Editorial Policies
The policies and guidelines provided here are to help protect the quality and integrity of scholarly practice and research, as well as the reputation of the publications produced by United Scientific Group (USG) publishing. USG's policies and guidelines are available in detail in the editorial policies section. Information on policies and guidelines for specific research areas are also available. USG has put together all necessary documents that will help in guiding the editors and reviewers to deal with ethical issues that may arise while performing their duties.
Ethical principles are highly valued and followed by all our editors and reviewers and USG aims to strictly adhere to and uphold the standards of ethical behavior at all stages of the publication process. We follow closely the industry associations, such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), which set the standards and guidelines for best practices in scientific and medical publishing.
USG actively encourages intellectual honesty in all the scientific and medical research studies that it publishes and requests authors to make themselves aware of its publication ethics, policies and guidelines in order to prevent any misconduct or breaches to best ethical practice.
The underlying principles of good publication practice are the faith and confidence in the peer review process. USG aims to select the best quality articles by making the peer review and publication processes transparent, systematic and impartial. All stages of the publication are explicitly built on ethical principles and informed decisions that are an outcome of the editor’s broad perspectives. Thus the overall quality of scholarly work published in a journal is highly dependent on the trust that the authors, researchers and readers repose on the editorial policies of the journal.
Open access (OA) is a recent and preferred advancement in the publication industry whereby peer reviewed research articles are made freely available for public use over the Internet almost immediately after being accepted for publication. Thus in OA journals there are neither financial constraints like subscription charges, licensing fees, pay per view charges etc. nor permission constraints like copyright and licensing restrictions since the author is the sole copyright owner for his work and reserves the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
OA gives quick exposure of scholarly research to the scientific community where one can use it any number of times for free after citing the author. Our open access policy allows authors to easily comply with the open access requirements of their corresponding institution, government and funding body.
USG is committed to convey the authors a strong understanding of their rights and responsibilities. They have the ability to ensure that the article can be accessed and used by the widest possible readers. Our expert editorial policies and guideline helps authors to understand open licenses, and publish articles under full open access conditions.
Authors of the accepted manuscripts will be given options to choose the license for open access under which they wish to publish their work, that is the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) license or Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC 4.0) license. The author remains the sole copyright owner for his/her work and by selecting a Creative Commons usage license he/she can define how the article may be used by the general public.
For more information, please contact: managingeditor(at)uniscigroup.com
USG recommends all authors to deposit their research work in trusted digital archives (popularly referred to as Digital Repositories or Institutional Repositories) that adhere to the standards of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), thus allowing readers to have free access to the content and be able to completely use, refer, reuse, the article text. By depositing in such repositories the author can make their work public under open access conditions regardless on the journal that their articles are published in. Currently the authors can choose from more than 2,000 open Digital Repositories worldwide to deposit their work.
USG has partnered with CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS), a not-for-profit organization to preserve our journal content. By archiving within these two organizations, we are ensuring that all our scholarly publications remains accessible to global research community at all times (irrespective of whether the articles are available to the authors at the publisher's website or not).
USG publishes all its journals in full open access format. Thus the scientific community and the general public have, for free, unlimited and immediate access to all the content published in any of the USG journals as soon as it is published online. This means that USG does not make revenue from selling subscriptions to print or view online versions of its journals or by charging for "pay-per-view". Therefore, to defray the operational, editorial and technical expenses-including those for online hosting, developing and maintenance of electronic tools, devices and systems for peer review management and journal production, archiving and securing inclusion in indexing databases, USG collects an article processing charge (APC) from authors' institutes or research funding bodies. USG is committed to keeping its open access publication charges at a minimum level.
Today, increasing number of authors from the scientific and medical fields have started to realize the importance and advantages of the open access publishing policy in terms of reaching wider community of audience and thus increasing the impact of their work. The traditional publication model posed a restricted access to the published material by charging the readers to get access to articles and thus recouped the costs of the publication process. However the current open access publishing model considers publication as the last phase of the research and provides readers free access to the published material. The publication process costs are managed through an APC that is levied at the beginning of the publication process.
APC vary by journal and are payable for articles upon acceptance. Visit the individual journal homepages for specific pricing information.
The scientific industry involved in networking, organizing meetings and publishing scholarly journals is increasing constantly in order to meet the ever changing demands of emerging new concepts and subjects in different fields of science. Rigorous and meticulous policies and guidelines are essential to maintain the highest standards of scientific excellence. USG is fortunate to have a United Scientific Group Editors Association (USGEA) that serves this role. USGEA is an association of USG journals editors with diverse backgrounds and professional experience, who seek to foster cooperation and communication among editors, improve editorial standards, promotes the concept of self-criticism, self-regulation in scholarly publishing, and encourage research on the editorial principles and practices of publishing.
USGEA will take all the necessary steps to make the journals indexed in major citation databases such as PubMed, PubMed Central, Scopus, CAS, Web of Knowledge (ISI), MedLine.