Policies and Ethical Standards

In their work, the editors and the publisher act in accordance with the applicable guidelines and standards defining the mutual roles of all the participants in the publication process, i.e. the authors, editors and the editorial board, reviews, and the publisher:

- Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, published by The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE),
- The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Guidelines / Core Practices,
- Recommendations on Publication Ethics Policies for Medical Journals, prepared by the Publication Ethics Committee of The World Association of Medical Editors (WAME)
- Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, published by the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association in collaboration with DOAJ, COPE, and WAME.

The entire peer review and publication process are thorough, objective, and fair. Editorial decisions about a manuscript are based on its importance, originality, clarity, and relevance to the journal's scope and content. The journal has an obligation to its readers and patients to ensure that the research published is accurate and that is adheres to the highest ethical standards.


1. Obligations of the author
1.1. Authorship of the article
The journal and editorial board abide by the ICMJE recommendations. An author or co-author is a person who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a published study and the drafting of the article. Authorship is based on the following three criteria: 1) substantial contribution to the conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data; 2) involvement in the drafting of the manuscript or the critical revision of its intellectual content; 3) approval of the final published version. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content. Additionally, each author is held accountable for ensuring that any questions or doubts relating to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. The corresponding author is the one individual who takes primary responsibility for communication with the journal during the manuscript submission, peer review, and publication processes. When a large multi-author group has conducted the work, all members of the group named as authors should meet the criteria for authorship, including the approval of the final manuscript.

1.2. Disclaimer
The statements, opinions, and data contained in the journal belong solely to individual authors, not to the publisher and the editors. Neither the publisher nor the editors take any legal responsibility for the errors that may be made.

1.3. Originality and plagiarism
The authors should ensure that their work is original in its entirety. If the authors used other works to obtain data for their article, the referenced work must be appropriately cited or quoted. Plagiarism – regardless of its form – constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable. During the deposit into the DIRROS repository, each document is submitted for the detection of similarity of its content (plagiarism) to all the content on the National Open Science Portal. For plagiarism prevention and detection, the editorial board uses the plagiarism software DPV (Slovene: Detektor podobnih vsebin; English: detector of similar content). Detailed technical information about the software for plagiarism detection, the process of similar text detection, and the Slovenian national open-access infrastructure are available here.

1.4. Disclosure and conflict of interests
A conflict of interest occurs when an individual (author, reviewer, or editor) or its organization is involved in multiple interests, one of which could possibly corrupt the motivation for an act in the other. In their manuscript, all authors should disclose any financial or other substantive conflicts of interest that might be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project should be clearly disclosed. Potential conflicts of interest should be disclosed at the earliest stage possible.

1.5. Potential hazards to human or animal subjects
If their work involves chemicals, procedures, or equipment that have any unusual hazards inherent in their use, the author must clearly specify them in the manuscript. If the work involves the use of animal or human subjects, the author should ensure that the manuscript contains a statement that all procedures were performed in compliance with the relevant laws and institutional guidelines and that the National Medical Ethics Committee of the Republic of Slovenia has approved them. The research described in the papers submitted to the editors must adhere to the principles of the Helsinki Declaration (a statement of ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects). The author should include a statement in the manuscript that informed consent was obtained for experimentation with human subjects. The right of a person to privacy must always be respected.

1.6. Data access and retention
Authors may be asked by the editors to provide the raw data used in the drafting of their publication. Additionally, authors should be prepared to provide public access to such data and retain such data for three years after publication.

1.7. Multiple, redundant, or concurrent publication
An author should not, in general, publish manuscripts describing essentially the same research in more than one journal or primary publication. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently constitutes unethical publishing behavior and is unacceptable. Publication of some kinds of articles (e.g. clinical guidelines) in more than one journal is sometimes justifiable, provided certain conditions are met. The authors and editors of the journals concerned must agree to the secondary publication, which must reflect the same data and interpretation of the primary document. The primary reference must be cited in the secondary publication.

1.8. Acknowledgment of sources
References must be cited appropriately. Authors must always cite the works of others. They should cite all publications that have been influential in determining the nature of the reported work. Information obtained privately through conversation or correspondence with third parties must not be used or reported without explicit written permission from the source. References must be cited in accordance with the guidelines of the editors.

1.9. Correction or retraction policy
When an author discovers a significant error or inaccuracy in their own published work, it is the author’s obligation to promptly notify the editor to publish a correction. If the editor and/or publisher learn from a third party that a published work contains a significant error, it is the obligation of the editor and/or publisher to notify the author to promptly retract or correct the paper or provide evidence of the correctness of the original paper.

1.10. Standards of reporting
Authors of reports of original research should present an accurate account of the work performed as well as an objective discussion of its significance. Underlying data should be represented accurately in the paper. The paper should contain sufficient detail and references to permit others to replicate the work. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable. Review and professional publication articles should also be accurate and objective.


2. Obligations of the editors and editorial board
2.1. Publication decisions
The editor of a peer-reviewed journal is responsible for selecting the articles submitted and deciding upon their publication. Such decisions must always be driven by the validation of the work in question and its importance to researchers and readers. The editor may be guided by the policies of the journal's editorial board and constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. The editor may discuss the publication of a work with other editors, reviewers, and members of the editorial board.

2.2. Fair play
The editor should evaluate manuscripts based on their intellectual content, with no regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, political philosophy, or the world view of the authors.

2.3. Confidentiality
The editor and other members of the editorial board must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone but the adequate author, reviewers, and potential reviewers, other editors, or the publisher, whenever that is appropriate.

2.4. Disclosure and conflicts of interest
Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript must not be used in an editor's own research without an express written consent of the author. Privileged information or ideas obtained through peer review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage. Editors should recuse themselves from considering manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest (competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers). Editors should require all contributors to disclose relevant competing interests and publish corrections if competing interests are revealed after publication. If needed, other appropriate action should be taken, such as the publication of a retraction or expression of concern. The peer-review process is confidential and is the same for all the submitted manuscripts. Non-peer reviewed sections of the journal should be clearly identified.

2.5. Involvement and cooperation in investigations
The editor should take reasonably responsive measures when ethical complaints have been presented concerning a submitted manuscript or published paper. Such measures will generally include contacting the author of the manuscript or the relevant institutions and research bodies, and if the complaint is upheld, the publication of a correction, retraction, expression of concern, or other note, as may be relevant. Every reported act of unethical publishing behavior must be looked into, even if it is discovered years after publication.

The publisher allows the author the use of the submitted version of the manuscript (preprint - author manuscript prior to peer-review) or the accepted version of the manuscript (postprint - author's final peer-reviewed manuscript) or the use of the final published version of the article (publisher's version/pdf) for self-archiving on the author's personal website and/or archiving in an institutional or other open-access repository. The published source must be acknowledged and a link to the journal home page or the article’s DOI must be set.

3.2. Open access statement
Onkologija is an open-access journal, meaning that all of its contents are freely accessible without any charge to the user or their institution. All articles are available on the internet to all users immediately upon publication. In accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of open access, users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking for prior permission from the publisher or the author, provided the authors and the journal are appropriately credited.

3.3. Long-term preservation / Deposit policy
The publisher has an archiving agreement (see archiving agreement) with the Central Technological Library at the University of Ljubljana to ensure the long-term monitoring, archiving, and management of the electronic publications stored on its servers. Digital publications in the Digital Repository of Research Organizations of Slovenia (DiRROS) are backed up and distributed to ensure they remain available over the long term. Compatibility with OpenAIRE guidelines enables the sharing of content with other repositories and compliance with the provisions of the European Commission on open access to peer-reviewed scientific publications and corresponding research data from publicly funded projects, as well as the requirements of the Slovenian national strategy, institutional policies, and financers (see DIRROS policies: Metadata Policy, Data Policy, Content Policy, Submission Policy, Preservation Policy)

The journal is also permanently archived (see an archiving agreement) at The Digital Library of Slovenia (dLib.si), an active partner in the development of Europeana. The repository/portal is maintained by the National and University Library. The publisher has an archiving agreement with the National and University Library to ensure the long-term monitoring, archiving, and management of the electronic publications stored on its servers.

In accordance with the National Strategy for Open Access to Scientific Publications and Research Data in Slovenia, the Scientific Research and Innovation Activity Act, and the Decree on the Implementation of Scientific Research Work in line with the principles of Open Science, the journal Onkologija supports open access to research data. Open data constitute a valuable resource for further use and enable the verification and reproducibility of scientific findings. The Editorial Office provides authors with technical support for depositing data in the DIRROS repository. If the data are sensitive (e.g., due to intellectual property protection or the need to safeguard vulnerable groups), alternative access and protection measures may be applied, such as anonymization or controlled and regulated access. Each dataset is assigned a catalog record in COBISS, an appropriate typology (2.20 – completed scientific dataset or corpus), and a permanent identifier (DOI). Authors of research data retain the economic rights to their data.

Authors may, at their discretion, also deposit their research data in any other suitable repository. A comprehensive list of repositories is available in the Registry of Research Data Repositories (www.re3data.org).

Authors who use existing data sources in their research must cite these sources appropriately at the end of their manuscripts.

3.4. Journal funding and advertising policy
The journal is founded and financially supported by the Institute of Oncology Ljubljana. The publication of this journal is also subsidized by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency (ARIS).
The editorial policy follows the ethical guidelines for the publications of scientific and professional articles in medical journals. The advertisements in the print version of the journal are unrelated to the editorial decision-making process and are kept separate from the published contents. Found on the last pages of the journal, the advertisements are published in the order of their arrival.

3.5. Payment of authors and publication charges
Authors receive no payment for the publication of their articles. There are no publication fees charged to the authors, and the articles are available on the journal website and repository DIRROS and repository dLib.si immediately upon their publication. The journal provides immediate open access to the full-text of articles at no cost whatsoever, encouraging the free availability of research and promoting a greater global exchange of knowledge.