Journal of Pharmacology and Drug Science is a peer-reviewed journal that guarantees the highest standards of publication ethics regarding ethical issues, errors, and retractions. The Journal's editorial board is responsible for maintaining the integrity of the publications by preventing malpractices such as plagiarism, multiple submissions, fabrication, falsification, and conflicts of interest. The Journal is committed to following the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) ethical standards and its principles for dealing with acts of misconduct and pledging to investigate any misconduct complaints to ensure the integrity of research.

Editor-in-Chief's Responsibilities

The Editor-in-Chief is ultimately responsible for improving the Journal's quality and impact while upholding the highest ethical and competence standards. The Editor-in-Chief is the deciding authority to select the Journal's executive editors and editors. Furthermore, the Editor-in-Chief decides on submission acceptance and rejection after receiving comments from the concerned topic specialist editor throughout the peer-review process. The Editor-in-Chief creates journal policies and ethics. The Editor-in-Chief shall analyze editorial member inclusion applications' quality and select the editorial board members.

Editorial Board Member's Responsibilities

The Editor is responsible for the publication's contents and general quality, which can be guaranteed with the support of appropriate reviewers and authors. Editors employ techniques to improve research work's quality, usefulness, originality, completeness, and clarity. The Editor follows the manuscript submissions and decides whether the manuscript can be sent for peer review after analyzing plagiarism, content quality, workflow, readability, ethical compliance, and potential scientific impact. The eligible manuscripts will be sent for peer review with a minimum of two reviewers using a double-blind review process. The Editor will analyse the comments from the reviewers, and the recommendations will be submitted to the Chief Editor. Besides, editorial board members will promote the Journal to get more articles for the Journal. The Editor has prime responsibility to maintain the integrity of the research contents in the manuscript. Editors should not expose or disclose the contents submitted by authors to any others except editorial board members and potential reviewers. Conflicts of interest between employees, authors, reviewers, and board members should not be permitted by editors. The Editor must follow appropriate COPE procedures and flowcharts in situations involving alleged misconduct, authorship disputes, conflicts of interest, or other ethical concerns.

Reviewer Responsibilities

Reviewers have the right to reject or accept the review invitation promptly. The manuscript received by reviewers should be treated as a confidential document to ensure the secrecy of the information or content present in the manuscript. Reviewers should not process the manuscript further for publication if there is any conflict of interest relating to authorship, institution, ownership, intellectual property, or funding. Reviewers should ensure that all relevant contributors and sources are appropriately acknowledged and cited in the manuscript. Reviewer(s) should not consider the race, age, gender, ethnic origin, sexual orientation, disability, religious belief, citizenship, political orientation, or social class of authors during the peer-review process.

Author's Responsibility

Author(s) should submit their work to the Journal, and the same manuscript should not be published elsewhere or be under consideration for publication in any other journal. The author should take responsibility for obtaining appropriate ethical clearance and approvals for the research wherever required. If a manuscript is published in multiple journals, the authors should take responsibility for addressing the duplicate publication and cooperating with the relevant journals in accordance with applicable publication ethics procedures.

Individual contributions should be described as an Author Contributions statement to provide appropriate credit to all contributors and assign accountability for published work. The Statement of Author Contributions is essential. It should be included in the submission. It can be a few sentences long and should clearly define each author's responsibilities.

During the submission, peer review, and publication process, the corresponding author should take responsibility for being in contact with the Journal and editorial office until the publication process ends. After publishing, the corresponding author should be willing to address any questions or comments relating to the published work.

In case of a change of address, the current address may also be stated if the author has moved since the work was primarily done. Addresses will not normally be updated or changed after the publication of the article, except where a correction is necessary to maintain the accuracy of the published record.

Upon submission, authors are strongly advised to ensure the correct author group, corresponding author, and order of authors. Adding or deleting authors, changing the corresponding author, or changing the order of authors after acceptance is generally not permitted unless there is a justified reason and all authors provide written agreement, subject to editorial approval.

Plagiarism

The submissions may be analyzed utilizing appropriate plagiarism-detection software. Upon detection of substantial plagiarism or inappropriate text reuse, the Journal will follow applicable COPE guidelines. Manuscripts containing substantial plagiarized content may be rejected by the Editor without being processed for peer review. Where appropriate, authors may be given an opportunity to respond to concerns regarding text similarity before an editorial decision is finalized.

Conflict of Interest

Authors, editors, and reviewers must disclose any actual, potential, or perceived conflict of interest that could influence the research, review, or editorial decision. Authors should declare relevant financial and non-financial competing interests at the time of submission.

If a conflict of interest is identified during the review process or after acceptance and publication, the Journal will assess the matter in accordance with its editorial and ethical procedures. Depending on the circumstances, the Journal may request clarification, correction of the published record, withdrawal of a manuscript before publication, or retraction of a published article.

Retractions

If a significant factual, methodological, ethical, or other substantive error is identified in a published manuscript, the Editor will assess the matter and, where appropriate, request clarification or correction from the corresponding author.

Where an error substantially affects the validity or integrity of the published work, the Journal may publish a correction, expression of concern, or retraction as appropriate. Duplicate publication, fabricated or falsified data, serious ethical violations, or other forms of major research misconduct may result in retraction following appropriate investigation.

The Journal will follow recognized publication-ethics procedures when considering corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions, with the objective of maintaining an accurate and trustworthy scholarly record.

Archiving

The Journal of Pharmacology and Drug Science supports the long-term preservation and accessibility of its published scholarly content through appropriate digital archiving and repository mechanisms. Details of the Journal's indexing and archiving arrangements are provided on the relevant Journal website pages.