EDITORIAL POLICY

 The Editorial Policy of the Journal Engrams is in the line with the recommendations of The Council of Science Editors (CSE) http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=3286.


EDITORIAL RESPONSIBILITIES
The Editor-in-Chief of the Journal, in consultation with the members of the Editorial Board, makes the final decision on who will publish manuscripts. Editor-in-Chief is responsible for deciding which articles submitted to Engrams will be published. The Editor-in-Chief is guided by the Editorial Policy and constrained by legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement, and plagiarism.

The Editor-in-Chief reserves the right to decide not to publish submitted manuscripts in case it is found that they do not meet relevant standards concerning the content and formal aspects. The Editorial Staff will inform the authors whether the manuscript is accepted for publication.
Editor-in-Chief must hold no conflict of interest with regard to the articles they consider for publication. If an Editor feels that there is likely to be a perception of a conflict of interest in relation to their handling of a submission, the selection of reviewers and all decisions on the paper shall be made by the.

Editorial Board shall evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content free from any racial, gender, sexual, religious, ethnic, or political bias.

The Editor and the Editorial Staff must not use unpublished materials disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the express written consent of the authors. The information and ideas presented in submitted manuscripts shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

Editors and the Editorial Staff shall take all reasonable measures to ensure that the reviewers remain anonymous to the authors before, during, and after the evaluation process and the authors remain anonymous to reviewers until the end of the review procedure.

Publisher`s Council is an advisory body that actively contributes to the development of the journal. The tasks and duties of the Editorial Council include:

the support to the development of the journal, and its promotion, encouraging experts in the area of medicine, dentistry, and pharmacy to get involved as journal authors and/or reviewers, writing editorials, reviews, and commentaries.

PROCEDURES FOR DEALING WITH UNETHICAL BEHAVIOUR
Anyone may inform the editors and/or Editorial Staff at any time of suspected unethical behavior or any type of misconduct by giving the necessary information/evidence to start an investigation.

Investigation

  • Editor-in-Chief will consult with the Editorial Board on decisions regarding the initiation of an investigation.
  • During an investigation, any evidence should be treated as strictly confidential and only made available to those strictly involved in investigating.
  • The accused will always be given the chance to respond to any charges made against them.
  • If it is judged at the end of the investigation that misconduct has occurred, then it will be classified as either minor or serious.

Minor misconduct
Minor misconduct will be dealt  with by those directly involved without involving any other parties, e.g.

  • Communicating to authors/reviewers whenever a minor issue involving misunderstanding or misapplication of academic standards has occurred.
  • A warning letter to an author or reviewer regarding fairly minor misconduct.

Major misconduct
The Editor-in-Chief, in consultation with the Editorial Board, and, when appropriate, further consultation with a small group of experts should make any decision regarding the course of action to be taken using the evidence available. The possible outcomes are as follows (these can be used separately or jointly):

  • Publication of a formal announcement or editorial describing the misconduct.
  • Informing the author's (or reviewer's) head of department or employer of any misconduct by means of a formal letter.
  • The formally announced retraction of publications from the journal is in accordance with the Retraction Policy (see below).
  • A ban on submissions from an individual for a defined period.
  • Refer a case to a professional organization or legal authority for further investigation and action.

When dealing with unethical behavior, the Editorial Staff will rely on the guidelines and recommendations provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

RETRACTION POLICY
Legal limitations of the publisher, copyright holder, or author(s), infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, or any major misconduct require retraction of an article. Occasionally a retraction can be used to correct errors in submission or publication. The main reason for withdrawal or retraction is to correct the mistake while preserving the integrity of science; it is not to punish the author.

Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this practice has been adopted for article retraction by Engrams: in the electronic version of the retraction note, a link is made to the original article. In the electronic version of the original article, a link is made to the retraction note where it is clearly stated that the article has been retracted. The original article is retained unchanged, save for a watermark on the PDF indicating on each page that it is “retracted.”

 

Peer review process


REVIEWERS' RESPONSIBILITIES
Reviewers are required to provide written, competent and unbiased feedback in a timely manner on the scholarly merits and the scientific value of the manuscript.

The reviewers assess manuscript for the compliance with the profile of the journal, the relevance of the investigated topic and applied methods, the originality and scientific relevance of information presented in the manuscript, the presentation style, and scholarly apparatus.

Reviewers should alert the Editor to any well-founded suspicions or the knowledge of possible violations of ethical standards by the authors. Reviewers should recognize relevant published works that have not been cited by the authors and alert the Editor to substantial similarities between a reviewed manuscript and any manuscript published or under consideration for publication elsewhere, in the event, they are aware of such. Reviewers should also alert the Editor to a parallel submission of the same paper to another journal, in the event they are aware of such.

Reviewers must not have a conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors, and/or the funding sources for the research. If such conflicts exist, the reviewers must report them to the Editor without delay.

Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the Editor without delay.
Reviews must be conducted objectively. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate. Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.

Any manuscripts received for review must be treated as confidential documents. reviewers must not use unpublished materials disclosed in submitted manuscripts without the express written consent of the authors. The information and ideas presented in submitted manuscripts shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

PEER REVIEW


The submitted manuscripts are subject to a peer-review process. The purpose of peer review is to assist the Editor-in-Chief in making editorial decisions and through the editorial communications with the author it may also assist the author in improving the paper.

Peer review in the Journal is anonymous.

Each submitted manuscript is reviewed by at least two referees. If the outcomes of the performed reviews do not match the demands, it is necessary to proceed to the third review. In accordance with its outcome, the manuscript is further adjusted if there is a need and finally accepted. If there are two negative reviews, the manuscript will be rejected.

A statistical review of all manuscripts accepted for publication in Engrams is part of a regular peer review process.

Reviews are free of charge and must be completed within three weeks.

The choice of reviewers is at the Editors' discretion. The reviewers must be knowledgeable about the subject area of the manuscript; they must not be from the authors' own institution and they should not have recent joint publications with any of the authors.

All of the reviewers of a paper act independently and they are not aware of each other’s identities. If the decisions of the two reviewers are not the same (accept/reject), the Editor may assign additional reviewers.

During the review, the Editor may require authors to provide additional information (including raw data) if they are necessary for the evaluation of the scholarly merit of the manuscript. These materials shall be kept confidential and must not be used for personal gain.

The Editorial team shall ensure reasonable quality control for the reviews. With respect to reviewers whose reviews are convincingly questioned by authors, special attention will be paid to ensure that the reviews are objective and high in academic standard. When there is any doubt with regard to the objectivity of the reviews or quality of the review, additional reviewers will be assigned.

Policies on conflict of interest, human and animal rights, and informed consent


AUTHORS' RESPONSIBILITIES
Authors warrant that their manuscript is their original work, that it has not been published before, and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Parallel submission of the same paper to another journal constitutes misconduct and eliminates the manuscript from consideration by Engrams.

The Authors also warrant that the manuscript is not and will not be published elsewhere (after the publication in Engrams in any language without the consent of the Publisher).
In case a submitted manuscript is a result of a research project, or its previous version has been presented at a conference in the form of an oral presentation (under the same or similar title), detailed information about the project, the conference, etc. shall be provided appreciation at the place of work, and in front of the list of literature. A paper that has already been published in another journal cannot be reprinted in Engrams.

It is the responsibility of each author to ensure that papers submitted to Engrams are written with ethical standards listed below:

The Declaration of Helsinki
The Basel Declaration
Good Laboratory Practice
Good Clinical Practice
ICMJE guidelines

The authors affirm that the article contains no unfounded or unlawful statements and does not violate the rights of third parties.

The Publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.

Reporting standards
A submitted manuscript should contain sufficient detail and references to permit reviewers and, subsequently, readers to verify the claims presented in it. The deliberate presentation of false claims is a violation of ethical standards.

Book reviews and professional papers should be accurate and they should present an objective perspective.

Authors are exclusively responsible for the contents of their submissions and must make sure that they have permission from all involved parties to make the data public.

Authors wishing to include figures, tables, or other materials that have already been published elsewhere are required to obtain permission from the copyright holder(s). Any material received without such evidence will be assumed to originate from the authors.

Authorship
Authors must make sure that only contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors and, conversely, that all contributors who have significantly contributed to the submission are listed as authors. If persons other than authors were involved in important aspects of the research project and the preparation of the manuscript, their contribution should be acknowledged in a footnote or the Acknowledgments section.

Acknowledgment of Sources
Authors are required to properly cite sources that have significantly influenced their research and their manuscript. Information received in a private conversation or correspondence with third parties, in reviewing project applications, manuscripts, and similar materials, must not be used without the express written consent of the information source.

Plagiarism
Plagiarism, where someone assumes another's ideas, words, or other creative expressions as one's own, is a clear violation of scientific ethics. Plagiarism may also involve a violation of copyright law, punishable by legal action.
Plagiarism includes the following:

  • Word for word, or almost word for word copying, or purposely paraphrasing portions of another author's work without clearly indicating the source or marking the copied fragment (for example, using quotation marks);
  • Copying equations, figures, or tables from someone else's paper without properly citing the source and/or without permission from the original author or the copyright holder.

Please note that all submissions are thoroughly checked for plagiarism. Once the manuscript is received it is checked using the system CrossCheck (software iThenticate) on a possible (auto)plagiarism.

Any paper which shows obvious signs of plagiarism will be automatically rejected and authors will be permanently or temporarily forbidden to publish in the Journal.

In case plagiarism is discovered in a paper that has already been published by the journal, it will be retracted in accordance with the procedure described below under the Retraction policy, and authors will be permanently or temporarily forbidden to publish in the journal.

Conflict of interest
Authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial or other substantive conflicts of interest that might have influenced the presented results or their interpretation.

Conflict of interest statement

 The manuscript is accompanied by a signed statement within the Submission Letter form, in which the authors declare any possible conflict of interest or its absence. For more information on the different types of conflicts of interest, visit the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME; http://www.wame.org) website entitled "Conflict of Interest Policy". At the end of the paper, below the NOTES section, in a separate section Conflict of interest, it is necessary to declare each possible conflict of interest or its absence, for each author individually (full author's name or initials). For example. Jovan Jovanović: Sanofi-Aventis (lecturer). Nadežda Petrović: no. Desanka Maksimović: Pfizer, Sanofi, Bristol-Meyers Squibb (lecturer, honorary consultant, researcher on a scientific project).



Fundamental errors in published works
When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in his/her own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal editor or publisher and cooperate with the Editor to retract or correct the paper.

By submitting a manuscript the authors agree to abide by the Engrams’ Editorial Policies.



Open Access policy


Engrams is an Open Access Journal. All articles can be downloaded free from https://scindeks.ceon.rs/journalDetails.aspx?issn=0351-2665 with the use of license: the Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike.

Self-archiving Policy
The journal Engrams allows authors to deposit the final, published version in PDF document in an institutional repository and non-commercial subject-based repositories, such as PubMed Central, Europe PMC, or arXiv or to publish it on Author's personal website (including social networking sites, such as ResearchGate, Academia.edu, etc.) and/or departmental website, at any time after publication in accordance with the Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike – CC BY-AS. Full bibliographic information (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages) about the original publication must be provided and a link must be made to the article's DOI.

Copyright
Once the manuscript is accepted for publication, the authors shall transfer the copyright to the Publisher. If the submitted manuscript is not accepted for publication by the journal, all rights shall be retained by the author(s).

Authors grant to the Publisher the following rights to the manuscript, including any supplemental material, and any parts, extracts, or elements thereof:

  • the right to reproduce and distribute the Manuscript in printed form, including print-on-demand;
  • the right to produce prepublications, reprints, and special editions of the Manuscript;
  • the right to translate the Manuscript into other languages;
  • the right to reproduce the Manuscript using photomechanical or similar means including, but not limited to photocopy, and the right to distribute these reproductions;
  • the right to reproduce and distribute the Manuscript electronically or optically on any and all data carriers or storage media – especially in machine-readable/digitalized form on data carriers such as hard drive, CD-ROM, DVD, Blu-ray Disc (BD), Mini-Disk, data tape – and the right to reproduce and distribute the Article via these data carriers;
  • the right to store the Manuscript in databases, including online databases, and the right of transmission of the Manuscript in all technical systems and modes;
  • the right to make the Manuscript available to the public or to closed user groups on individual demand, for use on monitors or other readers (including e-books), and in printable form for the user, either via the internet, other online services, or via internal or external networks.

Authors retain the copyright of the published article and have the right to use the article in the ways permitted to third parties under the license: Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike. Full bibliographic information (authors, article title, journal title, volume, issue, pages) about the original publication must be provided and a link must be made to the article's DOI.

Authors grant the publisher the right to publish the article, to be cited as its original publisher in case of reuse, and to distribute it in all forms and media.

DISCLAIMER
The views expressed in the published works do not express the views of the Editors and Editorial Staff. The authors take legal and moral responsibility for the ideas expressed in the articles. Publisher shall have no liability in the event of issuance of any claims for damages. The Publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any claims for compensation.