Aims & Scope
Human and Animal Rights
Informed Consent
Copyright
Conflict of Interest
Author Fees
Publication Frequency
Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
Peer Review Process
Open Access Policy
Indexing
Corrections, retractions and expressions of concern about research findings
Disclaimer


Aims & Scope
Journal of Coastal Life Medicine (JCLM) aims to provide the most up-to-date medical information and an international academic communication platform for the life medical researchers, marine life medical workers, infectious diseases and public health medical workers around the world, especially to those who live in coastal regions, to improve the healthcare of residents in coastal regions and to prevent and control the spread of diseases specific in coastal regions and infectious diseases.
The scope: marine life medicine, marine animals medicine, coastal plant life medicine, bacteriology, environment and health, microbiology, drug and life medicine, physiology, pathology, immunology, virology, toxicology, epidemiology, vaccine, hematology, pathological histology, cell genetics, endemic diseases in coastal regions, etc. 


Human and Animal Rights
Human experiments should be performed only in accordance with the ethical standards provided by the responsible committee of the institution and in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (as revised in Edinburgh 2000), available at: http://www.wma.net/e/policy/b3.htm. Animal experiments should be in accordance with the instructions for the care and use provided by the institution at which the research was carried out.
 


Informed Consent 
All investigations on human subjects must include a statement that the subject gave informed consent. Patient anonymity should be preserved. Photographs need to be cropped sufficiently to prevent human subjects being recognized (or an eye bar should be used).



Conflict of interest
All authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. 


Author fees
No fees or charges are required for manuscript processing and/or publishing in Journal of Coastal Life Medicine (JCLM) for authors. 
 


Publication Frequency
Journal of Coastal Life Medicine was a quarterly journal in 2013. Since 2014, the journal publishes articles monthly, 12 issues per year in one volume. Months of publication are: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December. 


Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement
Journal of Coastal Life Medicine is a peer-reviewed journal, to ensure the high-quality, fair and ethical publication of scientific papers, the principles outlined below should be obeyed by all participants involved in the act of publishing: the author, the journal editor, the peer reviewer, and the publisher in the publication process. 


Responsibility for the Authors

  1. All authors should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for the content. Written approval signed by all authors should be presented with the manuscript. The sequence of author's names represents the degree of contribution. Co-authorship should be indentified in the manuscript.
  2. Authors must certify that their manuscript is their original work, has not previously been published elsewhere, or even submitted and been in reviewed in another journal. Any kinds of plagiarism, fraudulent data found in the paper will be denied for publication.
  3. Authors are obliged to provide corrections of mistakes and report any errors they discover in their published paper to the Editors by email: jclmm@yahoo.com; jclmm@jclmm.com
  4. Authors must identify all sources used in the creation of their manuscript and state that all data in the paper are real and authentic.
  5. All submitted papers are subject to strict peer review process.
  6. All submitted papers will be detected the similarity score using iThenticate software. An overall similarity less than 20% and similarity of text from a single source less than 5% for a manuscript will be considered for publication.

Responsibility for the reviewers

  1. Reviewers should keep all information regarding papers confidential.
  2. Reviewers should express their views objectively and clearly with supporting arguments, no personal criticism of the author, and provide the author with useful suggestions for improvement of the manuscript.
  3. Reviewers may identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors and should contact the editorial office for any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published papers.
  4. Reviewers should not review 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 and inform the editorial office.

Responsibility for the editors

  1. Editors should guarantee the quality of the publication.
  2. Editors should process the submitted papers fairly and timely.
  3. Editor is ultimately responsible for the selection of all its content, and editorial decisions may be informed by issues unrelated to the quality of a manuscript, such as suitability for the journal
  4. Editors should select appropriate and eligible reviewers for the submitted papers and keep all information of reviewers confidential.
  5. Editors should send the reviewers’ comments back to authors timely and promote the authors to resubmitted papers.
  6. It is the responsibility of the editor to ensure that reviewers have access to all materials that may be relevant to the evaluation of the manuscript, including supplementary material for e-only publication, and to ensure that reviewer comments are properly assessed and interpreted in the context of their declared conflicts of interest

Peer Review Process
The acceptance of each paper will be decided by three reviewers for publication.

  1. All submitted papers will be assessed by an Editor, the suitable ones (meet our editorial criteria) will be sent to three qualified reviewers for peer review.
  2. If one of the three reviewers disagrees with publication, editor will select the fourth reviewer for peer review.
  3. If the fourth reviewer agrees with publication, editor will inform the author for acceptance with or without revisions.
  4. If the fourth reviewer disagrees with publication, editor will select the fifth reviewer.
  5. If the fifth reviewer agrees with publication, editor will inform the author. If not, the paper will be rejected.
  6. If no experts included in our expert database are qualified for the peer review of an article, editor will invite other competent experts to make a decision.
  7. The final decision of acceptance lies with the chief editor based on the comments of the reviewers. Authors will be informed of the decision (Acceptance, minor revision, major revision or rejection).
  8. Each peer review process is expected to be completed within 15 days (the first three reviewers will finish reviewing within 15 days, and the fourth and fifth reviewers have 10 days each).

Open Access Policy
Journal of Coastal Life Medicine is an open access journal, which provides immediate open access to the full text of the article to promote global academic exchanges. All interested readers can read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles at no cost (for personal noncommercial use only), under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). 
  


Indexing
Journal of Coastal Life Medicine is indexed or abstracted in Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Open Academic Journals Index (OAJI), Biological Abstracts (BA), BIOSIS Previews (BP), Zoological Record (ZR), Index Copernicus (IC), Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience Abstract (CABA), Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA), Ulrich's Periodicals Directory (UPD), Chemical Abstracts (CA), Wanfang Data. 


Corrections, retractions and expressions of concern about research findings
Editors must assume initially that authors are reporting work based on honest observations. Nevertheless, two types of difficulty may arise.
Firstly, errors may be noted in published articles that require the publication of a correction or erratum of part of the work. It is conceivable that an error could be so serious as to vitiate the entire body of the work, but this is unlikely and should be handled by editors and authors on an individual basis. Such an error should not be confused with inadequacies exposed by the emergence of new scientific information in the normal course of research. The latter require no corrections or withdrawals.
The second type of difficulty is scientific fraud. If substantial doubts arise about the honesty of work, either submitted or published, it is the editors’ responsibility to ensure that the question is appropriately pursued (including possible consultation with the authors). However, it is not the task of editors to conduct a full investigation or to make a determination; that responsibility lies with the institution where the work was done or with the funding agency. The editor should be promptly informed of the final decisions, and, if a fraudulent paper has been published, the journal must print a retraction. If this method of investigation does not result in a satisfactory conclusion, the editor may choose to publish an expression of concern, with an explanation.
The retraction or expression of concern, so labeled, should appear on a numbered page in a prominent section of the journal, be listed in the contents page, and include in its heading the title of the original article. It should not simply be a letter to the editor. Ideally, the first author should be the same in the retraction as in the article, although under certain circumstances the editor may accept retractions by other responsible people. The text of the retraction should explain why the article is being retracted and include a bibliographic reference to it.
If a published paper is found later to be extensively plagiarized and is found to be a duplicate or redundant publication, a note of retraction will be published, the indexing services will be notified, and copies of the correspondence will be sent to the authors’ head of institute.
The validity of previous work by the author of a fraudulent paper cannot be assumed. Editors may ask the authors’ institution to assure them of the validity of earlier work published in their journals or to retract it. If this is not done they may choose to publish an announcement to the effect that the validity of previously published work is not assured.
For any errors in an already-published article, the journal may publish a notice of correction, which should include the exact nature of the error, along with the citation information for the corrected article.
JCLM is a member of Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and will strictly follow the retraction guidelines of COPE. If published articles violate ethical codes, such as multiple submissions, plagiarism, data error, etc., the editor may retract publications (or issue expressions of concern). This notice of retraction will: contain the title "Retraction: [article title]", authors of the article, the reason for the retraction and who request to retract the article; include a link to the original electronic article which will be retained with "retracted" watermark on each page of the PDF; be published online in the next issue and be listed in the table of contents as soon as possible.


Disclaimer
The Publisher, Society and Editors cannot be held responsible for errors and any consequences arising from the use of information contained in this journal; the views and opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Publisher, Society and Editor, neither does the publication of advertisements constitute any endorsement by the Publisher, Society and Editor of the products advertised.
To the extent permissible under applicable laws, no responsibility is assumed by Editorial Office of Journal of Coastal Life Medicine for any injury and/or damage to persons or property as a result of any actual or alleged libelous statements, infringement of intellectual property or privacy rights, or products liability, whether resulting from negligence or otherwise, or from any use or operation of any ideas, instructions, procedures, products or methods contained in the material therein.
The advertisements in the journal, in both print and online publishing platforms, do not constitute on the part of Editorial Office of Journal of Coastal Life Medicine a guarantee or endorsement of the quality or value of the advertised products or services described therein or of any of the representations or the claims made by the advertisers with respect to such products or services.