Publication Ethics and Misconducts

Tanzania Veterinary Association (TVA) (Publisher) and the editors on behalf of Tanzania Veterinary Journal (TVJ) shall take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of articles/manuscripts where research misconduct has occurred. In no case shall a publisher or editors encourage such misconduct, or knowingly allow such misconduct to take place.  In the event of any allegations or potential research misconduct, the chief editor shall initiate the investigation and make final decisions according to TVJ policy.  It is expected that authors and where applicable the institution(s) where the research was conducted will cooperate with the editor when the efforts to resolve the identified concerns are initiated.

Article withdrawal

Articles can be withdrawn if there is violation of any of Tanzania Veterinary Journal Policies, including policy on plagiarism, authorship, multiple submissions, or the article contain fraudulent data. Withdrawal request shall be sent to the editor with reasons why the article should be withdrawn.

Withdrawal request shall only be considered if the article is not formally published online, in print or both. All request received after publication will not be accepted for withdrawal. Depending on the reasons, the published article will be considered for errata or retraction.

Withdrawn articles will remain in the Journal archive for records but will not be available to the public. Complete removal shall only be considered only in cases of legal or regulatory compliances. The editor may require compensation from authors if the editor determines that the reasons for withdrawal are not sufficient and if there is significant time investment including completion of review process. Articles may be withdrawn without attracting penalties anytime within 7 days after submission.

Errata

Errata may be accepted and published to correct author names, correct main text or remove text that appears in the original version of the article provided that the new changes are necessary and do not significantly change the manuscript. Addition of authors or new data will not be accepted. In case the errata is accepted and published, the published article will be labelled as Erratum and will appear in the same or subsequent issue and in all publication media and the original published article will be retained.    

Article retraction

Retraction applies when the respective manuscript is already published. The reasons of retraction include redundant publications, conclusion based on fraudulent data, infringement of copyrights, false claims of authorship, legal requirements or serious violation of Journal policy.

With exception of legal requirements, expression of concerns and request for retraction must be submitted to the editor. Any one including whistleblowers can contact the editor if there is enough reason to suspect violation of basic publication ethics for scholarly work.

After receiving complaints or concerns, the editor will initiate the investigation. The editor will notify all the respective authors on the raised issues with their manuscript. After notifications, authors must respond to all concerns raised. The Editor may engage the institution where the research was conducted if necessary.

The editor may retract the respective article with or without author consent if the editor is satisfied that there is genuine concerns and that cannot be corrected or there is copyright infringement.

If the raised concerns involves minor errors, does not invalidate the published data, and there is no involvement of copyright infringement or duplicate publication, the concerns will be handled in accordance with policy on errata.

For all retracted articles, there will be a separate and citable published RETRACTION NOTE both online and in print versions. In case the print version is already published, the retraction note will be published in the subsequent issue. In addition, the online version of original article will be preceded with a retraction note in the first page, followed by full article watermarked with: “RETRACTED MANUSCRIPT” in capital letters.

The retraction notice will contain the title of the article and authors as well as brief description of the history and reasons of retraction. Complete removal of the article from online database shall only be done in cases of legal compliance or in case where retention of the manuscript will cause harm to the public.

Detection of potential cases of Plagiarism

Detection of potential cases of plagiarism shall be done using software and assessed based on similarity index.  Serious cases of plagiarism will lead to outright rejection.

The use of Animals and human subjects   

All research that includes the use of animals or human subjects, the articles must include a statement in materials and methods indicating whether the research was approved by the relevant institution where the research was conducted. Additional information is available under author guidelines

Author responsibilities

Although editors, reviewers and readers may try their level best to identify and where applicable prevent publication malpractices but there is no guarantee that such cases may go unnoticed.

It is therefore the responsibility of all authors to avoid any kind of publication malpractices.

These include but not limited to the use of fraudulent or manipulated data, unjustified splitting of data in order to gain multiple publications on limited data sets,  manipulating the review process, including fake authors, excluding deserved authors, multiple submission of the same manuscripts to different journals, using published data without proper acknowledgement of the original publisher or obtaining permission, failure to declare conflict of interest, failure to acknowledge other people who contributed to the work but could not qualify to become authors, and plagiarism.

The corresponding author is responsible to make sure that all co-authors have seen and approved the final version before publication.

If the editor becomes aware that the corresponding author provided false information in order to gain acceptance of the manuscript for publication, the respective manuscript will be retracted.

Authorship conflicts

The editor welcomes any complaints related to authorship and will try to cooperate as much as possible, but neither the Journal nor the publisher will take responsibility for any problem related to authorships. Authors are encouraged to discuss and agree about authourship before submission of the manuscript. Additional resource is available for guidance.

During the review stage new authors may be added provided that they have contributed significantly to qualify as authors see details on who should be included as an author.

Authors are required to provide details of contribution for all authors although currently the journal do not publish such details unless when needed. The journal reserve the right to change this policy without notice.

All requests for addition, change order or removal of authors after the publication of the manuscripts will not be accepted.

Conflic of interest for TVJ editors

Editors have the responsibility to ensure that the work published in the Journal is beneficial to the wider scientific community and has been rigorously evaluated to meet this criteria. To facilitate objective decision and good publication practices, from the year 2021 TVJ started to implement a policy where editors and other members of editorial board are discouraged to publish in the journal while they are still active members of the Board. However, in the event that such publication is necessary, the  respective editor should not be involved in the peer review and editorial decision-making process for their own articles. In addition, editors publishing in TVJ will include a disclosure statement in the manuscript published. This rule does not apply for editorials notices published by editors.