The research journal of pharmacology and pharmacodynamics (RJPPD) focuses on preventing conflict of interests by addressing their root causes. Conflict of interest arises when personal or financial interests interfere with professional duties, leading to biased research and decision making. These conflicts can seriously harm institutions by taking away their efficiency, trust and overall effectiveness. By eliminating the root causes of conflict of interest RJPPD journal aims to promote transparency, fairness and ethical standards.
This method helps to ensure success and growth of institutions involved in pharmacology and pharmacodynamics which promotes a reliable and trustable scientific community.
RJPPD tries not to hide anything from the general public and believes that every information should be known to all and should be mentioned in all the manuscripts.
RJPPD makes sure it doesn't reject study papers simply because they have some amount of conflict of interests. However, this will explicitly be mentioned in the published manuscript.
In RJPPD, all authors are told to identify all the potential conflict of interests and come to a conclusion of how these interests interfere with secondary interests that can affect the reliability of the institution and the journal. Therefore, we made mandatory for our authors to specifically mention those conflict of interests which are likely to affect the institution’s trust and after the assessment of the manuscript if the author found no competing interests, then it should also be mentioned in the manuscript stating no competing interests are found in the study after the assessment.
Conflicts of interests are sometimes seen as it is related to financial matters but in reality, the conflict of interests can also occur in personal, professional and non-financial matters including relationship with institution or individual.
As described earlier in the previous paragraph, if the author after assessing the manuscript finds no possible competing interests( related to personal, professional and non-financial matters) it becomes author’s responsibility to explicitly make a statement : “After successful assessment of the manuscript, the author found no conflict of interest and declare that this manuscript/research is free from all possible conflict of interests” and this statement should be made available in the manuscript prior to the acknowledgments.
However, if the author finds any conflict of interest, then it's the author's duty to state those conflicts of interest and explain the type of conflict of interest. It should also be made available to the editor during the submission or when required.
It is compulsory for the author to provide four types of information:
- Author and institution's relationship with commercial bodies that provided assistance for the work mentioned in the manuscript.
- Author's relationship with other commercial bodies and institutions that may have an interest in the field on which the manuscript is based.
- Complete information related to financial tie-ups involving relatives (spouse, children), if any.
- All non-financial matters that have interrelation with the submitted manuscript.
Editors, Reviewers & Journal Manager
Conflict of interest arises when there is interference between editor’s objective decision making and reviewer’s peer review. The interests with which the primary interest is conflicting can be financial, personal, or it can be in relationship with the other organization. Also, if editor or the person who is responsible for reviewing the manuscript encounters with their own conflict of interest then they have to make sure they are describing it in full length in the manuscript prior to its publication and if they feel the need of replacing themselves with the other person who is not having relation with any of the subjects mentioned in the manuscripts than they should do that or else they can specifically describe about their roles in the reviewing of manuscript.
Sometimes, it becomes very essential to hire a reviewer from other fields who can review the manuscripts which are related to areas like small fields of science or any other subdivisions of big domain to avoid biasing and to maintain integrity of manuscripts. Besides this, editor has the option of objective review of the manuscripts.
It is recommended to all the authors in a particular manuscript to address all the possible competing interest statements to the corresponding author, so that it can be included in the manuscript before publishing.
Additionally, all authors are required to download a copy of the ICMJE COI Disclosure Form and send a duly filled copy to the corresponding author.