6. Publication ethics

Article assessment. All articles will be subjected to peer review as they are expected to meet standards of scientific excellence. Both the reviewers, and the authors will be blinded during the process; meaning that the authors will not know the identities of the reviewers, nor the reviewers will now the identities from the authors. Although the authors are able to exclude reviewers in the cover letter, they cannot suggest reviewers. Our Research Integrity team will occasionally seek advice outside standard peer review, for example, on submissions with serious ethical, security, biosecurity, or societal implications.

Plagiarism. Authors are expected to send original content to the journal, so that appropriate credit should be given to the original authors when phrases, figures, and ideas that belong to others are used. If an image, table or figure belonging to a previously published article must be used as such within the text, the author must provide a written permission from the copyright holder.

Revista de la Sociedad Española de Beneficencia uses Crossref Similarity Check (iThenticate) to detect submissions that overlap with published and submitted manuscripts. If plagiarism is detected, the article will be immediately rejected.

Duplicate submissions. Articles based on content previously made public only on a preprint server, institutional repository, or in a thesis will be considered. Nonetheless, articles made available in other journals, in any language, will be rejected.

The submission of an article in the present journal is considered as an exclusive compromise. In this way, articles must not be submitted elsewhere while under consideration and must be withdrawn before being submitted elsewhere.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.

Duplicate publication of the same, or a very similar, article in Revista de la Sociedad Española de Beneficencia or other journals, will result in the retraction of the article and the authors may incur further sanctions.

Fabrication and falsification. All the submitted articles’ figures and images will be thoroughly analyzed for fabrication and falsification, and those that are found to have fabricated or falsificated results, including the manipulation of images, will be rejected and authors may incur sanctions, while published articles will be retracted.

For more information about the retraction of articles, please refer to the COPE retraction guidelines.

Authorship and acknowledgements. All listed authors must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research presented in the manuscript. The authorship of an article must be acknowledged according to the criteria suggested by the international committee of medical journal editors (refer to ICMJE), and preferably, their specific roles in the development of the research must be described in a section entitled “Author Contributions” at the end of the manuscript.

Anyone who contributed to the research or manuscript preparation, but is not an author, should be acknowledged with their permission.

Conflicts of interest. Conflicts of interest (COI) are defined as issues that could affect the neutrality and/or objectivity of the research. Such issues are always external to the research itself, and include the following:

• Financial—funding and other payments, goods and services received or expected by the authors relating to the subject of the work or from an organization with an interest in the outcome of the work.
• Affiliations—being employed by, on the advisory board for, or a member of an organization with an interest in the outcome of the work.
• Intellectual property—patents or trademarks owned by someone or their organization.
• Personal—friends, family, relationships, and other close personal connections.
• Ideology—beliefs or activism, for example, political or religious, relevant to the work.
• Academic—competitors or someone whose work is critiqued.

If the COIs are properly disclosed before the publication of an article, they will never represent a reason to reject the article. Nonetheless, undisclosed COIs may be a reason to reject or retract the paper from publication. All funding, whether a conflict or not, must be declared in the ‘Acknowledgments’.

Corrections and retractions. If an author-derived error is detected after the publication of the article, the editorial board will consider if a corrigendum must be written by the authors. If, on the other hand, the error is publisher-derived, it will be disclosed as an erratum.

We follow the COPE retraction guidelines for both the retraction of an article, or the publication of expressions of concern for serious errors and/or data fabrication/falsification.