General policies

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Author responsibilities
Publication ethics
Research ethics
Clinical trials
Patient Consent
Data deposition and availability of materials
License to publish
Author self-archiving/public access policy
Prior publication
Permissions
Authorship
Groups and consortia
Proofs
Post-publication corrections

Author responsibilities

Submission of a manuscript implies that it reports original unpublished work and that it is not under consideration elsewhere. All files, including figures, must be original. The submission process must be carried out by the corresponding author. The corresponding author is required to check the relevant boxes during online submission on behalf of all authors to indicate that they are all in complete agreement with the contents of the manuscript and are prepared to abide by the general policies of EMPH as listed below. If the submitting author is not the corresponding author, then full contact details of the latter must be included in the submission. Under certain circumstances the journal may need to communicate with the senior author of the manuscript. The email addresses of all co-authors must be provided.

During submission, authors are requested to upload a cover letter containing additional information which will aid the processing of the manuscript. This must include details of any previous submission of the work to EMPH , either partial or in entirety, which has been rejected, regardless of any changes in authorship. The manuscript number of the earlier submission must be provided, together with a file containing the responses to any editorial or referee reports and a summary of the changes that have been made. The cover letter should also contain details of any data obtained from other groups which is cited in the manuscript as a personal communication(s). The corresponding author must confirm that permission has been obtained for each inclusion.

Authors must advise the journal of any related manuscripts currently under consideration by EMPH or any other journal, especially where the related manuscript describes work that may impinge significantly on the results or interpretation of the current EMPH submission. A file of the related manuscript should be uploaded into the online submission system.

Publication ethics

EMPH expects that authors will observe high standards with respect to publication ethics. The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and its editors follow COPE’s Code of Practice and guidelines as closely as possible. For example, the following practices are unacceptable: (1) falsification or fabrication of data, (2) plagiarism, including duplicate publication of the authors' own work, in whole or in part without proper citation, (3) misappropriation of the work of others such as omission of qualified authors or of information regarding financial support. Allegations of unethical conduct will be discussed initially with the corresponding author. In the event of continued dispute the matter will be referred to the author's institution and funding agencies for investigation and adjudication.

Duplicate publication

Submission of a paper to EMPH implies that it reports work that has not been published elsewhere, or is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, whether in print or electronic form. Presentation of an abstract or poster at an academic or professional meeting does not constitute duplicate publication, and neither does the inclusion of material from an academic thesis, even if publicly available. During the submission process, authors should provide copies of related manuscripts that are under consideration elsewhere to allow reviewers to judge the extent of possible overlap.

Plagiarism

An attempt to re-publish without acknowledgement or citation any part of the work of others, or of the authors’ own work, is considered to be plagiarism. EMPH uses plagiarism detection software on submitted manuscripts. Detection of plagiarism will lead to automatic rejection of the manuscript concerned. The journal reserves the right to report suspected plagiarism to the corresponding author's institution.

Conflicts of interest

Each author should declare all potential conflicts of interest that might affect the perceived credibility of their article and therefore of the journal. Such potential conflicts of interest frequently arise from financial considerations (such as employment by, investment in, or support from a commercial entity) but may also include those arising from non-financial professional or personal relationships. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to ensure that all co-authors adhere to this policy and to confirm whether they have any conflicts to declare. In the event of one or more co-authors declaring a conflict of interest, details should be provided online during the submission process, and a prominent paragraph included in the submitted manuscript. If the manuscript is published, this information will be communicated in a statement in the published paper.

If you are in any doubt as to what constitutes a conflict, please read the FAQs or contact the Editorial Office ([email protected]).

Peer reviewers are also asked to disclose relevant conflicts of interest and if necessary disqualify themselves from consideration of a paper.

Declaration of conformity with these requirements

During the electronic submission process, corresponding authors will be required to take responsibility for the ethical aspects of their submission by confirming that the requirements of this section have been met.

Research ethics

Studies involving medical research on human subjects must be performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (as revised in 2008). Statements confirming that the study protocol was approved by a local or institutional review board, and that written informed consent was obtained from all participants or their representatives, should appear in the methodology section. Human ecological (anthropological) studies should be performed in accordance with relevant ethical principles, for example those of the American Anthropological Association.

Research on animals must be performed in accordance with national and institutional regulations, and a statement to that effect should appear in the methodology section.

These statements should also be included under an ‘Ethics and consent’ subheading at the end of the manuscript after the acknowledgements.

Clinical trials

As recommended by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), all clinical trials reported in EMPH must have been registered prospectively in a publicly accessible database before initiation of patient recruitment. The trial registration number must be provided in the paper. Reporting of clinical trials should follow the recommendations of the CONSORT Group.

Patient Consent

Informed Patient Consent

EMPH follows the ICMJE guidelines for reporting about patients. Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without prior informed consent. Identifying information should not be published in written descriptions or pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) has given written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that the patient be shown the manuscript to be published.

Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential, but patient data should never be altered or falsified to attain anonymity. We understand that complete anonymity is difficult to achieve, and informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt.

When informed consent has been obtained, please indicate this in the published article. The Patient Consent Form (or similar) should be supplied when submitting a manuscript for review.

Mandatory Patient Consent Form

For publication of material that contains detailed patient information about a living individual, it is compulsory for a signed patient consent to be obtained.

Images of Patients

EMPH does not publish patient photographs.

Data policy

Availability of Data and Materials

Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health encourages all authors, where ethically possible, to publicly release all data and software code underlying any published paper. Authors are required to include a Data Availability Statement in their article.

We encourage data to be presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files or deposited in a public repository whenever possible. Information on general repositories for all data types, and a list of recommended repositories by subject area, is available here.

Data Availability Statement

The inclusion of a Data Availability Statement is a requirement for articles published in Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health. Data Availability Statements provide a standardized format for readers to understand the availability of data underlying the research results described in the article. The statement may refer to original data generated in the course of the study or to third-party data analyzed in the article. The statement should describe and provide means of access, where possible, by linking to the data or providing the required unique identifier.

The Data Availability Statement should be included in the end matter of your article under the heading ‘Data availability’.

More information and example Data Availability Statements can be found here.

Data Citation

Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health supports the Force 11 Data Citation Principles and requires that all publicly available datasets be fully referenced in the reference list with an accession number or unique identifier such as a digital object identifier (DOI). Data citations should include the minimum information recommended by DataCite:

[dataset] Authors, Year, Title, Publisher (repository or archive name), Identifier.

*The inclusion of the [dataset] tag at the beginning of the citation helps us to correctly identify and tag the citation. This tag will be removed from the citation published in the reference list.​

Licence to Publish

All content published in EMPH is made freely available online to all under an Open Access model.

After a manuscript is accepted for publication, the corresponding author will be required to accept a mandatory license to publish agreement. Authors who are employed by the government should select the Government Open Access option.

Oxford Open articles are published under Creative Commons licenses. Authors publishing in the journal can use the following Creative Commons licenses for their articles:

• Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY)

Visit the OUP licensing page to find out more about the Creative Commons licenses.

Author self-archiving/public access policy

All EMPH content will be automatically deposited in PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central, and made freely available via these resources soon after publication in the journal. This means that publishing in EMPH is fully compliant with e.g. the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access policy and the HHMI, UK MRC and Wellcome Trust policies on open access. Authors wishing to comply with these policies need not take further action.

For more information, please visit our Author Self Archiving Policy page.

Prior publication

EMPH will not consider any paper or component of a paper that has been published or is under consideration for publication elsewhere. Distribution on the Internet may be considered prior publication and may compromise the originality of the paper as a submission to EMPH , although we do allow posting of research papers on not-for-profit preprint servers such as biorxiv.org and arxiv.org. Please contact the editors with questions regarding allowable postings to other servers.

Permissions

Authors (generally of Commentaries and Reviews) wishing to reproduce material (such as tables, illustrations or more than 200 words of text) previously published elsewhere must obtain the necessary permissions from the copyright holders (and if necessary the authors) of that material. Copies of permission letters should be forwarded to the Editorial Office ([email protected]) upon acceptance of the manuscript. This does not apply if the material was previously published under a Creative Commons license, but the source of the material must be correctly attributed. Authors must obtain authorisation for all personal communications.

Authorship

EMPH has adopted the criteria for authorship drafted by the ICMJE. Briefly, authors are expected to have made substantial intellectual contributions to a published work through study design and data analysis/interpretation. All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be so listed. The order of authorship should be a joint decision of the co-authors, and should be agreed upon before submission to the journal. Submission of a paper implies that all the named authors have read and approved the final version.

Groups and consortia

Groups and consortia can be included in the list of authors. The full list of members does not have to be provided but if it is, the points below apply:

• If the group only has a few members, the members should be listed in a footnote on the manuscript's title page.

• If the group has many members, the members should be listed in the Acknowledgements section or in an appendix at the end of the article.

For articles where only the group is listed as author (i.e. no individuals are listed), the corresponding email address must link to a named individual and not a generic email address. The name and institution of the individual must be provided. Acronyms in the list of authors are acceptable as long as they are unambiguous.

Proofs

Corresponding authors will be sent proofs in PDF format by email. It is the authors' responsibility to check proofs thoroughly.

Post-publication corrections

Corrections are made if the publication record is seriously affected by the accuracy of published information. Online publication constitutes definitive publication and is not subject to informal changes. However, if a significant error is discovered after publication of an article, which necessitates correction, a new version or a corrigendum can be published. Corresponding authors who wish to have considered the publication of a correction that materially affects the data or conclusions of their already published paper should contact the Editorial Office ([email protected]).

All EMPH content will be automatically deposited in PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central, and made freely available via these resources soon after publication in the journal. This means that publishing in EMPH is fully compliant with e.g. the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access policy and the HHMI, UK MRC and Wellcome Trust policies on open access. Authors wishing to comply with these policies need not take further action.

For more information, please visit our Author Self Archiving Policy page.