Publication Policies

Publication Policies have been prepared by Grand Journal of Urology Editorial Board, by examining the guidelines of the leading national and international institutions in the publishing sector.

Editorial policies of Grand Journal of Urology are conducted as stated in the rules recommended by the Council of Science Editors and reflected in the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals: Writing and Editing for Biomedical Publication (http://www.icmje.org/). Accordingly, authors, reviewers, and editors are expected to adhere to the best practice guidelines on ethical behavior contained in this statement. It is recommended that all researchers who will send their studies to the journal should examine this guide carefully.

Articles should be prepared following the guidelines of ICMJE- Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (http://www.icmje.org). Authors should prepare papers by following CONSORT guidelines (http://www.consort-statement.org) for randomized research studies, STROBE guidelines (http://www.strobe-statement.org) for original observational research studies, STARD guidelines (https://www.equator-network.org/reporting-guidelines/stard/) for studies on diagnostic accuracy, PRISMA guidelines for systematic reviews and meta-analysis (http://www.prisma-statement.org), ARRIVE guidelines for experimental animal studies (https://arriveguidelines.org/) and TREND directives for non-randomized public behavior (http://www.cdc.gov/trendstatement).

Copyright & Licensing

The copyrights of the studies published in Grand Journal of Urology belong to their authors. Authors allow the intellectual work they submit to be published by the Grand Journal of Urology under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Under this license, the third parties and authors are allowed to reuse the articles for non-commercial purposes. The contents can be used as a reference in scientific publications and presentations.

The corresponding author should sign the Copyright Agreement and Author Contribution Form, and a scanned version of the wet signed document should be uploaded via the online submission system during the manuscript submission.

Price Policy

Grand Journal of Urology is a self-supporting journal and is not owned by any institution/organization. It does not get any financial support from any institution/organization. The journal's functioning is carried out by the voluntary efforts of editors and reviewers. Potential advertisers should contact the Editorial Office. Advertisement images are published only upon the Editor-in-Chief’s approval.

Submission, processing, and publication are free, and authors are not charged in any way. All published articles are available online in PDF and HTML format and can be downloaded free of charge from www.grandjournalofurology.com.

Open Access Policy

Open access is an approach that supports interdisciplinary development and encourages collaboration between different disciplines. Therefore, Grand Journal of Urology contributes to the scientific publishing literature by providing more access to its articles and a more transparent review process.

Author (s) and the copyright owner (s) grant access to all users for the articles published in Grand Journal of Urology free of charge. Grand Journal of Urology does not demand any subscription fee, publication fee, or similar payment to access electronic resources. Articles may be used provided that they are cited.

Open Access Policy is based on Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/). By "open access" to peer-reviewed research literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, index, or link to the full text of these articles. Enter them as data into the software, and use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, is that the authors retain control over the integrity of their work and should be properly acknowledged and cited. 

A Creative Commons license is a public copyright license that provides free distribution of copyrighted works or studies. Authors use the CC license to transfer the right to use, share or modify their work to third parties. All published content in the Grand Journal of Urology is licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits third parties to share and adapt the content for non-commercial purposes by giving the appropriate credit to the original work.

CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

You are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material

The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

Under the following terms:

Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.

No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Ethical Policy

Submission is considered on the conditions that papers are previously unpublished and are not offered simultaneously elsewhere; that authors have read and approved the content, and all authors have also declared all competing interests; and that the work complies with the Ethical Approval and has been conducted under internationally accepted ethical standards. If ethical misconduct is suspected, the Editorial Board will follow the relevant international rules of publication ethics (i.e., COPE guidelines, https://publicationethics.org/).

For the experimental, clinical, and drug human studies, approval by ethical committee and a statement on the adherence of the study protocol to the international agreements (Helsinki Declaration revised 2008 (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/) are required. In experimental animal studies, the authors should indicate that the procedures followed were by animal rights (Guide for the care and use of laboratory animals, https://www.nap.edu/catalog/5140/guide-for-the-care-and-use-of-laboratory-animals), and they should obtain animal ethics committee approval. The Ethics Committee approval document should be submitted to Grand Journal of Urology together with the manuscript.

The approval of the ethics committee, statement on the adherence to international guidelines, and that the patient's informed consent is obtained should be indicated in the `Material and Method` section and is required for case reports whenever data/media used could reveal the identity of the patient. The declaration of the conflict of interest between authors, institutions, acknowledgment of any financial or material support, or aid is mandatory for authors submitting a manuscript, and the statement should appear at the end of the manuscript. Reviewers are required to report if any potential conflict of interest exists between the reviewer and authors, or institutions.

Ethics committee approval is required in accordance with the National Ulakbim TR Index criteria for research/original article studies using patients' data, even if they are retrospective, and this approval document should be attached when submitting the article.

In case reports, the author (s) must get informed consent from the individual (or parent or guardian if the participant is young or incompetent).

For photographs that can reveal patients' identities, the author (s) must get permission from the patient or their legal representative and attach evidence of such permission when submitting their article. Authors wanting to add figures, tables, or text sections published elsewhere must obtain permission from the copyright holders and include evidence of such permission when submitting their articles. Any material received without such evidence will be deemed to come from the author (s), and the legal, financial, and criminal responsibility in this respect will belong to the author (s).

Fabrication: To publish data and findings/results that do not exist.
Duplication: Used data from another publication; that includes republishing an article in different languages.
Salamisation: Creating multiple publications by supernaturally splitting the results of a study.

We disapprove of such unethical practices as plagiarism, fabrication, duplication, and salamisation and efforts to influence the review process with such practices as gifting authorship, inappropriate acknowledgments, and references. Submitted manuscripts are also subjected to the evaluation of plagiarism, and duplicate publication by automatic software. Authors are obliged to acknowledge if they published study results in whole or in part in the form of abstracts.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the republishing of whole or part of the content in another author's publication without attribution, and is an ethical violation, whether intentionally or not. It is a crime and an unacceptable code of conduct, as it is unethical to submit and publish manuscripts imitating other sources, with or without citing references. Authors should not quote directly from other publications, and they should give their information by using their original sentences and citing the original publication. This situation also applies to self-citation. For this reason, due to publication policies, Grand Journal of Urology, for all studies to be published in all the periodicals, necessitates a plagiarism checker.

All submitted articles are scanned with similarity detection software (iThenticate) before being sent to the double-blind peer-review process and after passing the reviewers' evaluation.

Our criterion is not a percentage of matching. A specialized team carries out auditing excluding percentages of matching but considering the parameters, such as identification of matching paragraphs, whether citations and references are appropriately written under the writing rules of the journal, the places of the matching sentences/paragraphs in the article, and the sources with which they are matched. The prepared plagiarism report is sent to the relevant editor of the study. In consideration of the report, the editorial board may request from the author correction of the errors in the manuscript and send it again or accept or reject it. The acceptance of the study is on the initiative of the Editor-in-Chief. In alleged or suspected research misconduct cases such as plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data fraud/fabrication, the Editorial Board will follow and act by the COPE guidelines (https://publicationethics.org/).

Conflict of Interest & Financial Disclosures

Conditions that provide financial or personal benefit bring about a conflict of interest. The reliability of the scientific process and the published articles is directly related to the objective consideration of conflicts of interest during the planning, implementation, writing, evaluation, editing, and publication of scientific studies.

Financial relations are the most easily identified conflicts of interest, and they will inevitably undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and the science. These conflicts can be caused by particular relations, academic competition, or philosophical approaches. The authors should refrain as much as possible from making agreements with sponsors in the opinion of gaining profit or any other advantage that restrict their ability to access all data of the study or analyze, interpret, prepare, and publish their articles. In order to prevent conflicts of interest, editors should refrain from bringing together those who may have any relationship with them during the evaluation of the studies. The editors, who make the final decision about the articles, should not have any personal, professional, or financial ties with any of the issues they will decide.

Author (s) should disclose any existing or potential conflicts of interest, including financial, consulting, and institutional, that could lead to potential bias or conflict of interest. Any financial grants or other support received from individuals or institutions should be informed to the Editorial Board. The Editorial Board resolves any potential conflict of interest of editors, authors, or referees within the context of COPE (https://publicationethics.org/) and ICMJE (http://www.icmje.org/) guidelines.

If one of the editors is an author in any manuscript, the editor is excluded from the manuscript evaluation process. In order to prevent any conflict of interest, the article evaluation process is carried out as double-blinded. Because of the double-blinded evaluation process, except for the Editor-in-Chief, none of the editorial board members, international advisory board members, or reviewers is informed about the authors of the manuscript or institutions.

Our publication team works devotedly to ensuring that the evaluation process is conducted impartially, considering all these situations.

Deposit Policy

Deposit policy (Self-archiving policy) according to Sherpa/Romeo are as follows:

The author cannot archive pre-print (i.e., pre-refereeing); the Author can archive postprint (i.e., final draft after refereeing); and the Author can archive the publisher's version/PDF.

Every paper published in the Grand Journal of Urology is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).