JOURNAL POLICIES
Publication Ethics Policy
The Ophthalmology Cases & Hypotheses (OCH) welcomes the submission of manuscripts that meet the general criteria of significance and scientific excellence.
Generally, the receipt of a manuscript will be acknowledged within 2 weeks of submission; authors will be provided with a manuscript reference number for future correspondence. If an acknowledgment is not received in a reasonable period of time, the author should contact the Editorial Office.
Papers written in English are considered. If English is not your native language, please consider having your text reviewed by a professional medical editor. All manuscripts are subject to editorial review.
Statements
This journal operates on a double-blind review process. Submissions are reviewed by the Editorial Office to ensure that they contains all parts. Submissions will be rejected if the author has not supplied all the material and documents as outlined in these author's instructions. Manuscripts are then forwarded to the Editor-in-Chief, who makes an initial assessment of it. If the manuscript does not appear to be of sufficient merit or is not appropriate for the Journal, the manuscript will be rejected without review.
Manuscripts not compiled under the requirements of the journal will not be accepted for publication.
Statement of Ethics
Published research must comply with internationally-accepted standards for research practice and reporting. Manuscripts may be rejected if the editors believe that the research has not been carried out within an appropriate ethical framework, and concerns raised after publication may lead to a correction, retraction, or expression of concern in line with COPE guidelines.
The presentation of manuscripts should follow the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).
The Ophthalmology Cases & Hypotheses (OCH) journal aims to adhere to the COPE Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines.( https://publicationethics.org/)
License to Publish / Open Access and Creative Commons Licensing
This is an open-access journal and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 License (CC BY), which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate
Each author must complete a License to Publish. This license grants Ophthalmology Cases & Hypotheses permission, among other things, to publish and distribute the article. Authors will also need to indicate on the form if they are making their article open access under the CC BY license
Peer review
Journal uses a double-blind peer review system where reviewers do not know the names of the authors and the authors do not know who reviewed their manuscripts. All contributions will be initially assessed by the editor for suitability for the journal. Papers deemed suitable are then typically sent to a minimum of two independent expert reviewers to assess the scientific quality of the paper. The Editor is responsible for the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of articles. In the event that an editor has a conflict of interest with a submitted manuscript or with the authors, the manuscript, review, and editorial decisions are managed by another designated editor without a conflict of interest related to the manuscript. Editors are not involved in decisions about papers which they have written themselves or have been written by family members or colleagues or which relate to products or services in which the editor has an interest.
Duplicate submission and redundant publication
Ophthalmology Cases & Hypotheses (OCH) journal consider only original content, i.e. articles that have not been previously published, including in a language other than English. Articles based on content previously made public only on a preprint server, institutional repository, or in a thesis will be considered. Manuscripts submitted to our journal must not be submitted elsewhere while under consideration and must be withdrawn before being submitted elsewhere. Authors whose articles are found to have been simultaneously submitted elsewhere may incur sanctions.
If authors have used their own previously published work, or work that is currently under review, as the basis for a submitted manuscript, they must cite the previous articles and indicate how their submitted manuscript differs from their previous work.
Redundant publication, the inappropriate division of study outcomes into more than one article (also known as salami slicing), may result in rejection or a request to merge submitted manuscripts and the correction of published articles. Duplicate publication of the same, or a very similar, article may result in the retraction of the later article, and the authors may incur sanctions.
Plagiarism
The journal may use plagiarism detection software to screen the submissions. Manuscripts that are found to have been plagiarized from a manuscript by other authors, whether published or unpublished, will be rejected and the authors may incur sanctions. If plagiarism is identified, the COPE guidelines on plagiarism will be followed.
Citation manipulation
Authors whose submitted manuscripts are found to include citations whose primary purpose is to increase the number of citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal, may incur sanctions. Editors and reviewers (https://publicationethics.org/node/19886) must not ask authors to include references merely to increase citations to their own or an associate’s work, to the journal, or to another journal they are associated with.
Fabrication and falsification
The authors of submitted manuscripts or published articles that are found to have fabricated or falsified the results, including the manipulation of images, may incur sanctions, and published articles may be retracted.
Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing
The Journal complies with the ICMJE uniform requirements for manuscripts. This is clearly indicated in the Submission Guidelines. Also, our affiliated Journal follows the COPE guidelines and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. The statements and opinions contained in this journal are solely those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the editor or the publisher's ones.
Ethics & advertisement policies
We endorse the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) policies in editorial, peer review, advertisement, ethics, informed consent, handling cases requiring corrections, retractions, and editorial expressions of concern. We also respect policies of International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.
