Informed Consent and Subject Confidentiality
Authors must protect patient privacy and confidentiality. Informed written consent must be obtained from all human participants or their legally authorized representatives for participation and for the publication of any potentially identifiable personal, diagnostic, or photographic data. The consent to participate in a clinical study cannot be substituted for consent to publish identifiable case material. Identifying clinical descriptions, initials, or facial imagery must be omitted unless indispensable for scientific validity, in which case formal, explicit written patient consent must be documented.
Data Authenticity and Image Presentation
Fabricating data, fraudulent manipulation, selectively omitting conflicting data, and inappropriately altering experimental images (such as electrophoretic gels, Western blots, and histology micrographs) constitute egregious research misconduct. Any graphical adjustment involving brightness, balance, or contrast must apply uniformly across the entire digital frame, must not distort, obscure, or delete specific visual information, and must be stated transparently in the figure legends. The journal reserves the right to demand raw, unprocessed instrument data, original laboratory records, and uncropped image files during review or subsequent inquiry.
Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)
International Pharmacy Acta (IPA) is committed to the principles of publication ethics and follows the guidelines published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). COPE publishes guidelines for editors of scientific, technical, and medical journals and provides resources and flowcharts for handling misconduct, disputes, and ethical concerns in scholarly publishing. COPE assists in resolving disputes involving member editors, journals, and publishers, but only after a journal's internal complaint procedures have been exhausted.
In line with these guidelines, the editorial team of IPA expects all contributors—authors, reviewers, and editors—to adhere to recognized standards of research and publication integrity, including originality of submitted work, proper attribution of sources, transparent disclosure of conflicts of interest, and responsible reporting of research findings. Allegations of misconduct (such as plagiarism, data fabrication or falsification, duplicate submission, or undisclosed conflicts of interest) are handled according to COPE flowcharts, and, where necessary, corrective actions such as corrections, retractions, or expressions of concern will be issued.
Plagiarism and Redundant Publication
The journal uses systematic digital screening with iThenticate and validated text-matching software to identify textual overlap across all submissions upon initial intake and before formal publication. The journal maintains a zero-tolerance framework for textual plagiarism, patchwriting, redundant duplication, duplicate publication, uncredited appropriation of intellectual property, and salami slicing (fragmented publication of an interrelated experimental dataset). If substantial overlap or duplicate submission is found, the manuscript will be summarily rejected, and we will notify the authors' affiliated institutions and relevant regulatory bodies in accordance with COPE procedural flowcharts.
Conflicts of Interest and Transparency
Authors, reviewers, and editors are required to disclose any financial or non-financial conflicts of interest that could influence, or be perceived to influence, the reporting or appraisal of the scientific work. Authors must complete and sign standard ICMJE disclosure statements at submission. Financial sponsorships, corporate consulting engagements, honoraria, institutional support, commercial patent filings, and relevant corporate ties must be fully disclosed within the manuscript. For manuscripts authored by members of the editorial board, the submission is transferred entirely to an independent guest editor, and the authoring editor is excluded from the review process and editorial decision-making.
Article Processing Charges (APC)
Publishing operations for International Pharmacy Acta are supported by the Pharmaceutical Sciences Research Center at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences. The journal does not impose any Article Processing Charges (APCs), submission fees, or publication surcharges on authors. All submissions are processed and published free of charge. Editorial evaluations are conducted solely on academic merit, independently of any economic considerations.
