyone, anywhere in the world, without subscription fees or registration paywalls.

Core Framework:

• This policy complies with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of open access: users are permitted to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose without financial, legal, or technical barriers.
• All publications are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. This allows anyone to copy, redistribute, remix, transform, and build upon the work, even commercially, provided that the original authors are credited and the publication source is properly cited.

Article Processing Charges (APC) and Funding:

During the inaugural and launch phase of SJOHS, the journal does not charge authors any submission fees, editorial processing fees, or article processing charges (APCs). The operating costs of the journal are fully sponsored by Public Health Section of Himalayan Environment & Public Health Network, Bharatpur-12, Nepal, ensuring that financial constraints do not limit the dissemination of high-quality health sciences research. Any future adjustments to the APC policy will be announced transparently, and a comprehensive waiver program will be established for researchers from Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs).

At SJOHS, we believe that authors should retain ownership of their intellectual property. Therefore, authors who publish in SJOHS retain the full, unrestricted copyright of their work without constraints.

Terms of Copyright and Licensing Agreement:

• Authors grant SJOHS a non-exclusive license of first publication, permitting the journal to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher.
• Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Under this license, authors grant all users the right to read, share, and adapt the material, provided the original authors are credited and the first publication in SJOHS is acknowledged.
• Authors are free to enter into separate, non-exclusive contractual arrangements for the distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal.

Self-Archiving / Repository Policy (Green Open Access):

SJOHS encourages self-archiving. Authors retain the right to archive all versions of their manuscript in institutional, subject-specific (e.g., PubMed Central, Europe PMC), or personal repositories without embargo:

• Preprint (Submitted Version): May be shared on preprint servers (like bioRxiv or medRxiv) at any time.
• Accepted Manuscript (Post-print / Author Accepted Manuscript): May be deposited immediately upon acceptance.
• Version of Record (Published HTML/PDF): May be shared immediately upon publication, provided that a link to the original article’s Digital Object Identifier (DOI) on the SJOHS website is included.

SJOHS maintains a strict, zero-tolerance policy regarding plagiarism, redundant publication, and text recycling. All submitted manuscripts are screened for similarity and plagiarism prior to peer review using professional industry-standard software (e.g., Turnitin and Crossref Similarity Check powered by iThenticate).

Guidelines and Similarity Thresholds:

• Overall Similarity Index: Manuscripts must demonstrate an overall similarity index of **under 15%** (excluding references, lists, and standard mathematical/chemical formula definitions).
• Single-Source Matches: The similarity from any single source must not exceed **1% to 2%**. High similarity to a single paper, even if the overall percentage is low, is subject to scrutiny.
• Text Recycling (Self-Plagiarism): Authors must not reuse large portions of their own previously published work without explicit attribution and justification.

Misconduct Categories Screened:

1. Literal Plagiarism: Copying text verbatim from another source without quotation marks or attribution.
2. Substantial Coping: Paraphrasing large blocks of text or ideas from other studies without clear citation.
3. Redundant/Duplicate Publication: Submitting a manuscript that is identical or significantly overlaps with a study already published elsewhere.
4. Ghost, Guest, or Gift Authorship: Listing authors who did not contribute (gift/guest) or omitting contributors who met authorship criteria (ghost).

Response to Misconduct:

If plagiarism is detected prior to peer review, the manuscript will be returned to the authors for revision or rejected immediately. If plagiarism or data manipulation is discovered after publication, the journal will conduct an investigation following COPE protocols. If confirmed, this will result in a formal retraction of the article, a public notice linked to the paper, and the notification of the authors' institutional administration.

SJOHS requires all authors, reviewers, and editors to declare any potential conflicts of interest that could bias or be perceived to bias their research, evaluations, or decisions. A conflict of interest exists when professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patient welfare or research validity) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain or academic competition).

1. Authors' Disclosures:

At the time of submission, authors must declare all financial, personal, or professional relationships that could influence their work. Examples include:

• Financial: Funding sources, grants, consultancies, employment, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, or travel support.
• Non-Financial: Personal relationships, academic rivalries, or strong ideological/political beliefs that could affect the objectivity of the study.

All manuscripts must include a dedicated **"Conflict of Interest Statement"** before the References section. If no conflicts exist, the authors must state: *"The authors declare that they have no competing interests."* Funding agencies must be detailed, along with their role in study design, data collection, analysis, or the decision to publish.

2. Reviewers' Disclosures:

Reviewers must declare any conflicts of interest that could bias their evaluation of a manuscript (e.g., working at the same institution, having a past student-advisor relationship, or currently collaborating with any of the authors). If a conflict exists, reviewers must recuse themselves from the review process immediately.

3. Editors' Disclosures:

Editors will not handle manuscripts where they have a conflict of interest. In such cases, the manuscript is assigned to another independent editor. Editorial decisions are kept entirely separate from commercial, institutional, or sponsorship interests.

To promote scientific transparency, reproducibility, and open collaboration, SJOHS strongly encourages and, in certain cases, requires authors to make the raw data, code, and analytical materials underlying their research findings openly available to the scientific community.

Guidelines for Authors:

• Authors are encouraged to deposit their anonymized datasets in recognized, public repositories (such as Figshare, Dryad, Zenodo, Mendeley Data, or domain-specific repositories like GenBank) prior to publication.
• All submitted manuscripts must contain a dedicated **"Data Availability Statement"** describing how the underlying data can be accessed.
• If datasets cannot be made publicly available due to legal, ethical, or privacy restrictions (e.g., patient confidentiality), this must be explicitly stated in the statement, along with the conditions under which data can be requested.

Template Statements:

• *Data available in public repository:* "The data supporting the findings of this study are openly available in [Repository Name] at [DOI link/URL]."
• *Data available on request:* "The datasets generated during the current study are not publicly available due to [reason, e.g., patient privacy] but are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request."
• *No data associated:* "No new datasets were generated or analyzed during this study (e.g., for reviews/editorials)."

Authors must be prepared to provide raw, unedited data to the editors and peer reviewers upon request during the review process for verification purposes.

SJOHS is committed to preserving the accuracy, reliability, and integrity of the scholarly record. If errors, omissions, or ethical issues are identified in published articles, the journal will take appropriate corrective actions following COPE guidelines.

Mechanisms for Post-Publication Corrections:

• Corrections (Erratum / Corrigendum):
  • *Erratum:* Used to correct significant errors introduced by the journal during production.
  • *Corrigendum:* Used to correct significant errors made by the authors that do not invalidate the scientific conclusions of the article.
  • In both cases, a separate correction note is published, linked to the original article, and indexed.
• Expressions of Concern: Published by the Editor-in-Chief when there is strong but inconclusive evidence of research or publication misconduct (e.g., ongoing institutional investigations, or data reliability disputes), allowing readers to be aware of potential issues while an investigation is conducted.
• Retractions:
  • Issued in cases of severe scientific flaws, honest errors that completely invalidate the results, redundant publication, plagiarism, or ethical violations.
  • A retraction note detailing the reasons for the action, signed by the editors and/or the authors, is published. The original PDF is marked with a watermarked "RETRACTED" stamp on every page, though it remains accessible to preserve the historical record.

Authors or readers who detect significant errors in published work should contact the editorial office immediately at editor@sjohs.org.

To ensure that published scientific articles remain permanently accessible to researchers and the public, SJOHS employs robust digital preservation and archiving strategies. We recognize that long-term digital preservation is a key requirement for indexed journals.

Preservation Framework:

• Digital Preservation Repository: SJOHS is establishing partnerships with long-term archiving services (such as LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, and Portico) to guarantee that all published volumes are preserved in perpetuity, even in the event that the journal ceases publication.
• National Archiving: The journal deposits physical and digital copies of its published issues with the National Library of Nepal and related archives.
• Repository Deposit: Authors are encouraged to deposit the published PDF (Version of Record) in their university’s institutional repository or subject-specific archives.
• Persistent Identifiers: Every article published in SJOHS is assigned a unique, permanent **Digital Object Identifier (DOI)** via Crossref, ensuring stable indexing, linking, and citation.

SJOHS is committed to protecting the personal data and privacy of its users. This policy outlines how the journal collects, stores, and uses personal information in compliance with standard data protection regulations (such as GDPR).

Information Collected and Purpose:

• The journal collects names, affiliations, contact details (email address, telephone), and professional identifiers (such as ORCID iDs) provided by authors, reviewers, and registered users.
• This information is used strictly to manage the peer-review process, correspond with authors and reviewers, edit and publish manuscripts, distribute journal alerts, and index published articles.
• Reviewer identities are kept strictly confidential and are never shared outside the editorial management system.

Security and Sharing:

• Personal data is securely stored and is never sold, traded, or shared with third parties for commercial or marketing purposes.
• Data is shared with indexing databases (e.g., Crossref, Google Scholar, DOAJ) only as part of standard metadata publishing required to index published articles.
• Users retain the right to access, correct, or request the deletion of their personal information from the journal's databases by emailing the editorial office at editor@sjohs.org.