JHPC adheres to the guidelines and best practices published by professional organizations, including the ICMJE Recommendations and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing (joint statement by the Committee on Publication Ethics, COPE; the Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ; the World Association of Medical Editors, WAME; and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA; https://doaj.org/bestpractice). Furthermore, all processes of handling research and publication misconduct shall follow the applicable COPE flowchart (https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). JHPC requests that all authors comply with research and publication ethics policies.

• 1) Conflict of interest statement

  A conflict of interest exists when a person's interpretation of data or presentation of information could be influenced by a personal or financial relationship with other people or organizations. Authors must disclose any financial competing interests. Authors should also reveal any nonfinancial competing interests that may cause them embarrassment were they to become public after publication of the manuscript. Authors are required to complete a declaration of competing interests. All competing interests that are declared will be listed at the end of published articles.

• 2) Statement of informed consent and institutional review board approval

  Clinical research should be conducted in accordance with the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Helsinki – Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/). Clinical studies that do not adhere to the Declaration of Helsinki will not be considered for publication.
  For clinical studies with human subjects, there should be a certificate, agreement, or approval by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the author’s affiliated institution. If necessary, the editor or reviewers may request copies of these documents to resolve questions about IRB approval and study conduct. For humans, identifiable information, such as patients’ names, initials, hospital numbers, dates of birth, or other protected health care information, should not be disclosed. Copies of written informed consent forms should be kept for studies on human subjects. This information should be specified in the Methods section of the manuscript. For animal subjects, research should be performed based on the National or Institutional Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, and the ethical treatment of all experimental animals should be maintained.

• 3) Authorship and author's responsibility

  Authorship credit should be based on:
  (1) substantial contributions to the conception and design of the study, acquisition of data, and/or analysis and interpretation of data;
  (2) participation in drafting of the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
  (3) the provision of final approval of the version to be published; and
  (4) agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of it are appropriately investigated and resolved. Every author should meet all four of these conditions.
  The underlying responsibility of the authors it to submit only original work, and to properly acknowledge academic ideas borrow from others.
  Submissions will be checked with the Turnitin service to find similarities to published articles.

  • Authors should ensure that all submitted work is original— adding significantly to known works— and should not published or submitted in other journals. Known works that are similar should be acknowledged with proper referencing and proofs that are standard or are only slight variations of known proofs should be acknowledged as such. If the authors know that the same results have been obtained simulataneously but independently by other authors this should be aknowledged.
  • All listed authors should have contributed substantially to the paper, and are responsible for its content.
  • Authors should disclose to the editors any outstanding authorship disagreements regarding the submitted article.
  • Figures or data included in a submission should be free of copyright or be of open copyright. For any copyrighted material that the authors intend to include, they should have written permission for reuse by the copyright holders. (The main place this is an issue is when authors try to re-use a figure from a paper of theirs that is published in another journal. Often the journal then holds the copyright for the figure. )
  • Authors should remain available, and respond in a reasonably timely manner, to the editors for communications regarding the processing of the article. (Authors should also be able to expect the same courtesy of the editors. )
  • Once an article has been reviewed and accepted, authors should not withdraw it without sufficient reason.

• 4) Originality and duplicate publication

  Manuscripts that have already been published in other journals or this journal shall not be published in duplication. If an article containing similar information has already been published in other journals, a copy of the article should be submitted with the manuscript. In this case, the editorial board of Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care first determine whether the manuscript had already been published elsewhere, then later review it to decide if it is suitable for publication in this journal. A manuscript that has already been published in this journal may not be published in other journals without the permission of the editorial board of Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care. Figures and tables of this journal can be used freely if original source is verified according to Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial License. It is mandatory for all authors to resolve any copyright issues when citing a figure or table from a other journal that is not open access.

• 5) Process for managing research and publication misconduct

  When JHPC faces suspected cases of research and publication misconduct such as duplicate publication, plagiarism, fraudulent or fabricated data, changes in authorship, undisclosed conflicts of interest, ethical problems with a submitted manuscript, a reviewer who has appropriated an author's idea or data, or a complaint against the editors, the resolution process will be as is presented in a flowchart provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts). All discussion and decisions on the suspected cases are overseen by the JHPC Editorial Board.
  
  Similarity Check Similarity Check is a multi-publisher initiative to screen published and submitted content for originality. To find out more about Similarity Check, visit http://www.crossref.org/crosscheck/index.html. All manuscripts submitted to JHPC may be screened, using the iThenticate tool, for textual similarity to other previously published works.

• 6) Editorial responsibilities

  Reviewers’ Responsibilities The underlying responsibility of the reviewer is to give an objective and timely review, based solely on the merits of the paper, without regard to who the authors are or how the reviewer may benefit from the article's publication.
  
  • Reviewers should only accept a reviewing assignment if they are confident they will be able to read (the majority of) the review article and give an informative review in a timely manner.
  • Reviewers should disclose to the editors any conflict of interest they may have with the authors or the subject of the article under review that may make it difficult for them to be objective. Examples of this may be close ties, or enmity, with some of the authors. It would also be a conflict of interest if the reviewer has reason to delay the publication of the article, say, if the reviewer is working on similar results and publishing precedence is desirable.
  • If reviewers gain ideas for results of their own from reading a review article, such ideas should not be used until the article is published or posted on an archive.
  • Reviewers should keep reviews anonymous. They should not contact authors directly about the article, but send all communications through the editors. There should be no identifying information in communications or reviews.
  • Reviews should avoid suggesting references without specific reasons, and be especially wary of suggesting references to their own articles of articles of those close to them.

  Editors’ Responsibilities In their initial quality check editors should accept or reject the article based on its quality relative to other submitted articles and with knowledge of the percentage of articles that the journal can publish. In assessing the quality of the article, the editor should follow the guidelines of reviewers, and make their assessment solely on the articles merits, without regard to how the editor may benefit from the article’s publication.
  
  For articles that pass an initial editorial quality check, the underlying responsibility of the editors is to obtain timely, thorough, confidential and unbiased reviews of the article, and use these reviews to assess the article for publication in the journal.
  
  • Editors should take due diligence in finding appropriate reviewers for the article who can review the article in a reasonable time frame.
  • If editors have trouble finding reviewers for the article, authors should be advised of this and given the opportunity to suggest appropriate reviewers. (Editors should keep in mind though that the reviewers should be confidential, so suggestions must be handled with care.)
  • Editors should respond to author queries, or if unsure how to respond, pass them on to the managing editor.
  • Use respectful language in communications with authors and reviewers, and encourage the same of reviewers in their reviews.
  • Respect the integrity of reviews, but, if necessary, with due notification to the reviewer, edit them to maintain the anonymity of the