The editor’s chief responsibility is to determine which submissions to the journal will be published. He/she must ensure that decisions are made based on the manuscript’s merit and that the author’s race, gender, religious or political beliefs, ethnicity, or citizenship are not considered.
Confidentiality
Information concerning a submitted manuscript should only be revealed to the corresponding author, reviewers, editorial board members, or the publisher as required or otherwise appropriate.
Disclosure and conflicts of interest
Reviewers will not use unpublished information disclosed in a submitted manuscript for their research purposes without the author’s explicit written consent. Reviewers will recuse themselves from reviewing manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships/connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers. Editors should follow the procedure set out in the COPE flowchart. Editors should respond promptly to complaints and should ensure there is a way for dissatisfied complainants to take complaints further.
Independence
Editors should preserve their pen and paper independence to work and make sure that authors are free to write. The editors are responsible for accepting or refusing the articles, which typically depend on the idea, and recommendations of reviewers; by the way, the articles which are inappropriate from the point of view of editors are probably refused without reviewers’ assessment.
No biases
Editors should improve their position score and circumstances confidentially, constructively, and unbiasedly. Editors carry the essay review duty only based on scientific merits. Editors should act unbiased, without personal or ideological advocacy.
Conflict of Benefits
Editors should avoid any action, which increases conflicts of benefits with its unreasonable aspect. For instance, to avoid potential conflict of benefits, the editor is not allowed to publish an article, which is not clearly identified, reviewed, or partly reviewed. Liability, writing authority, and editing each article by the editor, submitted to the journal of Cellular, Molecular and Biomedical Reports (CMBR), should be submitted by the editor to another qualified person like the previous editor or one of the members of the editorial boards. Editors should avoid any article study, which is in contrast with their real or potential conflict of benefits. The contrast may be due to the competitive, partnership, financial or other relations with any other companies, organizations, or institutes related to the article. The examples related to the relations, which show conflicts of benefits of the editor or author are:
- Both the author and editor have been employed by one institute;
- The editor has been one member of the dissertation committee of the author or vice versa;
- The editor and the author are currently co-workers and co-authors in another article or have been co-authors in an article in the past two years.
Double-Blind Peer-Review
The journal follows a double-blind peer-review in which authors do not know the reviewers and vice versa. Assessment standards should be expressed clearly and concisely.
Confidentiality
Editors and their editorial boards are not allowed to reveal relevant information about the article to anyone but reviewers and authors. Official and formal procedures should be determined to preserve the confidentiality of the assessment process. Editors are expected to make sure the confidentiality of the double-blind peer-review process and lack of information revelation, which may reveal the author’s identity to reviewers and vice versa. Reviewers’ anonymity can be breached only when reviewers permit editors to reveal their identities. Editors should make sure that their editorial boards are compatible and coordinated with them. Some parts of a submitted article, which has not been published, are not allowed to be used in the personal research of an editor without the author’s written permission. Confidential ideas or information, which has been got by article assessment, should be preserved privately, not to be used for private benefits.
Assessment Quality
Typically, three to five reviewers are invited to express their idea about an article. The editor should evaluate all assessments qualitatively. The editor may rarely edit an assessed article before submitting it to the author (for example, eliminating an expression, which reveals the reviewer’s identity or not sending the assessed article in case it is not constructive or appropriate. Rankings and scores of assessment quality, as well as other functional features, are assessed periodically by the editor to make sure of the optimized operation of the journal of Cellular, Molecular and Biomedical Reports (CMBR). These scores and rankings should help decision-making in the field of reappointment of reviewing teams and continuous requests. Individual operation data should be accessible to editors and kept confidential.
Being up to date
To guarantee the article’s assessment and quick response to the authors’ requests about assessment status by a determined deadline (maximum one week after receiving the article) editors should apply primary assessment and reviewer selection.
Quality of decision
Editors are responsible for describing the decisions of the editorial boards for authors and their articles. Editors should write high-quality letters where these letters represent the combination of the reviewers’ recommendations and extra suggestions for another author. Editors should not attach the result of the decision in the letter format without an explanation of the advice and suggestions of the reviewer.
Precision
As the editor receives convincing evidence from the reviewer based on false concepts or results of an unpublished article, he should inform procedure to the author. If similar evidence about an article were published, the editor should apply an emergency modified publishing, return the previous one, and express relevant matters with other notes appropriately.
Authority
The Editor is responsible for the final authority and responsibility of the journal. They should respect the journal formation (such as readers, authors, reviewers, editors, and staff of the editorial boards) and try his/her best for the truthful and honest content of the journal as well as continuous improvement. The Editor should select members of the editorial boards based on the written assessment board, determine their responsibilities and evaluate their actions regularly.
Operation
The Editor should design the operation in full operational detail, taking account of all policy, technical, economic, financial, institutional, management, environmental, socio-cultural, and gender-related aspects. The journal is going to be published based on annual auditing related to admission level, publishing intervals, submitted articles percentage for revision and foreign revision as well as the operation data. Operation indexes ought to improve the journal operation for assessing the revolution of articles along with publishing processes.