Editorial Policies
1. All articles are freely available and immediately accessible online upon publication.
2. Readers can study, download and/or print OPEN access articles without any cost.
3. Articles are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode), which permits the unrestricted, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the work is properly cited.
4. The African Journal of Nursing and Health Issues follows the single blind peer-review procedure for submissions of all manuscripts. It is the most common type of peer-reviewing, in which the identity of the reviewers is not disclosed to the authors of the submitted manuscript. The anonymity of reviewers allows for objective assessment of the manuscript and is also free from any influence by the authors on the reviewers’ comments.
5. All submitted articles are subject to an extensive peer review, in consultation with members of the journal's Editorial Board and independent external referees (usually three). All manuscripts are assessed rapidly and the decision taken by the journal's Editor-in-Chief based on all the peer reviewers’ comments, which are then conveyed to the author(s).
Submissions from the Editor-in-Chief will undergo independent peer-review and will be submitted to another Editor for his decision on acceptance.
6. All efforts are made to expedite the peer review process leading to timely publication.
7. Authors publishing with the African Journal of Nursing and Health Issues retain the copyright to their work.
8. Authors have the flexibility to publish a wide range of articles in African Journal of Nursing and Health Issues e.g. short communications, full-length research and review articles, as well as supplements, conference proceedings and case studies.
9. Human and Animal Rights: All clinical investigations must be conducted according to the Declaration of Helsinki principles. For all manuscripts reporting data from studies involving human participants, formal review and approval by an appropriate institutional review board or ethics committee are required.
10. Patient Consent: Compliance with the guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (www.icmje.org) is recommended, in accordance with the patient’s consent for research or participation in a study as per the applicable laws and regulations regarding the privacy and/or security of personal information, including, but not limited to, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 ("HIPAA") and other U.S. federal and state laws relating to confidentiality and security of personally distinguishable evidence, It is the responsibility of the author to ensure that:
· Patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers must not be mentioned anywhere in the manuscript (including figures).
· Authors are responsible for obtaining patient consent-to-disclose forms for all recognizable patients in photographs, videos, or other information that may be published in the Journal, in derivative works, or on the journal’s web site and for providing the manuscript to the recognizable patient for review before submission.
· The consent-to-disclose form should indicate specific use (publication in the medical literature in print and online, with the understanding that patients and the public will have access) of the patient's information and any images in figures or videos, and must contain the patient's signature or that of a legal guardian along with a statement that the patient or legal guardian has been offered the opportunity to review the identifying materials and the accompanying manuscript.
· If the manuscript has an individuals’ data, such as personal detail, audio-video material, etc., consent should be obtained from that individual. In case of children, consent should be obtained from the parent or the legal guardian.
· A specific declaration of such approval and consent-to-disclose form must be made in the copyright letter and in a stand-alone paragraph at the end of the article especially in the case of human studies where inclusion of a statement regarding obtaining the written informed consent from each subject or subject's guardian is a must. The original should be retained by the guarantor or corresponding author. Editors may request to provide the original forms by fax or email.
· All such case reports should be followed by a proper consent prior to publishing.
Editors may request that authors provide documentation of the formal review and recommendation from the institutional review board or ethics committee responsible for oversight of the study. The editors reserve the right to reject manuscripts that do not comply with the above-mentioned requirements. The author will be held responsible for false statements or failure to fulfill the above-mentioned requirements.
Non-identifiable Images: Anonymous images, that do not identify the individual directly or indirectly, such as through any identifying marks or text, do not require formal consent, for example, x-rays, ultrasound images, pathology slides or laparoscopic images.
If case of not obtaining consent, concealing the identity through eye bars or blurring the face would not be acceptable.
Appeals and Complaints: Generally, the editorial decisions are not reverted. However, authors who think that their manuscript was rejected due to a misunderstanding or mistake may seek an explanation for the decision. Appeals must give sound reasoning and compelling evidence against the criticism raised in the rejection letter. A difference of opinion as to the interest, novelty, or suitability of the manuscript for the journal will not be considered as an appeal. The EIC and other relevant editors will consider the appeal and the decision thereafter taken by the journal will be deemed final. Acceptance of the manuscript is not guaranteed even if the journal agrees to reconsider the manuscript, and the reconsideration process may involve previous or new reviewers or editors and substantive revision.
Authors who wish to make a complaint should refer them to the Editor-in-Chief of the journal concerned. Complaints to the Publisher may be emailed to info@ajnhi.net
Plagiarism Prevention: The African Journal of Nursing and Health Issues uses the iThenticate software to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. iThenticate software checks the content against a database of periodicals, the Internet, and a comprehensive article database. It generates a similarity report, highlighting the percentage overlap between the uploaded article and the published material. Any instance of content overlap is further scrutinized for suspected plagiarism according to the publisher's Editorial Policies. The African Journal of Nursing and Health Issues allows an overall similarity of 20% for a manuscript to be considered for publication. The similarity percentage is further checked keeping the following important points in view:
Low Text Similarity: The text of every submitted manuscript is checked using the Content Tracking mode in iThenticate. This mode ensures that manuscripts with an overall low percentage similarity (but which may have a higher similarity from a single source) are not overlooked. The acceptable limit for similarity of text from a single source is 5%. If the similarity level is above 5%, then the manuscript is returned to the author for paraphrasing the text and citing the original source of the copied material. It is important to mention that the text taken from different sources with an overall low similarity percentage will be considered as a plagiarized content if the majority of the article is a combination of copied material.
High Text Similarity: There may be some manuscripts with an overall low similarity percentage, but a higher percentage from a single source. A manuscript may have less than 20% overall similarity but there may be 15 % similar text taken from a single article. The similarity index in such cases is higher than the approved limit for a single source. Authors are advised to thoroughly rephrase the similar text and properly cite the original source to avoid plagiarism and copyright violation.
Types of Plagiarism: We all know that scholarly manuscripts are written after thorough review of previously published articles. It is therefore not easy to draw a clear boundary between legitimate representation and plagiarism. However, the following important features can assist in identifying different kinds of plagiarized content. These are:
· Reproduction of others words, sentences, ideas or findings as one’s own without proper acknowledgement.
· Text recycling, also known as self-plagiarism. It is the author’s use of a previous publication in another paper without proper citation and acknowledgement of the original source.
· Poor paraphrasing, copying complete paragraphs and modifying a few words without changing the structure of original sentences or changing the sentence structure but not the words.
· Verbatim copying of text without putting quotation marks and not acknowledging the work of the original author.
· Properly citing a work but poorly paraphrasing the original text is considered as unintentional plagiarism. Similarly, manuscripts with language between paraphrasing and quoting are not acceptable. Authors should either paraphrase properly or quote and in both cases, cite the original source.
· Higher similarity in the abstract, introduction, materials and methods, and discussion and conclusion sections indicates that the manuscript may contain plagiarized text. Authors can easily explain these parts of the manuscript in many ways. However, technical terms and sometimes standard procedures cannot be rephrased; therefore, Editors must review these sections carefully before making a decision.
Plagiarism in Published Manuscripts: Published manuscripts which are found to contain plagiarized text are retracted from the journal website after careful investigation and approval by the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. A ‘Retraction Note’ as well as a link to the original article is published on the electronic version of the plagiarized manuscript.
Copyrights: Authors who publish in The African Journal of Nursing and Health Issues retain copyright to their work. Submission of a manuscript to the respective journals implies that all authors have read and agreed to the content of the Covering Letter or the Terms and Conditions.
It is a condition of publication that manuscripts submitted to a journal have not been published and will not be simultaneously submitted or published elsewhere. The African Journal of Nursing and Health Issues (Licensor) grants the author(s) a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and non-commercial perpetual license to exercise the rights in the article published as stated below:
. All articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the work is properly cited.
a. The authors retain the copyright of their published article. They will also have the right to:
§ Reproduce the article, to incorporate the article into one or more collective works, and to reproduce the article as incorporated in collective works;
§ Create and reproduce Derivative Works for educational purposes.
§ Distribute Copies
§ Any commercial application of the work, with prior agreement by the author, is exclusively granted to African Journal of Nursing and Health Issues
Waiver: Authors grant to licensor the right to retain all revenue from commercial sales of the author's published article in African Journal of Nursing and Health Issues.
The journal offers affordable article processing fees, ranking amongst the lowest as compared to those of other OPEN access journal publishers. An article-processing fee payable by the author/ author's institution applies for every accepted article, to cover the costs incurred by OPEN access publication.
Authors can self-archive post prints of their published articles.
Authors can reproduce derivative works of the article for educational purposes and distribute its copies.
Publication Charges Policy: African Journal of Nursing and Health Issues is committed to disseminating research and scholarly publications as widely as possible. It supports the principle that 'the results of research that have been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain’ and therefore it encourages researchers to make their research available through Open Access (OA).
Open access publishing is not without costs. To provide open access, The African Journal of Nursing and Health Issues partly defray the expenses of peer review, journal production, and online hosting and archiving from authors and their research sponsors by charging a publication fee for each article they publish. The publication fee for each published article is US $150.
The following special discounts are offered to authors and editorial board members:
· Authors from developing countries are entitled to 30% discount of their article publication fee submitted to the journal.
· Editorial Board Members and Editors of the journal are allowed ONE free publication annually. Subsequent submissions from Editorial Board Members are published at 50% discount of the standard publication fee.
· Waiver and additional discount requests are decided on the basis of author’s country of origin and quality of the submitted article. Editors and reviewers have no access to whether authors are able to pay; decisions to publish are only based on meeting the editorial criteria.
Errata or a Corrigenda and Corrections in Published Articles: Authors and readers are encouraged to notify the Editor-in-Chief if they discover errors in published content, authors’ names and affiliations or if they have reasons for concern over the legitimacy of a publication. In such cases, The African Journal of Nursing and Health Issues will publish an ERRATUM or a CORRIGENDUM, in consultation with the Editor-in-Chief and authors of the article, and/or replace or retract the article.
Article Withdrawal: Articles in Press (articles that have been accepted for publication or published as E-pub Ahead of Schedule but which have not been formally published with volume/issue/page information) that include errors, or are determined to violate the publishing ethics guidelines such as multiple submission, fake claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like, may be “Withdrawn” from the journal. Withdrawal means that the article files are removed and replaced with a PDF stating that the article has been withdrawn from the journal in accordance with Editorial Policies.
Article Retraction: Published articles (with volume/issue/page information), which may contain infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like, are retracted.
· A retraction notes titled, "Retraction: [article title]" signed by the authors and/or the Editor-in-Chief is published in the paginated part of a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in the contents list.
· In the electronic version, a link is made to the original article.
· The online article is preceded by a screen containing the retraction note. It is to this screen that the link resolves; the reader can then proceed to the article itself.
· The original article is retained unchanged with a watermark on the PDF indicating on each page that it is “retracted.”
Concurrent publication/Simultaneous submission: It is a condition of publication that manuscripts submitted to the journal have not been published and will not be simultaneously submitted or published elsewhere. Plagiarism is strictly forbidden, and by submitting the article for publication the authors agree that the publishers have the legal right to take appropriate action against the authors, if plagiarism or fabricated information is discovered.
Abstracts and posters of conferences, results presented at meetings (for example, to inform investigators or participants about findings), results databases (data without interpretation, discussion, context or conclusions in the form of tables and text to describe data/information where this is not easily presented in tabular form) are not considered prior to publication.
Authors who wish to publish translations of the articles that have been published elsewhere should ensure that they have appropriate permission(s), indicate clearly that the material has been translated and re-published, and indicate clearly the original source of the material. The Editor-in-Chief may request copies of related publications if he/she is concerned about overlap and possible redundancy.
Disclaimer: Responsibility for the content published by African Journal of Nursing and Health Issues, including any opinions expressed therein, rests exclusively with the author(s) of such content. To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, The African Journal of Nursing and Health Issues (on its own behalf, and on behalf of its staff and members of its editorial board) disclaims responsibility for any and all injury and/or damage (whether financial or otherwise) to persons or property, resulting directly or indirectly from any ideas, methods, instructions or products (including errors in the same) referred to in the content of the journal.