Editing and reviewing procedure

Pre-review
The editorial board will read all submitted articles and classify them into three basic categories: texts that will be sent to the reviewers for assessment; texts that will be returned to the author for revision; and refused texts. After a maximum of one month starting from the date of the article submission and the pre-review issued by the editorial board, the author will receive his or her text with the suggestions for improvement. The text must then be adjusted accordingly and resent in the final form to the editorial board.

Peer review
All articles are peer reviewed by specialists involved in the same or similar research area. Reviewers are given instructions in which they are asked to formulate their opinion on the scholarly importance of the article, assessing it by carefully reading the text and double-checking facts and statements. They will also suggest possible improvements. The reviewers are expected to assess the articles on the basis of internationally accepted standards, whereby the most important criteria are originality and the significance of the contribution as to the knowledge and interpretation of a particular subject. If the article does not satisfy these basic criteria, it will not be accepted. Every article will be assessed by at least two and sometimes by three reviewers.

Text revision
Authors will receive the reviewed articles along with the additional instructions and suggestions that they should take into account. After the revision, the author is supposed to submit the improved version of his/her text with all modifications clearly indicated. Those articles that must be significantly altered according to the reviewers’ suggestions will be resent to the reviewers after the revision, in case they request it.

Editorial board and conflict of interest
In order to prevent the conflict of interest and ensure objectivity, the reviewing process for articles submitted by one of the editors or a member of the editorial board is delegated to an independent external advisor, in accordance with the guidelines of the World Association of Medical Editors (http://www.wame.org/resources/publication-ethics-policies-for-medical-journals#conflicts) and the Committee on Publication Ethics(http://publicationethics.org/case/editor-author-own-journal).

Publication ethics and publication malpractice statement

Editors
IAH Journalis committed to ethical standards in its editorial policy. The editors ofIAH Journalendeavour to ensure fair and objective double-blind peer review processes and editorial decisions. They strongly discourage any kind of misconduct on the part of authors, reviewers or editors themselves. Received manuscripts are evaluated entirely on the basis of their academic merit. The editors ofIAH Journalguarantee to handle the manuscripts and all unpublished information with confidentiality, regardless of whether the article will be published or not. They should also take reasonable measures when ethical complaints have been presented concerning a submitted manuscript or published paper.

Authors
Fraudulent or plagiarism on the part of authors constitute unethical behaviour and are unacceptable. The authors should ensure that their work is entirely original, and if the work or the words of others have been used, this has to be appropriately acknowledged in footnotes or in text. Submitting the same manuscript to more than one journal is unacceptable as well.

Reviewers
The received manuscripts reviewers must treat as confidential documents. Any information or ideas obtained through peer review they must keep confidential and must not use them for personal advantage. Reviews should be conducted objectively, and observations should be formulated clearly with supporting arguments, so that authors can use them for improving the paper. If there should be any reason for which the selected peer reviewer does not want to review a manuscript, he should notify the editor about that. Reviewers should not consider manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.

To support and promote integrity in research publication, we fully support theposition statementsfor editors and authors that were developed at the 2nd World Conference on Research Integrity in Singapore in 2010:
Position Statement 1: International Standards for Editors*
Position Statement 2: International Standards for Authors*

* Both position statements were published under a Creative Commons licence. Source:COPE(Committee on Publication Ethics),http://publicationethics.org/international-standards-editors-and-authors(last accessed 4 June 2013).