Ethical Principles and Publication Policy


The Journal of Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation observes the condition that all articles published in its body are of high ethical and scientific standards. There are ethical rules that editors, referees and authors must comply with in all processes of the articles examined for publication in our journal.

The said rules and the standards to be followed are the document named Code of Conduct and Best-Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (https://publicationethics.org/files/). Code_of_conduct_for_journal_editors_Mar11.pdf) and the document named Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals published by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (http://www.icmje.org).

All studies submitted to our journal are required to comply with the following ethical issues:

• Requiring ethical committee approval; Ethics committee approval should be obtained for all studies with humans or animals, this approval should be stated in the method section of the article along with the name of the ethics committee, the number of decisions and the date, and should be documented during the upload of the article documents. All studies that require ethical committee approval are detailed below.
•In all studies with humans, information about obtaining informed consent should be included in the method section of the article.

• The statement that the Research and Publication Ethics is complied with in the planning and execution of the study should be included in the article.

Ethics committee approval is required for ALL of the studies listed below:

• Any kind of research carried out with qualitative or quantitative methods that requires data collection from the participants by using survey, interview, focus group work, observation, experiment, interview techniques,

• Research involving the use of humans and animals for scientific purposes in any context and scope,

o Clinical studies on humans,

o Clinical studies on animals,

• Retrospective (file scanning, etc.) studies using information and data belonging to people (in accordance with the personal data protection law).

Editors, referees and authors have separate responsibilities in all articles published or to be published in our journal.


Editors' responsibilities

Decisions regarding all articles submitted to the journal for review for publication are taken together with the editor and field editors. Decisions taken during this process cannot under any circumstances be dependent on the race, gender, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, ethnic origins, nationalities or political views of the authors and/or be affected by these characteristics of the authors. The decision about the article depends entirely on the importance of the article in the scientific context, its suitability for the scope of our journal, its originality, the fact that it was carried out with valid and reliable methods, and its content is understandable. Chief editor, field editors and technical editors, information about the articles submitted to them; It cannot be shared with anyone other than other editors, referees and authors. During the sharing of information with the referees, the identities of the authors cannot be disclosed under any circumstances. Any information or material (images, figures, diagrams, etc.) obtained from the content of an article under review by the journal boards cannot be used elsewhere without the express and written permission of the authors. Where it is used, the person using it should also share the written permission from the authors.


Responsibilities of the Referees


The purpose of the peer-review process is not to ensure that the reviewed article is published, but to assist the editor and assistant editors in making decisions about the article. To facilitate this decision, reviewers can provide suggestions for improving the article.

The referees should treat all articles and other documents related to the article with absolute confidentiality. The referees cannot share the documents of the article or the parts taken from the content of the documents with anyone other than the person or persons authorized by the editor directly. Since our journal is double-blind and refereed, the authors and referees cannot know each other's identities in any way. If the referee learns or deduces the identity of the authors in any way, he is obliged to notify the editor immediately. In this case, the referee's duty in the relevant article is terminated and another referee is assigned.

Referees also identify the problems that exist in terms of citing references in the article they have reviewed. In this context, if a publication cited in the content of the article is not cited in the bibliography section, the referee should determine this situation. In addition, the referees are obliged to notify the editor in case they detect significant similarities between the article they have reviewed and other publications they know.

The referees must make all their reviews on our own. Although the referee has a certain opinion about a scientific concept, it is one of the referee's greatest responsibilities to review the article on the same or a similar concept completely without prejudice. All evaluations and suggestions for improvement by the referee must be based on objective grounds and personal opinions cannot influence these evaluations.

The person invited to referee should promptly notify the editor if he/she can act as a referee. In addition, the referee who has accepted to act as a referee is responsible for notifying the editor without delay if he or she cannot perform his/her refereeing duties quickly and effectively due to a new situation.

Author's duties

Authors of original research papers should include sufficient detail and references in the "methods" section to allow others to replicate the work. Making fraudulent or knowingly false statements constitutes unethical behaviour and is unacceptable.

In some cases, authors may be asked for raw data on their work. When the sharing of data is appropriate, the data should be shared by the responsible author by making absolute anonymization.
One of the biggest responsibilities of writers is to produce completely original works. If it is determined that all or part of a study reviewed in our journal is not the original product of the authors, the article will be rejected directly. Therefore, authors should compose their articles originally and appropriately cite statements and sections taken from other publications.
It is unethical behaviour for a publication under review in our journal to be under review in another journal in the same or substantially similar way.

Authorship should be with individuals who have made significant contributions to the conceptualization, design, execution or interpretation of the reported work. Anyone who has made significant contributions should be listed as a co-author. Accordingly, anyone who has not made a meaningful contribution to the article should not be listed as an author. The corresponding author ensures that there is no other non-contributory co-author on the list of authors other than all contributing co-authors. The corresponding author is also responsible for confirming that all co-authors have approved the final version of the article and agreed to submit it for publication.

All authors must make a statement disclosing any financial or other material conflicts of interest that may be considered to affect the conclusion or interpretation of their article.
If an author detects a material error or inaccuracy in his or her published work, it is the author's obligation to promptly notify the journal editor or publisher and cooperate with the editor to correct or withdraw the article via an error correction form.

Open Access Publication Policy

The journal «Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation» provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Full-text access to scientific articles of the journal is presented on the official website

Open Access Licenses
Journal of Occupational Therapy and Rehabilitation © 2013 by Hacettepe University is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/