Conflicts of Interest Statement
How conflicts of interest are managed justly has a deep impact on the public trust in the scientific process and the credibility of published articles particularly during the processes of planning, implementation, writing, peer review, editing, and publication of scientific work. When a primary interest (such as patients’ welfare or the validity of research) takes impact from a secondary interest (such as financial gain), a conflict of interest is likely to arise. Understanding the conflict of interest is as crucial as the conflict of interest itself. Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership or options, honoraria, patents, and paid expert testimony) are the most obvious types of conflicts of interest and can damage the credibility of the journal, the authors, and the field of science under study. However, conflicts can also be the result of some other factors, such as personal relationships or adversities, academic competition, and intellectual opinions. Authors should refrain from signing any such agreement with the study sponsors that is likely to hinder the authors’ access to the complete study’s data or their right to analyze and interpret the data and independent manuscript submission as per their demand, no matter if it is for-profit or non-profit.
Participants of peer-review and publication process i.e., authors, peer reviewers, editors, and editorial board members of journals, should be aware of their conflicts of interest and need to perform their part in the article review and publication accordingly. If they have any relationships leading to conflicts of interest in their knowledge, they are required to disclose them.
Authors: Authors should disclose all the financial and personal relationships leading to conflict or biases at the time of submission of manuscripts of any type or format. The KKG Publications has designed a Form for Disclosure of Conflicts of Interest to be signed for the articles that are about to be published.
Peer Reviewers: During the critical evaluation, reviewers should be asked to disclose all those conflicts of interest that can possibly impede the review process. Reviewers should inform the editors of any such conflicts of interest that can make their judgment biased towards a manuscript, and should avoid the review of such manuscripts that have a strong risk of obtaining a biased evaluation. Reviewers need to respect the authors’ rights over the manuscripts by not using or misusing the manuscript’s knowledge for personal gains.
Editors and Journal Staff: Editors, in the presence of conflicts of interest, should stop the editorial decision-making. In case some conflict-creating relationships exist for the articles under consideration, editors should do the same. Other editorial staff members having a say in the editorial decisions need to inform the editors of their current financial interests or other conflicts (that may influence the editorial judgments somehow) and should recuse from the decision likely to be afflicted by any sort of conflict of interest. Editorial staff should also handle the content of manuscripts responsibly and ethically by not utilizing it for personal interests. Editors should declare through disclosure statements regularly the conflicts of interests related to the roles of the journal staff. Same guidelines need to be followed by the guest editors.
Reporting Conflicts of Interest
Articles that are about to be published should contain statements or supporting documents, such as conflict of interest form, affirming: – Authors’ conflicts of interest; and – Sources of support for the work, including sponsor names with descriptions of the role of those sources if any in study design; collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; report compilation; the decision of getting the report published or a statement assuring of no link with the supporting source; and – proof of the authors’ access to the study data, while defining the nature and the extent of access, with special reference to its on-going nature if applicable. For validating the above-mentioned statements or documents, editors may contact the authors of a study who might have funding sponsors with a proprietary or financial interest and ask them to sign a statement, “I had full access to all of the data in this study and I take complete responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.”