Policies
Scope of the journal
Sulaimani Dent. J. encourages submissions from all authors throughout the world. Manuscripts are assessed by two experts solely on the basis of their contribution to original data and ideas and their presentation. All manuscripts must comply with Instruction to Authors. The following manuscript types will be considered for publication:
Original articles, systematic reviews, case reports/ case series, editorials, brief communications, and letters to the editor.
Manuscripts are accepted for consideration with the understanding that data, text, figures, photographs, and tables have not appeared in any other publication, except as an abstract submitted and published in conjunction with a presentation by the author(s) at scientific meetings, and that material has been submitted only to this journal.
Investigation on human subjects should conform to the guidelines noted in the World Health Organization Chronicle 1976; 30: 360-362. Researchers submitted to the journal should be approved by an ethical committee according to the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki 1964 and its last revision. Experimental animal studies need to be carried out according to the principles of laboratory animal researchers. All articles will be critically reviewed by the editor and invited referees within 2 months.
Original research in all fields of dental, oral and craniofacial sciences
Biological, clinical, biomaterials and bioengineering parts for original research articles
Timely state-of-the-art review articles in all fields of dental, oral and craniofacial sciences.
Leading meeting proceedings in the e-supplement and as a special issue.
Ownership and management
The Sulaimani Dental Journal (Sulaimani Dent. J.) is the official Open Access, Peer-Reviewed bi-annual journal (in June and December) published by the College of Dentistry/University of Sulaimani.
Publishing schedule
This journal is published twice a year in June and December by College of Dentistry, University of Sulaimani.
Review process
The Sulaimani Dent. J. team and reviewers are working hard to reduce review time to minimum. Then, the reviewer's comments should be applied to revise the manuscript, after which it should be uploaded to the journal again unless the journal’s decision on your paper is rejecting with possibility of resubmission.
Follow the track change mode for word documents to enhance the process of reassessment of your paper.
Sulaimani Dent. J. is a peer reviewed Journal; all manuscripts go through a process of evaluation and reviewing. Every manuscript is referred to two reviewers and may be referred to a statistical reviewer if required.
Reviewers’ comments are sent to the author plus suggestions by the editor that would be helpful in this process. The revised version should be submitted back within a period of 30 days of receipt of the editor's comments.
Editorial decisions
Decisions made by the editorial board are based on the strength of arguments put forward by our reviewers and the authors as well as other considerations for each individual manuscript. This is the journal’s principal responsibility toward our readership, which is part of the scientific community. Thereby, we can serve our readers by considering the state of each article in relation to the many other articles also under evaluation.
Occasionally different and possibly conflicting recommendations might be provided by the two reviewers on the same paper, based on different experiences of our reviewers in the same field of knowledge. Therefore, the editorial board may have to make a decision based on conflicting advice during the process of unification of the reviewers’ comments and advice.
Double blind peer review
The reviewing process of Sulaimani Dent. J. is a double blind process as neither the reviewers nor the authors are exposed to each other. However, and in rare cases, authors may suggest favored and non-favored reviewers during the process of submission. Nevertheless, the final selection of reviewers is undertaken by the editorial board of Sulaimani Dent. J..
Our reviewers are not allowed to reveal themselves to the authors. Authors should inform the editor if the reviewer identifies him or herself to the author.
Peer review process
The peer review process is a method of identifying the quality of the article accepted for publication, in order to guarantee the high quality of the articles submitted and accepted for publishing. Sulaimani Dent. J. accepts articles not only based on the scientific validity and the originality of the manuscript, other factors are also considered such as the standard of innovation and the significance of the knowledge included in the paper against other accepted articles.
The Peer review process starts with the following steps
1- The first filter is performed by the editorial board and involves checking the submitted article for originality, specialty as some papers can fall into more than one specialty. Furthermore, some papers require modifications or correction according to Sulaimani Dent. J. guidelines and instructions for authors before the peer review process starts.
2- Then the editor selects two reviewers who are usually experts in the particular field, and often a statistician is consulted about the quality of statistical analysis used in the article. Sometimes, when the editor is not satisfied with the statistical method applied in the submitted article, the editor advises the author to consult a statistician about the statistical methods applied in his/her article.
3- The submitted article receives one of the following decisions from the Journal: accepted submission, the submission will be accepted without revisions. Revision required, the article would be accepted after minor changes. Resubmit for review, the paper requires major work. Declined submission, the paper will not be published with Sulaimani Dent. J.
4- The corresponding author can appeal via an email to the editorial office if he/she is convinced of the scientific value of his manuscript.
The Sulaimani Dent. J. editorial board provides a quick decision and publication under an affective editorial mechanism that is considered valuable to both our authors and the scientific community. We ask our reviewers to respond with the revision outcome within the number of days agreed. If the reviewer for any reason is expecting an unusual delay in the revision process, we ask them to inform us in order to inform the author about any expected delay and if necessary to change the reviewer.
After acceptance of proofs
Sulaimani Dent. J. editors read the reviewers’ comments and suggested corrections and then send the work back as one set of page proofs to the corresponding author via an email. The corresponding author should make the required amendments and return the manuscript to the journal in one submission within two weeks. This will be the final amendment; no major amendments to the manuscript will be accepted afterward. Authors are exclusively responsible for proofreading; hence, if the manuscript requires proofreading, Sulaimani Dent. J. editorial board will send the manuscript to a proofreader and the author will be charged for that.
Conflict of interest and funding
The journal requires that all authors disclose any potential sources of conflict of interest. Any interest or relationship, financial or otherwise that might be perceived as influencing an author's objectivity is considered a potential source of conflict of interest. These must be disclosed when directly relevant or directly related to the work that the authors describe in their manuscript.
Authors should list all funding sources at submission. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of their funder designation.
All authors are obliged to fill the conflict of interest and funding form.
Publication charge
Sulaimani Dent. J. charges 150,000 IQD for the manuscript accepted for publication, you will be asked to pay an Article Publication Fee to cover publications costs. There is a 25% waiver for students. If you don not have the funds to pay such fees, you will have an opportunity to waive the fee. We do not want fees to prevent the publication of worthy work.
Advertisements
Advertisements are crucial to this journal to keep all contents free for everyone. However, ethical considerations are in place to ensure the integrity of the journal and its content:
The advertiser has no control or input over the pages where their ads appear.
The Editorial Board has full and final approval over the content of all advertisements.
Advertisers will never be shown any manuscripts or other content prior to publication.
Copyright and open access
1. Access rights
All articles published in Sulaimani Dent. J. will be immediately and permanently available for free for everyone to read, download, copy and distribute.
2. User rights
This is an open-access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given (with a link to the formal publication through the relevant DOI) and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms. However, the user under no any circumstances shall use the article for commercial purposes and does not permit distribution of the article if it is changed or edited in any way.
3. Author rights
For open-access publishing, Sulaimani Dent. J uses an exclusive licensing agreement. Authors will transfer copyright to College of Dentistry, University of Sulaimani, but will have the right to share their article in the same way permitted to third parties under the relevant user license and certain scholarly usage rights.
Publication ethics
1. Screening for plagiarism
Manuscripts submitted for publication in Sulaimani Dent. J will be checked for plagiarism before being sent to editorial view. Sulaimani Dent. J advise authors to avoid plagiarism and self-plagiarism. This occurs when the author copies a substantial amount of data and text of published work without properly citing it. Manuscripts with over 25% plagiarism will be rejected and the author’s institution will be informed. However, minor plagiarism scattered over the manuscript unintentionally happens frequently and Sulaimani Dent. J editorium judge case by case on its merit. The corresponding author of a manuscript with plagiarism will be notified to revise the manuscript and resubmit it to be considered for publication.
2. Ethical approval
Manuscripts submitted to Sulaimani Dent. J relating to experiments conducted on humans and animals have to include a statement that the protocol has been approved by the ethical committee of the author’s institution. The study has to be performed in agreement with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000.
3. Allegations of misconduct