Publication Ethics

Authorship and Contributorship

This policy ensures that contributors who have made substantive intellectual contributions to an article are given credit and that contributors understand their role in taking responsibility and being accountable for what is published.

Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of the reported study.  All those who have made substantial contributions should be listed as co-authors.

Where there are others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the paper, they should be recognised in the acknowledgements section.

The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors and no inappropriate co-authors are included on the paper, and that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.

Authors take collective responsibility for the work. Each individual author is accountable for ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Complaints and appeals

This procedure applies to complaints that relate to content, procedures or policies that are the responsibility of LTM Journal’s editorial staff. Complaints may provide an opportunity and a spur for improvement, and so we aim to respond quickly, courteously, and constructively. The procedure outlined below aims to be fair to those making complaints and those complained about.

Complaints should be directly emailed to complaints@ltmjournal.com and will be dealt with confidentially.

Complaints at LTM Journal are coordinated by a complaints team with individual complaints handled by the most appropriate staff member, with the opportunity for escalation if they cannot be resolved.

In the case that initial response is felt to be insufficient, the complainant can request that their complaint is escalated to a more senior member of the team. If the complainant remains unhappy, complaints may be escalated to Editor-in-chief, whose decision is final.

If a complainant remains unhappy after what the Editor-in-chief considers a definitive reply, the complainant may complain to an external body.

All complaints will be formally acknowledged within three working days. If possible a full response will be made within two weeks. If this is not possible, an interim response will be given within two weeks. Further interim responses will be provided until the complaint is resolved.

Conflicts of interest

All authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial and personal relationships with other people or organisations that could be viewed as inappropriately influencing (bias) their work.

All sources of financial support for the conduct of the research and/or preparation of the article should be disclosed, as should the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the article for publication. If the funding source(s) had no such involvement then this should be stated.

Examples of potential conflicts of interest which should be disclosed include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. Potential conflicts of interest should be disclosed at the earliest possible stage.

Data and reproducibility

The journal’s data sharing policy strongly encourage that data generated by your research that supports your article be made available as soon as possible, wherever possible.

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.

While data sharing is not mandatory in our journal, we reserve the right to request at any time confidential access to any primary data needed to reproduce the article so that the results reported can be verified.

The journal encourages authors to cite any publicly available research data in their reference list. References to datasets must include a persistent identifier. We encourages research data to be made available under open licences that permit reuse freely.

Ethical oversight

The Editorial Board works in compliance with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki and demands adherence thereto in research involving human subjects.

The manuscripts must refere to the materials containing the approval of the research by the Ethics Committee of the university hosting the research. Authors should include a statement in the manuscript that informed consent was obtained for experimentation with human subjects. The privacy rights of human subjects must always be observed.

Fundamental errors in published works

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in their own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the journal editor or publisher and cooperate with the editor to retract or correct the paper if deemed necessary by the editor. If the editor or the publisher learn from a third party that a published work contains an error, it is the obligation of the author to cooperate with the editor, including providing evidence to the editor where requested.

Plagiarism policy

The Editorial Board of the journal considers plagiarism in articles unacceptable (publication in a written or electronic form of the research results obtained and published by other persons as the author’s own contribution, or reprint of the published texts authored by other persons without proper reference thereto).

The articles must not contain:

  • copied or published work executed by other scholars and presented as the author’s own findings.
  • word-for-word copying of fragments of any text (from a single phrase to several sentences) without proper quotation formatting;
  • slightly modified copied material (re-phrased sentences, changes in the word order, etc.) without proper quotation/reference formatting;
  • other people’s thoughts, ideas or texts rendered in the author’s own words without providing proper references to the sources. 

The author must provide references to his or her own previously published works.

The Editorial Board reserves the right to reject any manuscript containing borrowings  from previous publications without proper references thereto and can cancel any publication pursuant to a plagiarism complaint. 

The Editorial Board use Unicheck, eTXT Antiplagiarism.

Intellectual property

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

Correction and retraction

Journal is committed to maintaining the accuracy and integrity of the scientific record. We expect authors to inform the editor of any errors they have noticed in their article once published. Retractions will be issued where required in accordance with COPE guidelines. 

Errors in an article that affect the content of the article will be corrected through the publication of notice in the next available print issue. The online version of the article will link to the correction notice. Corrections are made at the journal’s discretion.

Retractions are considered by journal editors in cases of evidence of unreliable data or findings, plagiarism, duplicate publication, and unethical research. A replacement version of the article will be posted where required containing just the metadata, with a retraction note replacing the original text. The PDF will be replaced with a version watermarked with “Retracted” but the original text will remain accessible.