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Editorial Policies


Table of Contents

About the Journal

The Journal of the Society for Clinical Data Management (JSCDM), is the society’s open access, peer-reviewed publication. The mission of JSCDM is to promote and publish scholarly work with direct relevance to the practice of Informatics and Data Science in clinical research. Articles of interest include reports of original research, review articles, design manuscripts, case studies, demonstration projects, education and professional development, and topic briefs including tutorials and perspectives. 

JSCDM fills a gap in the biomedical literature by publishing the science and operations behind data collection and use in clinical studies. The journal seeks articles describing the development, application, evaluation and improvement of methods and tools to be applied in the design, conduct and reporting of and sharing data and resources from clinical studies.

The primary audience for JSCDM is the large community of professionals in industry and academe collecting, managing and using data in clinical studies. Additional readers include professionals in the broader clinical research community, those who are involved in the planning and conduct of clinical research including regulatory professionals, research sponsors, care providers and the general public, as well as researchers developing or evaluating methods for data handling and use in all stages of the clinical study lifecycle. JSCDM complies with International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICJME) recommendations to ensure rigorously produced content for readers.

For more information, contact the JSCDM Chief Editor, Claudine Moore, CCDM, or the Editorial Coordinator Sara Gillespie at the JSCDM Editorial Office: info@scdm.org

North America Office
Society for Clinical Data Management
7918 Jones Branch Drive | Suite 300
McLean, VA 22102, USA
Tel: +1-703-651-8205
Fax: +1-703-506-3266

Editorial Board

Editorial Board Members are recognized experts in the collection, management and use of data in the design, conduct and reporting of clinical studies and are selected by the SCDM Board of Trustees in collaboration with the journal’s Chief Editor. The Editorial Board operates with the editorial independence expected of a scholarly journal under the leadership of the Chief Editor. Editorial Board members steward the Editorial policies of the Journal to assure compliance with International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines including managing external review for submitted work. Inaugural Editorial Board members serve a renewable term of 18 months.

Electronic Subscription

The Journal offers a free eSubscription from the Journal website. eSubscription provides an email notification when articles or issues are published. Contact information will be collected from eSubscribers and eSubscribers will be offered an opt-in opportunity to receive information about SCDM published content and notification of educational offerings, professional certifications, surveys and meetings. A separate opt-in opportunity is available to eSubscribers to receive information from collaborating professional societies and organizations advertising with SCDM. The contact information is managed according to SCDM policies for doing so. A link to the SCDM privacy policy should be available from the subscription form.

 

Editorial Policies 

JSCDM considers publication of original and scholarly manuscripts reporting the application, evaluation and improvement of informatics methods for the design, conduct and reporting of and sharing data and resources from clinical studies. Scholarly articles covering research contexts across the full spectrum of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) definition of clinical research  are appropriate for the journal.  Articles may report development, implementation and evaluation of new data and information related theories, methods or systems (basic research) or adaptation, translation, implementation and evaluation of existing methods or systems (applied research). Papers submitted to the journal should follow the manuscript preparation guidelines. Manuscripts reporting data or experience from studies must include identifiers from national or international registration, e.g., the Clinical Trials.gov identifier for clinical trials. All articles describing human subjects research must include a statement describing ethics review, e.g., statement of Institutional Review Board (IRB) or ethics committee approval, determination of non-human subject research or a determination of non-research. Articles reporting research involving human subjects must describe the approach and methods for informed consent. Articles describing work considered by the Editorial Board to be human subject research cannot be published without evidence of prior review by the appropriate ethics authority.  

To assure a consistent supply of high-quality submissions, the Journal will from time-to-time advertise itself or publish calls for submissions including themed issues or special issues. As such, JSCDM will be advertised at national meetings and through relevant outlets primarily through the Society for Clinical Data Management and other relevant professional societies, publications and meetings. In addition, submissions may be solicitated from submitters or presenters at national or international meetings, and through relevant professional societies. Submissions targeting application to practice or evaluation in practice may be solicited from those previously reporting research results. 

 

Conflict of Interest (COI) Disclosure

Conflicts of interest are a natural part of professional and scientific work. JSCDM maintains the following process to manage these conflicts so that they do not unduly influence publication decisions or published work.  In the event that the editors of the journal identify a conflict of interest or a perceived conflict of interest regarding a submission, steps will be taken to effectively manage that conflict of interest such as declining participation in the review of a manuscript with which an Editorial Board Member or reviewer has a conflict. As such, Editorial Board members and reviewers are required to report conflicts with articles for which their review is invited.

As part of the online submission process, corresponding authors are also required to declare any potential conflicts of interest involving any author that are relevant to the submitted work, and to disclose the details of the conflicts as part of the submission. Disclosed conflicts will automatically be published with the manuscript. Statements of conflicts do not count against the allowed word count.

 

Copyright Policy

SCDM publishes JSCDM content in an open access manner under an Attribution-Non-Commercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA) license. When an article is submitted, the author releases copyright to SCDM. As the copyright holder, SCDM grants usage rights to others using this open license (CC BY-NC-SA) allowing for immediate free access to articles published in JSCDM and permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose and license their new creations under the identical terms.  View the License

 

Indexing and Preservation

Published articles are assigned persistent Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) prior to publication. Article metadata used for retrieval and later indexing are collected and quality controlled throughout the review and publication process. Article metadata is managed in the journal management system. Parts of article metadata are automatically used by the system in the generation of the .pdf and xml versions of published articles. These rich article-level metadata include article identifiers as well as xml and HTML representations that are fully open to web searches. Though the Journal is not indexed today, we plan to apply for indexing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in 2022.

Journal articles are archived and available with open access from the journal website and undergo digital archiving for long-term preservation by CLOCKSS. Articles are automatically archived by CLOCKSS on a rolling basis and are shared from the archive in the event of disaster or termination of the Journal according to the original copyright. 

Copyediting and Typesetting

All published articles will be edited by the SCDM copy editor and professionally typeset. Questions to authors may arise during these last steps prior to publication. All articles require author approval of the final copy edited and typeset version prior to publication.