Editorial Policies

When a manuscript is submitted to the JIINC, it is assumed that all authors have read and approved its content and that it complies with the journal's requirements.

Ethical Standards: The journal follows the Committee on Publication Ethics's (COPE) guidelines, which are the highest ethical standards for publishing. It is the responsibility of authors to conduct research and publication according to ethical standards.

Currently, the JIINC does not accept adverts from third parties.

Affiliations

When submitting a manuscript, authors must give correct and up-to-date information about their affiliations. This includes the full name of the institution, the college, the department, and any other subdivisions that are important.

Appeals and Complaints

The Journal follows COPE guidelines regarding complaints and appeals. Authors may appeal editorial decisions by submitting a written appeal with evidence or new information. Complaints about the editorial process, ethical concerns, or publication issues should also be submitted in writing. All appeals and complaints are handled confidentially, ensuring high standards of editorial integrity.

Acknowledgment

Individuals who contributed to the development of a manuscript but did not qualify as authors should be acknowledged. Organizations that provide financial and/or other resources should also be acknowledged. Any assistance from AI tools for content generation (e.g., large language models) and other similar types of technical tools which generate article content must be clearly acknowledged within the article. It is the responsibility of authors to ensure the validity, originality, and integrity of their article content. Authors are expected to use these types of tools responsibly and in accordance with our editorial policies on authorship and principles of publishing ethics.

Authorship

Listing authors’ names on an article is an important mechanism to give credit to those who have significantly contributed to the work. Authors listed in an article must meet all of the following criteria:

Made a significant contribution to the work reported, whether that’s in the conception, study design, execution, acquisition of data, analysis, and interpretation, or in all these areas.
Have drafted or written, substantially revised, or critically reviewed the article.
Have agreed on the journal to which the article will be submitted.
Reviewed and agreed on all versions of the article before submission, during revision, the final version accepted for publication, and any significant changes introduced at the proofing stage.
Agree to take responsibility and be accountable for the contents of the article and to share the responsibility to resolve any questions raised about the accuracy or integrity of the published work.

Any changes in authorship before or after publication must be agreed upon by all authors, including those being added or removed. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to obtain confirmation from all co-authors and to provide a full explanation about why the change was necessary. If a change in authorship is necessary after the publication of the article, this will be amended via a post-publication notice. Any changes in authorship must comply with our criteria for authorship, and requests for significant changes to the authorship list after the article has been accepted may be rejected if clear reasons and evidence of author contributions cannot be provided.

The corresponding author should ensure that all appropriate co-authors and no inappropriate co-authors are included in 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. All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors. Others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research project should be acknowledged or listed as contributors.

Authorship Criteria

Authorship credit should be based only on significant contributions to each of the three components outlined below:

Concept and design of study or acquisition of data or analysis and interpretation of data;
Drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
Final approval of the version to be published.

Participation in the acquisition of funding or the collection of data does not justify authorship. General supervision of the research group is not sufficient for authorship. Each contributor should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the manuscript's content.

The authorship order should reflect each contributor's relative contribution to the study and the writing of the manuscript. Once a manuscript is submitted, the order cannot be altered without written consent from all contributors.JIINC journal has a maximum number of authors allowed for manuscripts, which varies based on the manuscript type, its scope, and the number of institutions involved. Authors must provide justification if the number of authors exceeds these limits.

Citations

Authors must ensure that all sources cited in the manuscript are accurate and complete to support any claims made in the article. All references must be relevant to the paper's content and provide sufficient information for readers to locate the original sources. You must avoid excessive and inappropriate self-citation or prearrangements among author groups to inappropriately cite each other’s work, as this can be considered a form of misconduct called citation manipulation. Please read theCOPE guidance on citation manipulation.

In an article, you should ensure that the references you cite are relevant and offer a fair and balanced overview of the current state of research work on the topic. Your references should not be biased toward any specific research group, organization, or journal.

Conflicts of Interest

All authors of articles must disclose any and all conflicts of interest they may have with the publication of the manuscript or an institution or product that is mentioned in the manuscript and/or is essential to the outcome of the study presented. This includes financial interests, personal relationships, or affiliations that could affect the work's objectivity. Authors should also disclose conflicts of interest with products that compete with those mentioned in their manuscript.

Corrections, Expressions of Concern, and Retractions

Sometimes, after an article has been published, it may be necessary to make a change to the published article. This will be done after careful consideration by the Editor to ensure any necessary changes are done in accordance with guidance from theCommittee on Publication Ethics (COPE) .

Any necessary changes will be accompanied by a post-publication notice, which will be permanently linked to the original article. This can be in the form of a Correction notice, an Expression of Concern, a Retraction, and, in rare circumstances, a Removal. The purpose of this mechanism of making permanent and transparent changes is to ensure the integrity of the scholarly record.

Confidentiality

A submitted manuscript is a confidential material. JIINC Journal will not disclose submitted manuscripts to anyone except individuals who process and prepare the manuscript for publication (if accepted). These individuals include editorial staff, corresponding authors, potential reviewers, actual reviewers, and editors. However, in suspected cases of misconduct, a manuscript may be revealed to members of the Academic Journals’ ethics committees and institutions/organizations that may require it for the resolution of the misconduct. Academic Journals shall follow the appropriate COPE flowcharts wherever necessary.

Copyright Policy

User Rights

JIINC is an Open Access journal. Users have the right to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles under the following conditions: CC BY 4.0 (Copyright statement stated here and embedded in each published article).

Open Access Policy

JIINC is a Gold Open Access journal, which means that all content is online and freely available immediately upon publication without charge to the reader or their institution.

JIINC assures that the work in question is entirely the author's own. JIINC does not prevent the author from reusing their own work. All articles are licensed underCC BY 4.0 .

You are free to:

Share: copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format.
Adapt: remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

This license lets others distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon your work, even commercially, as long as they credit you for the original creation.

Author Rights

Authors will assign copyright to JIINC besides publishing and distribution rights.

Data Falsification/Fabrication

Where deliberate action has been taken to inappropriately manipulate or fabricate data. This is considered a severe form of misconduct designed to mislead others and damage the integrity of the scholarly record with wide-reaching and long-term consequences.

When submitting a manuscript to the journal, authors must ensure all data in their manuscript is accurate and correctly represents their work. To help assist the journal with manuscript evaluation, authors are expected to retain all raw data represented in their manuscripts. If the original data cannot be produced on request, acceptance of a manuscript or published paper may be declined or retracted.

Desk Rejection Policy

Below is an exploration of the main factors leading to desk rejection decisions, which authors must avoid:

The topic/scope of the study is not relevant to the field of the JIINC.
There are publication ethics problems, non-adherence to international standard guidelines, and plagiarism (set at a similarity index of higher than 20%).
Unclear abstract or title.
Weak research design or methodology with poorly structured manuscript.
Lack of significant contribution to the field.
Failure to indicate the significance of the findings.
Poor language and writing quality.
The manuscript does not follow the submission guidelines of the Journal.
Redundancy with existing publications.
Inaccurate or missing references.

Duplicate Submission/Publication

Authors are required to declare upon submission that the manuscript is not under consideration elsewhere, and as such the detection of a duplicate submission or publication is typically considered to be a deliberate act. This includes articles previously published in another language.

Funding

The journal requires that authors declare all the funding sources, including financial support, in their manuscript. The authors should describe the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in any stages, from study design to submission of the manuscript for publication. They should also state if the sponsor(s) had no such involvement. Please ensure that this information is accurate and in accordance with your funder’s requirements.

Images and Figures

You should only use images and figures in your article if they are relevant and valuable to the work reported. Please avoid including content that is purely illustrative and does not contribute value to the scholarly work.

As a warranty in the Journal Author Publishing Agreement you make with us, you must obtain the necessary written permission to include material in your article that is owned and held in copyright by a third party, including – but not limited to – any proprietary text, illustration, table, or other material, including data, audio, video, film stills, screenshots, musical notation, and any supplemental material.

Any images or figures sourced from another published work can only be reused if the authors have obtained the necessary permissions from the copyright owner. A statement confirming this must be included in the figure legend. Additionally, the image's original source must be cited, even if the image or figure is not under copyright or if its reuse is permitted under a license that allows unrestricted reuse.

Misconduct

The journal takes all forms of misconduct seriously and will take all necessary action, followingCOPE guidelines , to protect the integrity of the scholarly record.

Examples of misconduct include (but are not limited to):

Affiliation misrepresentation
Breaches in copyright/use of third-party material without appropriate permissions
Citation manipulation
Duplicate submission/publication
Ethics dumping
Image or data manipulation/fabrication
Peer review manipulation
Plagiarism
Text-recycling/self-plagiarism
Undisclosed competing interests
Unethical research

Duplicate Submission

Manuscripts found to be published or under review elsewhere will face sanctions for duplicate submission or publication. If authors base their submitted manuscript on their own previous work, whether published or under review, they must cite the earlier work and explain how the new manuscript adds something original.

Citation Manipulation

Manuscripts found to contain citations primarily intended to unfairly increase the citation count of a specific author's work or articles in a particular journal will be subject to citation manipulation sanctions.

Data Fabrication and Falsification

Submitted manuscripts that are found to have either fabricated or falsified experimental results, including the manipulation of images, will incur data fabrication and falsification sanctions.

Improper Author Contribution or Attribution

All listed authors must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript and approved all its claims. It is important to list everyone who made a significant scientific contribution, including students and laboratory technicians.

Redundant Publications

Redundant publications involve the inappropriate division of study outcomes into several articles.

Image Manipulation

A deliberate action has been taken to inappropriately manipulate or fabricate an image. This is a serious form of misconduct as it is designed to mislead others and damage the integrity of the scholarly record with wide-reaching and long-term consequences.

JIINC journal requires all images included in manuscripts to be accurate and free from manipulation. Specific features within an image may not be enhanced, obscured, moved, removed, or introduced without adequate notification of what the alteration is. Adjustments to the brightness, contrast, or color balance of an image are acceptable if they do not obscure, eliminate, or misrepresent information present in the original. Grouping images from different parts of gels, western blots, or microscope images must be made explicit in the arrangement of the figure or the text of the figure legend.

If the original, unedited images cannot be produced on request, acceptance of a manuscript may be declined or retracted.

Publication Ethics

The journal and its editorial board fully adhere to and comply with the policies and principles of theCommittee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Duties of Editors

Publication Decisions

The editorial board of the journal is responsible for deciding which of the articles submitted to the journal should be published. Members of the board confer and refer to reviewer recommendations in making this decision, constrained by legal requirements related to libel, copyright infringement, and plagiarism. Editorial decisions are not affected by the origins of the manuscript, including the nationality, ethnicity, political beliefs, race, or religion of the authors.

Confidentiality, Disclosure, and Conflicts of Interest

During the review process, editors are prohibited from disclosing information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, potential reviewers, and other editorial advisors. Unpublished materials included in a submitted manuscript must not be utilized in an editor's, reviewer's, or any reader's own research. Additionally, readers should be informed about the sources of funding for the research or other scholarly work, as well as whether the funders had any involvement in the research and its publication, and if so, what that involvement entailed.

Author Relations

Editors strive to ensure that peer review at the journal is fair, unbiased, and timely. The journal has established policies for handling submissions from editorial board members to ensure unbiased review. Author instructions provide guidance about the criteria for authorship.

Reviewer Relations

JIINC encourages reviewers to comment on ethical questions and possible misconduct raised by submissions (e.g., unethical research design, and inappropriate data manipulation), and to be alert to redundant publication and plagiarism. Reviewers’ comments should be sent to authors in their entirety unless they contain offensive or libelous remarks. Contributions of reviewers to the journal are regularly acknowledged, and reviewers who consistently produce discourteous, poor quality, or late reviews are not used.

Quality Assurance

Editors should take all reasonable steps to ensure the quality of the material they publish, recognizing that different sections have different aims and standards. Editors should seek assurances that the research they publish has been approved by an appropriate body (e.g., research ethics committee, institutional review board) where one exists. Editors should be alert to intellectual property issues and work with their publishers to handle potential breaches of laws and conventions. Errors, inaccurate, or misleading statements must be corrected promptly and with due prominence.

Duties of Reviewers

Contribution to Editorial Decisions

Reviewers assist the editorial board in making editorial decisions. Reviews should be conducted objectively, and observations should be formulated clearly with supporting arguments so that authors can use them for improving the paper. Personal criticism of the author is inappropriate.

Qualification of Reviewers

Any selected referee who feels unqualified to review the research reported in a manuscript or knows that its prompt review will be impossible should notify the editor and excuse themselves from the review process. Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.

Confidentiality

All manuscripts submitted for review must be regarded as confidential documents. Any privileged information or ideas gained through the peer review process must remain confidential and should not be utilized for personal gain.

Acknowledgment of Sources

Reviewers should identify relevant published work that the authors have not cited. References to the ideas of others should be accompanied by the relevant citation. A reviewer should also call the editor's attention to any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper they have personal knowledge of.

Duties of Authors

Reporting Standards

Authors of reports of original research should present an accurate account of the work performed and an objective discussion of its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately in the paper. Authors should be prepared to provide public access to raw data in connection with a paper and retain such data for at least two years after publication. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable.

Originality, Plagiarism, and Concurrent Publication

Authors should ensure their work is entirely original and that any work and/or words of others have been appropriately acknowledged. Plagiarism in all its forms constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable.

Disclosure and Conflicts of Interest

All authors should disclose in their manuscript any financial or other substantive conflicts of interest that might be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed.

Authorship of the Paper

Fundamental Errors in Published Works

When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in the published work, the author must promptly notify the journal editor and work with the editor to retract or correct the paper.

Peer Review Process

All manuscripts are subjected to peer review and are expected to meet the standards of academic excellence. If approved by the editor, submissions will be considered by peer reviewers, whose identities will remain anonymous to the authors and vice versa (Double-blind peer review). The decision regarding the acceptance or rejection of a manuscript is the responsibility of the editorial board and is based on the recommendations of the reviewers (peer-reviewed process).

Our Research Integrity team will occasionally seek advice outside standard peer review, for example, on submissions with serious ethical, security, biosecurity, or societal implications. We may consult experts and the academic editor before deciding on appropriate actions, including but not limited to recruiting reviewers with specific expertise, assessment by additional editors, and declining to further consider a submission.

Plagiarism

The journal has a strict policy against plagiarism. Submissions containing plagiarism in whole or part, duplicate and redundant publication, or self-plagiarism (in the same or a different language) will be rejected. The preprint archive will be considered a duplicate publication. The corresponding author is responsible for the manuscript throughout and after the evaluation and publication process with the authority to act on behalf of all co-authors. All submitted manuscripts are checked for plagiarism using professional plagiarism-checking software. Manuscripts with an unacceptable similarity index resulting from plagiarism are rejected immediately.

Special Issues

Currently, the JIINC does not accept special issues.

Use of Third-Party Material

Authors must obtain the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in the article. The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission. If authors wish to include any material in their paper for which they do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, they will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission.

Use of Generative AI and AI-Assisted Technologies in Writing

Please note that this policy only refers to the writing process, not the use of AI tools to analyze and draw insights from data as part of the research process.

Authors who incorporate AI and AI-assisted technologies into their writing process should do so with the intention of enhancing readability and language, rather than substituting essential authoring tasks such as generating scientific, pedagogic, or medical insights, drawing scientific conclusions, or offering clinical recommendations. The application of this technology should always be under human oversight and control, and all work should be subjected to careful review and editing. AI has the potential to produce content that sounds authoritative but may be incorrect, incomplete, or biased. Ultimately, authors bear the responsibility and accountability for the content they produce.

Authors must openly disclose their use of AI and AI-assisted technologies in their manuscripts, and a statement to this effect will be included in the published work. Such transparency fosters trust among authors, readers, reviewers, editors, and contributors and ensures compliance with the terms of use for the relevant tools or technologies.

Authors should refrain from attributing authorship to AI or listing AI as a co-author. Authorship entails responsibilities and tasks that can only be fulfilled by humans. Each author is responsible for addressing inquiries regarding the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work and for approving the final version of the work and consenting to its submission. The authors must also ensure the originality of the work, that the stated authors meet the criteria for authorship, and that the work does not infringe upon the rights of third parties.

Use of AI in Peer Review

To safeguard authors' rights and maintain research confidentiality, this journal currently prohibits the use of generative AI or AI-assisted technologies, such as ChatGPT, for peer review. We are actively assessing compliant AI tools and may update this policy in the future.