IJPDS follows the code of good practice by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), recommendations from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICJME).

We are members of the Association of Learned & Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), COPE, the Council of Science Editors (CSE), CrossRef, ICJME and CLOCKSS.

Authorship

Authors published in IJPDS must fulfil the criteria detailed below as informed by the ICJME (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors). In particular, each author must have made a substantial contribution to one of the following;

• the conception or design of the work;
• the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of the data;
• the creation of new software used in the work;
• have drafted the work or substantially revised it;

Approval must be given by each author for the submitted manuscript, and each author must be personally accountable for their own contributions and for ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work, even ones in which the author was not personally involved, are appropriately investigated, resolved, and documented in the literature.

All individuals that have made author-level contributions to the submitted manuscript must be acknowledged, including guest and honorary authorships. All other individuals that do not meet the criteria for authorship must be listed in the acknowledgements section including the nature of their contribution.

Corresponding authors must:

• Ensure that the manuscript has been approved by every listed author prior to submission
• Remain in continuous communication with their assigned editor and act as recipient for peer-review feedback.
• Check that all data and code contained within the manuscript comply with transparency and reproducibility standards for the journal and the field of Population Data Science.
• Confirm that all data, materials and code used in conjunction with the submitted manuscript are preserved and can be made available for other researchers to reuse.
• Examine the raw data and ensure that the data, materials, code accurately reflects the original sources
• Take responsibility for ensuring that there are no restrictions (or minimising any restriction) on the sharing of data, materials, code
• Be responsible for compliance with best practice

Conflict of Interest

Authors

Conflicts of interest can be personal, commercial, political, academic or financial. Any actual or potential conflicts of interest must be disclosed by all authors by completing the ‘ICJME Form for Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest’, including:

• Receipt of payments or services from a third party (government, commercial, private foundation, etc.) for any aspect of the submitted work (including, but not limited to, grants, data monitoring board, study design, manuscript preparation, statistical analysis, etc.)
• Any financial relationships (regardless of amount of compensation) with third parties (government, commercial, private foundation, etc.) that were present during the 36 months prior to publication.
• Any patents, whether planned, pending or issued, that are broadly relevant to the work.
• Relationships or activities that readers could perceive to have influenced, or that give the appearance of potentially influencing, the content of the submitted work.

If there are no existing conflicts of interest, this will be noted on the published manuscript as ‘None declared’.

Peer-reviewers

Editors assign peer-reviewers for each manuscript that have no known conflict of interest with the authors or their submitted work. Reviewers are instructed to disclose any conflicts to the assigning editor prior to accepting a review.

Editors

Editors are required to declare any conflicts of interest upon evaluation of a newly submitted manuscript and prior to appointing peer-reviewers.

Plagiarism

As members of CrossRef, IJPDS uses the CrossCheck service powered by iThenticate to identify plagiarism in newly submitted manuscripts before entering the peer-review process.

ORCID

We advise that all authors submitting to IJPDS include their ORCID number. For authors that do not have an ORCID number, we strongly advise that all lead and co-authors register an account with ORCID to ensure that their contributions to the published research is recognised. ORCID numbers are published with the manuscripts.

Confidentiality

Editors and reviewers are required to maintain complete confidentiality of manuscripts at all times. No information about a manuscript can be disclosed including whether they have been received by a reviewer, that they are under review and at what stage of review, prior disclosure of content, comments to authors from reviewers and editors, or the outcome of the submissions process.

Editors and reviewers must not appropriate authors’ ideas prior to publication of a manuscript, nor retain a manuscript for personal use. All copies of a manuscript must be destroyed or deleted immediately, following completion of a review.

The peer-review process is anonymous and reviewers’ identities will remain confidential. Reviewers’ identities must not be revealed to the authors or anyone else without expressed written permission from the reviewer. Peer review comments must not be published or publicised without permission from the reviewers.

In cases of suspected research or publishing misconduct, IJPDS reserves the right to contact funders, the authors’ institutions and regulatory bodies.

Ethics and Consent

All research published in IJPDS involving the use of person based data must adhere to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki. Details of ethical approval, or exemption from requiring ethic approval, must be included in manuscripts. Editors may request additional information when necessary, and will reject manuscripts where research has not been conducted using an appropriate ethical framework.

Corrections and Retractions

IJPDS refers to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) for guidelines on how to handle manuscript errors. Following copy-editing and production, the final draft of a manuscript is presented to the authors to proof read before it is published. Any final corrections that need making at this stage must be highlighted to the Editor immediately. The manuscript will only be published once signed off by the authors.

IJPDS is responsible for ongoing integrity of its publication record. Therefore, any errors identified after publication will be assessed by the Editor-in-Chief to determine whether a correction or retraction is required.

Complaints

All complaints are taken very seriously and will be dealt with swiftly and fairly.

Complaints relating to editorial decisions, editorial process, peer review process, general publishing process or the content of published manuscripts, should be raised with the Editor-in-Chief, Professor Kerina Jones, who will investigate the matter further using COPE guidelines.