PUBLISHING PRINCIPLES
Turkish Journal of Pediatric Surgery publishes original articles, rare case reports, invited-reviews, and letters to the editor that are prepared in accordance with the ethical guidelines. The publication language of the journal is English and Turkish.

The journal adopts and adheres to the principles published by the International Council of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) and Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). The journal follows standard guidelines to maintain transparency. Turkish Journal of Pediatric Surgery takes issues of publication ethics very seriously and subscribes to its principles on how to deal with acts of misconduct thereby committing to investigate allegations of misconduct in order to ensure the integrity of research.

All articles are published under the Open Access model. Manuscripts submitted for evaluation should not have been already published in an electronic or printed medium. The journal should be informed of manuscripts that have been submitted to another journal for evaluation and rejected. The submission of previous reviewer reports will expedite the evaluation process. Articles presented at a meeting (oral or poster) should be reported by giving the information of the meeting.

Studies submitted for evaluation go through a double-blind peer-review process. To ensure an impartial evaluation process, each application is reviewed by at least two external, independent referees who are experts in their field.

Authors must conform exactly to the research and publication ethics. Ethics committee reports are requested if necessary for experimental, clinical, drug studies and some case reports. Scientific and legal responsibilities of the article are those of the author.

For manuscripts concerning experimental research on humans, a statement should be included that written informed consent of patients and volunteers was obtained following a detailed explanation of the procedures that they may undergo. For studies carried out on animals, the measures taken to prevent pain and suffering of the animals should be stated clearly.

Information on patient consent, the name of the ethics committee, and the ethics committee approval number should also be stated in the Materials and Methods section of the manuscript. It is the authors’ responsibility to carefully protect the patients’ anonymity. The privacy rights of human subjects must always be observed.

For photographs that may reveal the identity of the patients, signed releases of the patient or of their legal representative should be enclosed and the publication approval must be provided in the Materials and Methods section.

To verify authenticity, your article is checked by the authenticity detection service Crossref Similarity Check.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST AND FUNDING

A conflict of interest is defined as any financial, personal, academically competitive or intellectual relationship between the author, referee or editor that involves article submission, referee evaluation, editorial decision and author-referee-editor correspondence and that could lead to a prejudiced and unfair action during the evaluation stage.

All authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. All financial contributions and sponsorships for the study and all financial relationships and conflict of interest areas should be included in the copyright transfer form that accompanies the article. The authors must explain the study sponsor’s role in collecting, evaluating and analyzing the data, writing the article and submitting it for publication. If there is no conflict of interest, this section must include a “The authors declare no conflict of interest” statement.

ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE AUTHORS

Each individual listed as an author should fulfill the authorship criteria recommended by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. All authors must have materially participated in the research and/or article preparation. Authors are expected to carefully consider the list and order of authors before submitting their manuscript and provide the definitive list of authors at the time of the original submission.

Authors must ensure that the submitted article has not been previously published in another journal (other than an abstract, published lecture, or academic thesis).

Content should make no assumptions about the beliefs or commitments of any reader.

Content should make contain nothing that         might imply that one individual is superior to another on the grounds of age, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, disability or health condition.

The use of descriptors that refer to personal characteristics such as age, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, disability or health status should be avoided unless relevant and valid.

All animal experiments should comply with the ARRIVE guidelines and  EU Directives. In addition, the authors should clearly indicate in the manuscript that such guidelines have been followed.

In case of any conflict of interest, when he / she finds an ethical violation related to his / her article, he / she will share it with the editor and publisher, and publish a statement of error, addendum, indemnity notice or withdraw the work if deemed it necessary.

LANGUAGE (USAGE AND EDITING SERVICES)

Help should be sought from English Language Editing services to eliminate possible grammatical or spelling errors of English articles.

ETHICAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE EDITORS

1. Acting in a balanced, objective and fair manner while performing their duties without any discrimination based on gender, religious or political beliefs, ethnic or geographical origin of the authors.
2. To evaluate the work submitted to the journal according to its content without showing any privilege to any author.
3. To take necessary measures to prevent potential conflicts of interest and to evaluate existing statements, if any.
4. To deal with sponsored works or special studies in the same way as other studies,
5. In case of complaints related to violation of ethics, to enforce necessary procedures by adhering to the policies and procedures of the journal. To give the authors an opportunity to respond to the complaint, and without refraining from imposing the necessary sanctions, regardless of the identity of the owner of the work
6. To reject the study if it does not meet the purpose and scope of the journal.

ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE REVIEWERS

1. In order to contribute to the editor's decision-making process, the manuscript should be scrutinized in a timely fashion and reviews should only accept the critical evaluation of the study of his/her expertise.
2. The assessment should be done in an objective manner only in relation to the content of the study. The study should be evaluated without considering religious, political and economic interests.
3. To make suggestions to help improve the quality of the article to be published and to critically review the study. To communicate his/her comments to the author in a constructive and gentle language.
4. To protect the confidentiality of the information provided by the editor and the author, to destroy the work after the evaluation process in accordance with the principle of confidentiality, to report to the editor if there is anything contrary to the blind review process and not to evaluate this study.
5. To be cognizant of potential conflicts of interest (financial, institutional, collaborative, or other relationships between the author and the author), and, if necessary, to alert the editor to withdraw his or her assistance for this article.

OPEN ACCESS STATEMENT

Turkish Journal of Pediatric Surgery believes that information should be easily accessible in order for scientific studies to spread to a wider audience. In this context, open access policy is adopted.

The term “open access” in this declaration means that” by means of internet, scientific literature can be accessed, read, recorded, copied, printed, scanned, linked to full text, indexed, transferred as data to the software, and used for all legal purposes without the financial, legal and technical barriers.

Considering the role of information sharing in the advancement of science, open access is of great importance for researchers and readers. For this reason, the articles published in this journal may be used as long as the author and the original source are cited. No permission is required from authors or publishers. The articles in Turkish Journal of Pediatric Surgery are accessible through search engines, websites, blogs and other digital platforms.

These open access policies accepted on September 12, 2012, and also adopted by our editorial board are also accessible at https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org