Medical Ethics: In research studies involving human subjects, the research protocol must be submitted for consideration, comment and approval to an appropriate research ethics committee. Medical ethics approval must be declared in the manuscript under the methodology section.
COPE guidelines:
Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Best Practice Guidelines
https://publicationethics.org/resources/code-conduct
Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing.pdf
Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests:
At CANADIAN ONLINE PUBLICATION GROUP (COPG), we use the ICMJE Conflict of Interest form. Please download and complete the ICMJE conflict of interest form. The signed form (by the corresponding author) must be submitted along with the manuscript files. All authors are required to reveal at the end of the manuscript, under a subheading ” DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING INTERESTS”, any financial and personal relationships with organizations or individuals that might have influenced their research.
Plagiarism and Data Integrity
Plagiarism in all its forms is unacceptable and unethical. COPG considers all forms of plagiarism and copyright infringement a serious offence. Appropriate author acknowledgment must be clearly indicated in the submitted manuscript. In-text citations must be inserted appropriately and citations must be correctly associated with a corresponding reference list. In cases of plagiarism, inappropriate data processing, disputed authorship, or duplicate publication, the COPG reserves the right to retract the published article and if necessary, take legal action. Based on the retraction guidelines of COPE, the retracted article (including the title and authors in the retraction heading) and the reason for retraction will be specified promptly in the journal website. If due to honest error a small part of an article proves to be misleading, we consider issuing a correction.
At COPG, we adhere to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) recommendations:
(a) Suspected plagiarism in a submitted manuscript
(b) Suspected plagiarism in a published manuscript
Editorial Expressions of Concern
The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Retraction Guidelines describe when journals could issue an Editorial Expressions of Concern. We may consider issuing an Editorial Expressions of Concern if our Editors receive indication of possible research or publication misconduct. If after our investigation, more evidence becomes available, the Editorial Expressions of Concern will be replaced by a retraction notice. Â However, if after our investigation the article is shown to be reliable, the Editorial Expressions of Concern will be replaced by an exonerating statement. For more information, please see Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Guidelines.
Data Sharing Policy
The COPG publishes research article that is reliable and follows the international standard for scientific research. Figures/Images should precisely replicate the original data. We may contact corresponding author and request source data for any figure/image before publication. We encourage authors to submit their database used in the research study as supplementary files (appendix) or host database on the authors’ personal or institutional website.