Aims & Policy

The Italian Journal for Interdisciplinary Health and Social Development is a GOLD open ACCESS JOURNAL!

Journal of Health and Social Sciences (abbreviation title: “J Health Soc Sci”; subtitle: “The Italian Journal for Interdisciplinary Health and Social Development”) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal related to medicine and public health. Areas of interest include any aspect of health from a wide range of medical sciences. The journal aspires to provide “interdisciplinary” exchange of views of scientists from around the world, aimed on the growth of modern man, where the focus is “health” defined by WHO.

“Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infermity” (WHO Constitution).

Our priorities are to publish high quality papers and provide an international and interdisciplinary forum for the research, including any aspect of health from a wide range of medical sciences. We want to provide a forum for discussion and controversy, adhering to the highest ethical standards of research conduct.

Journal of Health and Social Sciences publishes the following:

Peer-reviewed original research articles and critical or analytical reviews in any area of medicine, public health and social sciences relevant to health.

The Journal publishes the following types of contribution:

Brief Book Review, Case Report, Editorial, Commentary, Mini Review, Viewpoints, Original Research, Review, Overview, Letter to the Editor, Technical Report, Interviews.

Please see our Submission Guidelines for information on article submission. If you require further information, the journal’s editorial board will be happy to help you.

JOURNAL POLICY

Open access policy

All articles published by J Health Soc Sci are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication. All interested readers can read, download, and/or print open access articles at no cost. All manuscripts are pre-reviewed by the editor, and if appropriate, sent for blind peer review. Contributions must be original, not previously or simultaneously published elsewhere, and are critically reviewed before they are published. Papers, which must be written in English, should have sound grammar and proper terminologies.

Article Processing Charges 

If, after peer review, your manuscript is accepted for publication, a one-time APC is payable. This APC covers the cost of publication and ensures that your article will be freely available online in perpetuity under a Creative Commons license. The Corresponding author, if the manuscript is accepted for publication, is obliged to pay the Article Processing Charge of 449,00 EUR € (Incl. VAT) to Edizioni FS Publisher. The APC covers the cost of publication (DOI assignment, copyediting and production costs). In the event that authors do not pay the APC, the paper will not be published in the Journal of Health and Social Sciences.

Copyright

Open Access authors retain the copyrights of their papers, and all open access articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original work is properly cited (see: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/BY/4). Journal articles can be self archiving.

The use of general descriptive names, trade names, trademarks, and so forth in this publication, even if not specifically identified, does not imply that these names are not protected by the relevant laws and regulations.

While the advice and information in this journal are believed to be true and accurate on the date of its going to press, neither the authors, the editors, nor the publisher can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein.

All works submitted to Journal of Health and Social Sciences are subject to peer and editorial review. On acceptance of the work for publication, the author retains the copyright in their work but the author hereby grants to the Edizioni FS the exclusive right to first publication of the article without claim of royalties or other compensation. This exclusive right to first publication includes the right to reproduce and/or distribute the article (including the abstract) throughout the world in printed, electronic or other medium, including the right to authorize others (including Reproduction Rights Organizations such as Copyright Licensing Agency and Copyright Clearance Center) to do the same.

Digital Object Identifier

A unique digital object identifier (DOI) is assigned to every article Journal of Health and Social Sciences publishes.
The DOI initiative is an internationally agreed system for identifying electronic content and is guided by the International DOI Foundation, composed primarily of academic publishers and societies. The DOI appears on the title page of the article. It is assigned after the article has been accepted for publication and the author has arrange the payment and persists throughout the lifetime of the article.

Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving

Authors may make any use of their work that they wish. Edizioni FS allows authors the use of the final published version of an article for self-archiving (author’s personal website) and/or archiving in an institutional repository (or a non-profit server) immediately after publication.

Author’s Pre-print: author can archive pre-print (i.e. pre-refereeing) before publication

Authors’ Post-print: author can archive post-print (i.e. final draft post-refereeing) before publication

Publisher’s Version/PDF: author can archive publisher’s version/PDF after publication

Authors are required to grant the journal an exclusive license for open access publication of their article with a Creative Commons attribution license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The authors of the articles retain the copyright to their work.

Journal of Health and Social Sciences is not responsible for returning the original disk, hardcopy, and any photographs or illustrations.

Preprint policy at the Journal of Health and Social Sciences

A preprint is a paper that is made available publicly via a community preprint server prior to (or simultaneous with) submission to a journal. Preprint servers, i.e., servers that allow for the posting of papers prior to submission for publication, are becoming more common across a range of disciplines.

Edizioni FS believes JHSS should allow for the submission of manuscripts which have already been made available on such a server. Allowing submission does not, of course, guarantee that an article will be sent out for review; it simply reflects a belief that availability on a preprint server should not be a disqualifier for submission.

Our editorial guidelines require that articles submitted to our journals not be previously published, or be under simultaneous review for publication, in part or in whole within an academic journal, book or similar entity. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior publication.

Upon acceptance of an article for publication the author must be able to agree to the terms of the relevant journal’s License to Publish or Copyright Assignment form. After the article is published, the preprint can still be shared and used under its original license terms.

It is best practice to link preprints and the published article (the ‘Version of Record’). If appropriate, we encourage authors to include details of preprint posting, including DOI or other persistent identifier, when submitting to a journal. Authors are also encouraged to ensure that the preprint record is later updated with a DOI and a URL link to the published version of the article if their article is accepted.

Authors are requested to update any pre-publication versions with a link to the final published article.

Preferably, authors should only grant “no re-use” licenses to their preprints. However, Edizioni FS will consider for publication submissions that have previously been assigned CC-BY (-NC/-NC-ND) as preprints.

Data sharing policy

We strongly encourage that data generated by your research that supports your article be made available as soon as possible, wherever legally and ethically possible.

We require data from clinical trials to be made available upon reasonable request.

We require that a data sharing plan must be included with trial registration for clinical trials that begin enrolling participants on or after 1st January 2019. Changes to the plan must be noted in the Data Availability Statement and updated in the registry record (to comply with ICMJE recommendations).

We encourage you to make available as much of the underlying data from your article as possible (without compromising participant privacy), but at least the minimum data required to reproduce the results presented in the associated article.

We consider any files generated by your research as constituting relevant data. This may be raw or processed data. Examples include (but are not limited to):

  • Individual-level deidentified patient data
  • Survey results
  • Interview transcripts
  • Statistical code
  • Images
  • Videos
  • Spreadsheets
  • Audio files
  • Text files
  • Imaging and scan files
  • To enable reuse and enhance reproducibility, all data should be shared using the sources file in which they were originally generated, for example:

Images should be provided as .png, .jpg, .eps, etc.

Text files should be provided as .txt, .doc, .rft, etc.

Spreadsheets should be provided as .csv, .xls, .tsv, etc.

Videos should be provided as .mp4, .avi, .wav, etc.

Imaging and scan files should be provided in .img, .dcm, hdr, etc.

Data should not be shared in any way that could compromise participant anonymity or privacy, and data should not be shared if that would require the authors to break any laws or licensing agreements. If the data used were licensed from a third party, the data availability statement should explain how to obtain a licence for that data.

Where a research community in a particular field has established standards for what, where, and how data should be shared, we expect authors to meet those.

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) requires that clinical trials that begin enrolling participants on or after 1 January 2019 must include a data sharing plan in the trial’s registration. We encourage all authors to follow this best practice.

Plagiarism Policy

While submitting the manuscript to our Journal, the authors should be the copyright owner of the respective material and should not copy past anything from someone else’s work. The original work should be attributed in the form of citation. It is the responsability of the authors to assure that they are not reporting fake or fraudolent results under their authorship. The Editor in Chief can send the paper to international agencies for authentication of originality. For the plagiarised articles which might evade the peer-review process will be retracted temporarily from publication. The authors will be asked to explain their point of view. In case of unsatisfactory response, the article will be permanently retracted. The notice of such retraction will be published on line immediately and in the next issue of the printed version of the Journal. J Health Soc Sci follows the guidelines of International Committee of Medical Journal  Editors (ICMJE) for all kind of plagiarism.

Our Journal follows the Statement of Budapest Open Access Iniziative (BOAI):

” By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited”.

Principles of Best Practice

Journal of Health and Social Sciences follows the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing,  a document by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) outlining 16 “principles of transparency” that contribute to best practices in Open Access publishing.

This journal subscribes to the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and recommends that authors follow the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals formulated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). Our Journal follows its Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.

All the manuscripts published in the Journal of Health and Social Sciences, the “Italian Journal for Interdisciplinary Health and Social Development”, must follow the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki.

Edizioni FS Publisher follows the “Editorial Policy Statements”, which is a document produced by the Council of Science Editors (CSE) to cover the responsibilities and rights of editors of peer-reviewed journals, and The Publishing Ethics Resource Kit (PERK), which is an online resource to support journal editors in handling publishing ethics allegations.

Advertising Policy

Edizioni FS accepts advertising on the Journal of Health and Social Sciences web site and print Journal. The appearance of advertising does not imply endorsement of the advertised company or product, nor is advertising allowed to affect editorial decisions or editorial content. In fact, advertising is separate from content. Advertisers and sponsors have no advance knowledge of our editorial content, nor do the editors have advance knowledge of advertisers. Content is never altered, added, or deleted to accommodate advertising. Advertisers and sponsors have no input regarding any of our editorial decisions or advertising policies. The advertising sales representatives have neither control over, nor prior knowledge of, specific editorial content before it is published.
Advertising that appears at Publisher’s website and in email service will be clearly distinguishable from editorial content.
Advertising generally acceptable for consideration include the following:

Pharmaceutical products; medical-equipment products and services; medical software; practice-management products and services (including office equipment and supplies, medical billing systems, medical software products) and medical websites.

The following types of advertisements are prohibited on our Journal’s Web site:

Advertisements for alcohol and tobacco;
Advertisements for weapons, firearms, ammunition and fireworks;
Gambling and lottery advertisements;
Advertisements for pornography and related materials and services;
Political and religious advertisements;
Advertisements that claim to offer a “miracle” cure or method;
Advertisements that make unsubstantiated health claims for the products advertised;
Advertisements directed at children.

Publisher is not responsible for any damages, including but not limited to actual, direct, incidental or consequential damages, for errors in displaying an advertising.
Publisher will not be bound by any condition, printed or otherwise, appearing on any insertion order or copy instructions when such conditions conflict with the conditions set forth in this policy statement.
Publisher reserves the right to decline or cancel any advertisement at any time.

For more informations about advertising on the Journal of Health and Social Sciences contact us to this following e-mail: editor@journalhss.com.

Manuscript withdrawal Policy

Journal of Health and Social Sciences adheres to the highest standards of ethics and integrity in academic publishing. We expect that the authors will also show highest integrity in their work and adhere to high ethical standards. Some authors request withdrawal of manuscript from the publication process after submission. Once a manuscript has been sent out for our peer review, it is an unacceptable practice for authors to withdraw it unless there are compelling reasons. Peer reviewers are busy people who do this honorary service only to further the cause of science. Wasting their time is unethical and a misuse of the editorial decision making process. Authors are sometimes so keen on publishing in high impact factor journals that they indulge in unacceptable practices. Authors should keep in mind a few noteworthy points about withdrawal procedures to avoid falling into trouble:

1. Ideally, a manuscript should be withdrawn only if the authors detect errors or flaws in the manuscript.

2. It is not an acceptable practice to withdraw a manuscript after it has been sent for peer review, unless the reasons for withdrawal are very strong.

3. In case there is a strong reason for withdrawal, a request for withdrawal signed by all the authors and mentioning the reason for withdrawal must be sent to the editorial office.

4. A confirmation of withdrawal from the journal editorial office is required for the withdrawal process to be considered complete.

5. It is unacceptable to withdraw a paper from a journal because it is being accepted by another journal.

6. In cases of unacceptable withdrawals, our Journal could take punitive measures in the form of a fine or a ban on submitting to our journal.

In case of a mistake, we accept the withdrawal request when it is made  by the beginning of the peer review process (usually, within five days after submission). Otherwise, manuscripts may be withdrawn at any stage of review and publication process by submitting a request to the editorial office (editor@journalhss.com). However, manuscripts withdrawal will be permitted after submission only for the most compelling and unavoidable reasons.

Corrections, retractions, and editorial expressions of concern

We recognize our responsibility to correct errors that we have previously published. Our policy is to consider refutations (readers’ criticisms) of primary research papers, and to publish them (in concise form) if and only if the author provides compelling evidence that a major claim of the original paper was incorrect. Refutations are peer-reviewed, and where possible they are sent to the same referees who reviewed the original paper. A copy is usually also sent to the corresponding author of the original paper for signed comments.

Complaints, disagreements over interpretation and other matters arising should be addressed to the editor of the journals. Because debates over interpretation are often inconclusive, we do not automatically consider criticisms of review articles or other secondary material, and in the event that we decide to publish such a criticism we do not necessarily consult the original authors. Editorial decisions in such cases are based on considerations of reader interest, novelty of arguments, integrity of the publication record and fairness to the parties involved. Publication may take various forms at the discretion of the editor.  Journal of Health and Social Sciences considers correspondence relating to all review-type articles.

Corrections are published for significant errors in non-peer-reviewed content of the JHSS at the discretion of the editors. Readers who have identified such an error should send an email to the general email address of the journal, clearly stating the publication reference, title, author and section of the article, briefly explaining the error.

JHSS operates the following policy for making corrections to the print and online versions of their peer-reviewed content.

Publishable amendments that affect the publication record and/or the scientific accuracy of published information are published in print and online in the journal. Four categories of amendments are relevant for peer-reviewed material: Erratum or Publisher Correction, Corrigendum or Author Correction, Retraction or Addendum. All four correction types are bi-directionally linked to the original published paper. Detailed information on each amendment category follows below.

Erratum or Publisher Correction. Notification of an important error made by the journal that affects the publication record or the scientific integrity of the paper, or the reputation of the authors or of the journal.

Corrigendum or Author Correction. Notification of an important error made by the author(s) that affects the publication record or the scientific integrity of the paper, or the reputation of the authors or the journal.

Retraction. Notification of invalid results that affect the reliability of a previously published article. The original article is marked as retracted but remains available to readers, and the retraction statement notifying readers of the invalidity of the published paper is bi-directionally linked to the original published paper.

Addendum. Notification of additional information about a paper. Addenda are published when the editors decide that the addendum is crucial to the reader’s understanding of a significant part of the published contribution. Addenda include Editorial Expression of Concern, which is an editorial statement alerting our readership to serious concerns with the published paper. Editorial Expression of Concern are typically updated with another amendment once further information is available.

CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite you to submit high quality papers in English for review and possible publication in all areas of social sciences (psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, geography and policy), medicine and public health (occupational health and industrial hygiene, epidemiology, hygiene, health education, environmental health, health policy, hospital management, health economics, law and ethics) by focusing on the individual or global health.

 

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