Copyright, Licensing and Creative Commons

The copyright on any article published by CTOR PRESS in INNOVATION is retained by the author(s).

Authors must sign a Licensing Agreement giving CTOR PRESS the right to publish their article in INNOVATION and identify CTOR PRESS as the original publisher.

Authors may grant any third party the right to use their INNOVATION article freely with the understanding that the manuscript is not to be altered, all authors are to be listed in the proper citation and CTOR PRESS is acknowledged as the publisher of the original manuscript. CTOR PRESS abides by the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY).

CTOR PRESS adheres to an Open Data policy by applying the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication Waiver to all published data in INNOVATION. Authors who choose not to adhere to the Open Data policy must state this and give their justification in the Cover Letter. This will not influence acceptance of the manuscript.

Availability of Materials and Data

All manuscripts must include an ‘Availability of data and materials’ statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

Data availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

INNOVATION also requires that authors cite any publicly available data on which the conclusions of the paper rely in the manuscript. Data citations should include a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) and should ideally be included in the reference list. Citations of datasets, when they appear in the reference list, should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite and follow journal style. Dataset identifiers including DOIs should be expressed as full URLs. For example:

Hao Z, AghaKouchak A, Nakhjiri N, Farahmand A. Global integrated drought monitoring and prediction system (GIDMaPS) data sets. figshare. 2014. 

With the corresponding text in the Availability of data and materials statement:

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS], [Reference number].

Authors submitting a manuscript to INNOVATION must agree to make materials used in, and all raw data from, the study freely available to any researcher who intends to use these materials and data for non-commercial purposes. If these materials or data are from human subject research, the researchers making the request must confirm that they will adhere to the National Institutes of Health’s Human Subjects Research Guidelines to ensure research subject privacy.

CTOR PRESS is committed to making all datasets from manuscripts published in INNOVATION publicly available, via 1) deposition in public repositories (see below for links), 2) in the manuscript or 3) in Supporting Data that is submitted with the manuscript. These datasets should be in a software-readable format (e.g. spreadsheet) that allows outside researchers to perform independent analyses. If authors opt to not make their raw data publicly available, they must state this in the “Availability of Materials and Data Section,” as described below.

Availability of Materials and Data Section. Authors must explicitly state where the materials and data from their study can be obtained or found. Authors who do not wish to share their data must explicitly state this, and give the reason.

CTOR PRESS adheres to the Force11 Data Citation Synthesis Group Principles, which requires that all publicly available datasets be fully credited and attributed. INNOVATION requires that such shared datasets be listed in the references with an accession number or unique identifier (e.g., digital object identifier (DOI).

Reporting Standards

BioMed Central advocates complete and transparent reporting of biomedical and biological research. Please refer to the Minimum Standards Reporting Checklist for reporting standards. CTOR PRESS and INNOVATION also require that authors refer to the minimum reporting guidelines for health research hosted by the EQUATOR Network  when preparing their manuscript, and FairSharing for reporting checklists for biological and biomedical research. Authors must adhere to these guidelines when drafting their manuscript, and peer reviewers will be asked to refer to these checklists when evaluating such studies.

Checklists are available for a number of study designs

*Authors of systematic reviews should also provide a link to an additional file from the manuscript’s Methods Section detailing the search strategy. For an example of how a search strategy should be presented, see the Cochrane Reviewers’ Handbook.

Permanency

CTOR PRESS guarantees that all published INNOVATION manuscripts will be deposited in an open access digital archive to ensure readers will have access to the manuscripts in perpetuity.

Corrections and Retractions

If the integrity of CTOR PRESS or INNOVATION is deemed to be threatened by misconduct in published manuscripts, Corrections or Retractions will be published.
In line with CTOR PRESS’s Permanency Policy, Corrections or Retractions will be made by publishing an Erratum or a Retraction Note with the published manuscript. The original article will not be altered beyond the Erratum or Retraction Note and will remain indexed in the public domain. If needed, the published manuscript will be removed from the archive, per CTOR PRESS’s Removal Policy.

Corrections

Corrections that do not alter the conclusions of the manuscript or invalidate it in any way will be published as an Erratum that will be linked and indexed to the original publication. Corrections may also be utilized to change authorship and will be published as an Erratum that will be linked and indexed to the original publication. The decision to publish the Erratum will be made by the INNOVATION Editor.

Retractions

If convincing evidence of misconduct (including, but not limited to falsification of data or other scientific information, unethical study design or conflict of interest) in a published article is uncovered, the published article will be retracted. CTOR PRESS will adhere to the COPE guidelines in such cases. Retraction articles will remain indexed and linked to the original article.

Duplicate Publication

Any manuscript submitted to INNOVATION must be original. Simultaneous consideration of the manuscript by INNOVATION and any other journal is prohibited. If the submitted manuscript appears in any citable form, INNOVATION may consider it for publication under specific conditions (see Table below). In such cases, the corresponding author must state the specific condition in the cover letter accompanying their submission.

Acceptable and non-acceptable forms of duplicate publication