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Research Ethics and Author Usage Policies

Policy for Use of Artificial Intelligence

With the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI), the Marshall Journal of Journal of Medicine has implemented the following policies on AI-based content:

ChatGPT and other AI-based language tools cannot be listed as an author on submitted works.

  • Per ICMJE rules for authorship, AI cannot approve the final version of the work, nor can it be accountable for the accuracy and integrity of the work
  • AI also cannot agree to the journal’s terms of use nor can it sign the author agreement.
  • The journal will either reject or require revision of a submission with an AI-based language tool listed as an author.

As with other software, such as statistical tools, the use of AI-based language tools should be disclosed in the Methods section or in an acknowledgment at the end of the manuscript if it was used to generate portions of the manuscript text, which specific portions should be listed, or ideas on which the manuscript was based.

The Marshall Journal of Medicine reserves the right to use software or other applications to test for the use of AI-generated text. Furthermore, the editors reserve the right to reject a submission that is deemed to have a high likelihood of using AI-generated text should the authors not acknowledge the source.

Open Access

The Marshall Journal of Medicine conforms to the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) funding model. See https://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/. All content to the MJM is freely available to individuals and institutions without an embargo period. Users may "read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of the articles." Each article accepted by peer review is published under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. There is no charge for submitting a manuscript to the journal.

Human and Animal Studies

Human or animal studies must have a formal review and approval or waiver by an institutional review board (IRB) or ethics committee, which must be described in the Methods section of the article. Additionally, the IRB letter or email should be attached to the submission as supplemental content. The editors reserve the right to reject any submission that is determined to lack appropriate oversight. That can include research and quality improvement projects that the editors deem required IRB oversight, even if the project was approved by the facility ethics committee or was considered exempt by a local IRB.

Signed consent to publish patient descriptions, photographs, video, and other identifying information should be obtained from all persons who can be identified (not just the patients themselves) in the descriptions in the article, photographs, videos, or other media submitted with the manuscript, or in any of the supplemental materials provided with the submission.

Data Access and Retention

You may provide your raw data as supplemental content, or you may be asked to provide it by the editors or reviewers. You should be prepared to include the data as part of your publication.

Data Sharing

Data Sharing, meaning the sharing of information and data from diverse points of view and sources, is one aspect of The Marshall Journal of Medicine's (MJM) commitment to an open landscape in data and research information exchange. The MJM promotes an open research landscape, facilitating faster and more effective research discovery by enabling reproducibility and verification of data, methodology and reporting standards. MJM encourages authors to share the data and other artefacts supporting results reported by archiving those original sources in an appropriate public repository. Authors may provide a data availability statement, including a link to repository(ies) used and when they do so, this statement can be published in their paper.

Shared data should be cited. All accepted manuscripts may elect to publish a data availability statement to confirm the presence or absence of shared data. If an author has shared data, the paper will include a data sharing statement that describes how the data can be accessed and at least one persistent identifier such as a DOI for the data, or an accession number so that the select repository may be accessed.

Conflicts of Interest

It is the policy of The Marshall Journal of Medicine (MJM) to require a declaration of conflicting interests from all authors enabling a statement to be carried within the paginated pages of all published articles. A statement of "Declaration of Conflicting Interests" is included at the end of each author's manuscript, after any acknowledgments and prior to the paper's references. If no conflict exists, the Author signs the declaration: "The Author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest." MJM follows the ICMJE recommendations for guidance concerning conflicts of interest.

General Submission Rules

Submitted articles may not have been previously published, nor be forthcoming in an archival journal or book (print or electronic). Please note: "publication" in a working-paper series does not constitute prior publication. In addition, by submitting material to the Marshall Journal of Medicine, the author is stipulating that the material is not currently under review at another journal (electronic or print) and that he or she will not submit the material to another journal (electronic or print) until the completion of the editorial decision process at Marshall Journal of Medicine. If you have concerns about the submission terms for the Marshall Journal of Medicine, please contact the journal at MJM@marshall.edu

Plagiarism

Manuscripts submitted to the Marshall Journal of Medicine must be original, with content that is not under consideration for another journal. Articles will be checked for plagiarism. The editors reserve the right to judge potentially plagiarized or reused content on a case-by-case basis; editors may reject a submission without the option to resubmit.

Authors should not reuse content that has appeared in other published articles or articles under consideration with another journal, including text that has been written by the authors themselves. While some publications accept some reuse of text from the authors' previous work, the Marshall Journal of Medicine will not publish manuscripts that have content identical to that of other published materials, either the authors' own or from another source, without proper citation and, if necessary, written permission for reuse from any copyright and/or license holders.

Copyright

Authors of original work accepted for publication in the Marshall Journal of Medicine ("MJM") will be distributed by the journal under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This license allows others (third parties) to distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the author's work, even commercially, as long as they provide appropriate attribution (credit) to the author for the original creation and are not using the work for any commercial purpose. If the author, at any time, believes that the author's work has been published on the MJM website in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, or the author's intellectual property rights have otherwise been compromised or violated, the author must notify MJM@marshall.edu immediately.

If excerpts or figures from other copyrighted works are included, the authors must obtain written permission from the copyright owners and credit the sources in the article.

Permissions

It is the responsibility of each author to obtain permission from copyright holders for reproducing illustrations, tables, figures, or lengthy quotations. This includes copyright of the author's own material. Papers without correct permissions will not be published. Each author is required to submit the documentation of permission before final peer review of a submission.

Publishing Agreement

Articles published in Marshall Journal of Medicine (MJM) are freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY). The Creative Commons Attribution License allows others to re-use the work without permission as long as the work is properly cited (proper attribution is made) and the work is not used for commercial purposes. For more information, visit the Creative Commons licenses page at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.