About the Journal
Publisher
The journal is owned, sponsored and published by the Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria, Olabisi Onabanjo University Teaching Hospital, Sagamu Branch, Sagamu, Nigeria. The journal presently does not receive sponsorship from any external body or in form of adverts from agencies and companies.
Peer Review
The operations of the editorial board of the journal are in conformity with the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (C.O.P.E) and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) [www.icmje.org].
Manuscripts are submitted to the journal on the understanding that the same manuscript has not been simultaneously submitted to another journal, is not under processing by another journal, has not been accepted by another journal and no substantial part of the data contained in the manuscript has already been published elsewhere.
All manuscripts are subjected to an initial round of in-house editorial review and only manuscripts of satisfactory quality are processed further at the external peer review stage. The journal employs a double-blinded style of external peer-review process usually conducted by experts in the relevant specialties, who are sourced from cognate institutions. Guided by the reports obtained from the editorial review and the external peer review processes, the editorial board determines the suitability of every manuscript. Editorial decisions are usually communicated to the authors within eight weeks of submission.
Revised manuscripts are expected to be submitted within four weeks of communicating the editorial decision. As a matter of editorial policy, revised manuscripts are not returned to external reviewers for re-assessment. Rather, in-house editors vet revised manuscripts to ensure compliance with the suggestions and queries raised by external reviewers except for technical issues which must necessarily be assessed by the external reviewers. The other situation in which revised manuscripts may be returned to external peer reviewers is when the manuscript, after the initial review is recommended for rejection and re-submission. When a manuscript is accepted, a formal letter of acceptance indicating the manuscript number, title of the manuscript and the list of authors, is issued to the authors.
Upon acceptance, the editorial board reserves the exclusive right to edit manuscripts (from the title to the references, including tables and figures) to meet the journal’s style prior to publishing. Accepted manuscripts are published online (at www.annalsofhealthresearch.com) and in print.
The journal abhors duplicate submission, data falsification, data fabrication and duplication of data already accepted by or published in other journals (even when certain cosmetic changes/additions are made). Plagiarism of any form, is also considered a major publication misconduct. The Editorial Board uses intrinsic mechanisms detecting data falsifications, fabrications and duplications. Every manuscript is subjected to electronic plagiarism check using the tools provided in Crossref and the Oxford Similarity Checker. Such acts of publication misconduct shall be officially addressed according to the provisions of the ICMJE. Such cases of publication frauds shall be treated with outright rejection if detected prior to publishing or retraction if detected after publishing. The concerned authors shall be blacklisted and shall be officially reported to their institutions.
Authors and peer-reviewers are encouraged to channel any complaints or protests concerning any aspect of the editorial process to the Editor-in-Chief (annalsofhealthresearch@gmail.com) . Such complaints are investigated by the Editor-in-Chief and the findings are presented to the Editorial Board for deliberation and adjudication.
Open Access Policy
This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.
With the open access publishing policy and under the provisions of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 4.0 License, the journal grants all authors, users and researchers, free access to the materials published online in the journal with the permission to copy, use and distribute the materials contained therein for non-commercial but academic and scientific purposes, provided the source is adequately cited and credited.
Publication Scheduling
The journal is published quarterly.
General
In order to preserve all the published materials in digital repositories, this journal submits the metadata of all its electronically published articles to LOCKSS and CLOCKSS for archiving. This archiving is possible and freely done with the Open Journal System (OJS). By way of this system of archiving, this journal aims to ensure the continuous availability of every electronically published scholarly material to the public despite any accidental loss of data in its personal archival records. Further, electronically published materials from 2018 are assigned Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) which were formerly registered with mEDRA but currently registered with Crossref to enhance easy access to them through the permanent online links.
