Ethics committee

How the committee works

The Ethics Committee of the International Journal of Medical Students can be contacted at ethics@ijms.info. The committee will meet virtually to solve any issue communicated to them. Editors can communicate with members via email in between meetings. Clinical medicine, research, journalism, bioethics, law, and medical editing will be among the members' diverse areas of expertise. The chairman coordinates responses, and a decision is reached by a majority vote. Only in exceptional circumstances will the chairman make decisions without consulting the other members.

The committee is merely advisory in nature. The editor is free to disregard its advice, but they must justify their decision in writing to the chairman. Both the suggestion and the editor's response would be made public. In the event of a disagreement, the chairman of the committee can appeal to the University Library System of the University of Pittsburgh.

Roles of the committee

The committee has six main roles:

1. Clarifying, reviewing, and developing editorial policies on issues such as:

• • Material arising from the doctor-patient relationship.

• • Competing interests for authors, reviewers, editors, and ethics committee members.

• • Prior disclosure of results to research participants.

• • Editors' duty of confidentiality to authors

2. Formulating new editorial policies.
3. Advising editors on ethics questions that arise during routine editorial work. This includes scrutinizing papers referred by editors or peer reviewers worried about some aspect of the conception, design, conduct, presentation, authorship, or peer review of the work described in those papers.
4. Advising editors on their moral duties and responsibilities to patients, research participants, authors, reviewers, publishers, other editors, and readers.
5. Helping editors to enhance the coverage of bioethics in The IJMS
6. Keeping editors informed of developments in research and publication ethics.

The committee does not provide approval for research proposals, and it is not the last-resort destination for complaints or editorial decision support. Complaints and editorial decisions can be brought to the committee for information, and COPE can be contacted for more direct advice.

The IJMS' ethics committee members

Member 1: Duha Shella

Member 2: Avanthika Chaithanya

Member 3: Dawin Sichimba

Member 4: Ahmed Nahian

Chairwoman: Kiera Liblik

The committee is recruited through open advertisement on social media. We welcome applications from all over the world.

 

Ethics committee annual reports and minutes

Ethics committee annual reports and minutes will be posted once this committee is created.