Ethical issues
Content of this ethical section
Information on the owner of the journal and the editorial Committee
Policy regarding authorship
Policy regarding Artificial Intelligence tools
Plagiarism
Conflict of interest
Funding
Acknowledgments
Plagiarism
Policy regarding retractions
Policy regarding corrections
Processus peer reviewing
Research ethic policies for studies involving the participation of human subjects
Policy regarding malpractices
Abbreviation: in the following lines, the name of the journal Bulletin de la Dialyse à Domicile will generally be abbreviated to BDD
The French Language Peritoneal Dialysis (and Home Hemodialysis) Registry (RDPLF) is the owner and publisher of Bulletin de la Dialyse à domicile (BDD). RDPLF is a not for profit association that registers and analysis and publishes results of treatments in patients treated at home by dialysis (hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis). Its site is https://www.rdplf.org. It has been declared in the official journal of the French government in 1989 at URL: https://www.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/pages/associations-detail-annonce/?q.id=id:198900341356 and more detail in the About menu :
The editorial board is composed of internationally known nephrologists and registered nurses. Their curriculum vitae is available online by clicking on their name. https://bdd.rdplf.org/index.php/bdd/about/editorialTeam
The Editorial Committee of the Bulletin de la Dialyse à Domicile (BDD) is committed to maintaining a high level of integrity in published content. The BDD commits itself to respecting the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and directives of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). We use the Ethics toolkit at URL https://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines/ethics-toolkit-editors.
In particular, the members of the RDPLF and the Editorial Committee of the BDD will never leave their decision being influenced by considerations dealing with age, gender, religion, sexual preference, ethnicity, country, or political opinion.
Note: As we adhere to international principles of ethics in medical publishing, the following texts have been written based on the COPE and ICMJE guidelines and texts proposed by publishers such as SAGE or ELSEVIER recognized for their higth degree of integrity.
GENERAL POLICY OF BDD
Editor ethics
The editor of BDD as well as the member of the editorial committee are engaged in not sharing information about manuscripts, including whether they have been received and are under review, to anyone other than the authors and reviewers.
All peer reviews are double-blind, so we will not publish or publicize peer reviewers’ comments. If a reviewer accepts or wants to disclose his or her name he or she should send his/her written and authenticated written permission to the editor.
When a manuscript is finally rejected, all copies of the manuscript are removed from the editorial system. When a manuscript is published, we keep copies of the original submission, reviews, revisions, and correspondence in perpetuity, to help answer future questions about the work should they arise.
An author is one person who personally wrote the text partially or totally, and/or participated significantly in the record and analysis of the data for the submitted paper, the person who suggested or coached the work, or any person who actively and personally participated in the conception and realization of the work. Nobody should be added for reasons other than personal involvement in the work published.
Our policy regarding authorship is with respect to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) authorship guidelines
Artificial Intelligence and Chatbot: Software based on artificial intelligence, known as Chatbots, such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, may not be used or cited as an author. Authors must be human beings and must take responsibility for their contributions. We draw your attention to the risk of plagiarism detection in the case of automatic editing by a Chatbot.
Papers should only be submitted for consideration once consent is given by all contributing authors. Those submitting papers should carefully check that all those whose work contributed to the paper are acknowledged as contributing authors.
The list of authors should include all those who can legitimately claim authorship. This is all those who:
- Made a substantial contribution to the concept or design of the work; or acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data,
- Drafted the article or revised it critically for important intellectual content,
- Approved the version to be published,
- Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.
Authors should meet the conditions of all of the points above. When a large, multicentre group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript. These individuals should fully meet the criteria for authorship.
Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship, although all contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgments section.
At the end of the articles, the roles of each author should be explained
Any conflict of interest must be declared: a form is sent to all co-authors before publication so that they accept the publication and declare any conflict of interest. If it is impossible to contact a co-author, we ask the corresponding author to send us the form signed by the co-author. If this cannot be obtained, we inform the corresponding author that the name of this co-author cannot be maintained.
The form will be kept definitely by the RDPLF
Policy regarding Artificial intelligence tools
Authors who use AI tools for writing a manuscript, producing images or graphical elements of the article, or collecting and analyzing data, must be transparent by indicating in the "Materials and methods" (or similar) section of the article how the AI tool was used and which tool was used. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even the parts produced by an AI tool, and are therefore liable for any breach of publication ethics. An AI tool cannot be one of the co-authors of an article. In case of doubt about the use of artificial intelligence in an article, the author and editor scrupulously follow the recommendations of the COPE ethics committee: https://publicationethics.org/cope-position-statements/ai-author
All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an Acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, or a department chair who provided only general support.
Any acknowledgments should appear first at the end of your article prior to your Declaration of Conflicting Interests (if applicable), any notes, and your References.
Studies based on information contained in the RDPLF database must include a sentence thanking the nurses and physicians who participate in the RDPLF.
A ‘Declaration of Conflicting Interests’ statement must be included at the end of the manuscript, after any acknowledgments, and prior to the references. If no conflict exists, state that ‘The Author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest’. For guidance on conflict of interest statements, please see the ICMJE recommendations here
Financing of the work, All research articles should have a funding acknowledgment statement included in the manuscript in the form of a sentence under a separate heading entitled ‘Funding’ directly after your Acknowledgements and Declaration of Conflicting Interests, if applicable, and prior to any Notes and your References
Third-party submissions :
The editorial board of the BDD does not accept the third-party submission.
The BDD uses plagiarism detection software to check the submissions it receives.
As the journal is bilingual, each article is checked both in French and English for plagiarism
by CrossRef Similarity check by Ithenticate ®
- If the submission of an article has a similarity check of more than 20 % a mail is sent to the main author with the report of the similarities detected and he is kindly requested to resubmit his paper with more personal considerations.
Similarity check® indicates the percentage of identical text from different sources and the percentage of text present in a single source. Also, human control is exercised so that a degree of similarity lower than 20% may not be accepted: for example, the recopy of a table coming from a not clearly referenced article will not be accepted. On the other hand, copying the methodology from a text by the same author is tolerated. It is also possible that a multitude of small separate pieces of sentences will result in a higher similarity score without plagiarism. We, therefore, use the percentage of similarity as an initial guide that may lead to a different conclusion depending on the type of similarity, justifying a request for an explanation to the author. In practice, we use the following reference as a guide: https://www.ithenticate.com/plagiarism-detection-blog/bid/63534/crosscheck-plagiarism-screening-understanding-the-similarity-score#.V3Js2qLz_hF
A complex diagram or drawing copied from another article requires the authorization of its author or, at least, to clearly indicate the reference of the article from which it comes and the name of the author.
Retraction will be requested by the editor in the following cases :
- There is clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of a major error (eg, miscalculation or experimental error) or as a result of fabrication (eg, of data) or falsification (eg, image manipulation)
- The publication constitutes plagiarism
- The findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper attribution to previous sources or disclosure to the editor, permission to republish, or justification (ie, cases of redundant publication)
- The article contains material or data without authorization for use
- Copyright has been infringed or there is some other serious legal issue
- The article reports unethical research
- The article has been published solely on the basis of a compromised or manipulated peer review process
- The author(s) failed to disclose a major competing interest (a.k.a. conflict of interest) that, in the view of the editor, would have unduly affected interpretations of the work or recommendations by editors and peer reviewers.
In case of retraction by the author, once the article has been published and indexed: retraction information will replace the online summary of the article on the landing page of BDD, in addition, a retraction letter will be published in the journal for information, as soon as possible. In the case that the retraction has not been requested by the author himself, every attempt will be made to find a mutual agreement to communicate in order to respect both the author's reputation and the principles of ethics in scientific publication.
Post-publication corrections policy
All articles in the BDD have an online abstract and a downloadable pdf file. In case of the need for correction of errors in the text or figures, after publication, the following procedure is used: the downloadable pdf file is replaced by the corrected file which must have a note in the margin indicating that it is a corrected version of an older version, specifying the nature of the correction and indicating the publication date of the original version. The online abstract will also indicate that the pdf file has been corrected and that it replaces a previous version with a specified release date.
- In case of conflict with the authors or allegation of misconduct we will follow the decision tree published by Elsevier for their journals at URL https://www.elsevier.com/editors/perk or COPE guidelines (https://publicationethics.org/files/retraction-guidelines.pdf)
Confidentiality may have to be breached if dishonesty or fraud is alleged, but editors will notify authors or reviewers if we intend to do so and confidentiality will be always otherwise honored.
Peer-review policy and process :
For review policy and process please use this link: https://bdd.rdplf.org/index.php/bdd/relecture
ORCIDid
As part of our commitment to ensuring an ethical, transparent, and fair peer review process the BDD is asking authors to provide an ORCIDid for each contributors : ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCID provides a unique and persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers from every other researcher, even those who share the same name, and, it supports automated linkages between researchers and their professional activities, ensuring that their work is recognized.
Research ethic policies for studies involving the participation of human subjects
Papers submitted to BDD and involving human subjects must comply with the principles of the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki
Submitted manuscripts should conform to the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, and all papers reporting animal and/or human studies must state in the methods section that the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board provided (or waived) approval.
For research articles, authors are also required to state in the methods section whether participants provided informed consent and whether the consent was written or verbal.
Information on informed consent to report individual cases or case series should be included in the manuscript text. A statement is required regarding whether written informed consent for patient information and images to be published was provided by the patient(s) or a legally authorized representative. The patient’s actual written informed consent itself should be held by the authors/investigators themselves, for example in a patient’s hospital record.
Patients involved in the published paper must be anonymized: A list of 23 potential identifiers has been published in BioMed Central’s Trials: Hrynaszkiewicz, I., Norton, M.L., Vickers, A.J. et al. Preparing raw clinical data for publication: guidance for journal editors, authors, and peer reviewers. Trials 11, 9 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1186/1745-6215-11-9).
Animals: Any study based on animal experimentation is not accepted in this journal whose main aim is to publish articles only dealing with home dialysis in humans.
Policy regarding malpractice and complaints
Such complaints can take many forms (there are 133 cases in the COPE case database), some fairly common and straightforward, others less so.
Complaints about malpractice may arise over the conduct of editors and/or peer reviewers or the authors; for example, breaches of confidentiality, undisclosed conflicts of interest, or misuse of privileged information obtained during peer review. Or they may arise from disputes about substantive decisions: disagreements over retractions and expressions of concern and also how they are handled, data falsifications by authors can theoretically arise, etc..in such cases we follow guidelines of COPE, starting with decision flowchart: https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Flowcharts.
Sample letters for authors or editors or anyone wishing to make a comment or complaint are available at https://publicationethics.org/resources/sample-letters
Handling post-publication criticisms or comments.
Any reader of the BDD can express remarks or comments on a published article.
Comments or remarks from a reader regarding an article published in the BDD should be addressed directly to the BDD Secretariat or as a letter to the editor using the submission process. The BDD editor will forward the letter to the corresponding author of the article in question for response. The reader's comments and the author's response will be published in the next issue of the BDD after agreement from each two members of the editorial board. More details on the principles and process we follow are available at the URL https://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts/handling-post-publication-critiques.
