The framework we follow
CRMSSS aligns its practice with the core practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). Where this page is silent on a situation, those documents govern and we will say publicly which of them we applied.
We are a new journal. Saying we follow these standards is a commitment about future conduct, not a record of past conduct, and it should be read that way until there is a record to judge.
Authorship
Authorship requires all four ICMJE criteria. Meeting one or two of them earns acknowledgement, not authorship.
- Substantial contribution to the conception or design of the work, or to the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of the data.
- Drafting the work, or revising it critically for important intellectual content.
- Final approval of the version to be published.
- Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work, including for the integrity of parts they did not personally perform.
Guest, gift, and ghost authorship are misconduct. Adding a department head who did not contribute, or omitting a medical writer who drafted the manuscript, both misrepresent the record. Anyone who wrote any part of the text must be named as an author or disclosed in the acknowledgements with their funding source.
Changes to the author list after submission require written agreement from every author, including the one being added or removed, and a reason. Changes after acceptance are made only through a correction notice.
The corresponding author is accountable for the accuracy of the author list and for communicating with all co-authors. We contact every listed author at acceptance to confirm their authorship and their declarations independently — a step some journals skip, and the point at which gift authorship usually surfaces.
Conflicts of interest
A conflict of interest is any relationship that a reasonable reader might think could have influenced the work. It is not an accusation and disclosing one does not disqualify a paper — failing to disclose one does.
Authors declare for the 36 months before submission; reviewers declare on accepting an invitation; editors declare on assignment, and recuse where the tests in the Peer Review Policy apply. Every declaration is published with the article, including the ones that say "none". A blank space is ambiguous; an explicit "none" is a statement someone is accountable for.
Editorial independence and the publisher
CRMSSS is published by the CureRays Innovation & Education Institute, which is affiliated with a clinical practice that treats the conditions this journal studies. Readers are entitled to be sceptical about that, and the following are firm commitments rather than aspirations.
The publisher does not decide what is published. No commercial, clinical, or reputational interest of CureRays may influence an editorial decision, and no one outside the editorial process may see a manuscript under review or intervene in its handling.
Submissions from the publisher are handled externally. Manuscripts authored by the Editor-in-Chief, by CureRays staff, or by the Institute go to an independent editor with no CureRays affiliation, who selects reviewers and issues the decision. The internal team cannot see or reverse it. The handling editor is named on every published article.
We will not publish a finding favourable to a CureRays technology without the same scrutiny we would apply to a competitor's. Because the peer reviews are published in full, that claim is checkable rather than merely asserted, which is the main reason the reviews are published.
No advertising, and no sponsored content. The journal carries neither. If that changes, sponsored material will be labelled unmistakably and kept out of the peer-reviewed record entirely.
Generative AI
AI cannot be an author. Authorship requires accountability, and a model cannot be accountable for anything.
Authors may use generative AI as a tool, and must disclose it: what it was used for, and which model. Language editing and improving readability are ordinary uses and disclosure is enough. Generating data, images, or results is not permitted — an AI-generated figure presented as an observation is fabrication regardless of the intent behind it. Authors are fully responsible for everything in the manuscript, including anything a model produced: "the tool wrote it" is not a defence against an inaccurate citation or an invented reference.
Reviewers and editors may not upload a manuscript under review to any public or third-party AI service. The manuscript is confidential and the author never agreed to it leaving the review process.
Plagiarism, fabrication, and duplicate publication
Every submission is screened for text similarity at the editorial stage. Similarity itself is not misconduct — methods sections legitimately repeat — and each flag is read by an editor rather than acted on by a threshold.
Where an allegation of plagiarism, data fabrication, image manipulation, or duplicate publication arises, whether before or after publication, we follow the relevant COPE flowchart. In outline: the concern is documented; the corresponding author is asked to respond, with a reasonable deadline; if the response does not resolve it, the authors' institution is contacted, since a journal can investigate a manuscript but cannot investigate a laboratory. The article carries an expression of concern while an investigation is ongoing if readers would otherwise be misled in the meantime.
We do not resolve these quietly. Withdrawing a paper without a notice leaves every citation of it standing and uncorrected.
Corrections, concerns, and retractions
The published version of record is permanent. Anything that changes its meaning happens through a linked, citable notice, never by editing the file in place.
| Notice | When it is used | What happens to the article |
|---|---|---|
| Correction | An error that does not change the conclusions — a mislabelled figure, a transposed number in a table, a wrong affiliation. | The article is updated and a permanent, citable correction notice is linked from it in both directions. |
| Expression of concern | A credible, unresolved concern about integrity, where waiting for a conclusion would leave readers misled. | Unchanged, with the notice displayed on the article. Replaced by a correction or retraction once the matter concludes. |
| Retraction | Findings are unreliable — through error or misconduct — or the work is plagiarised, duplicated, unethical, or the peer review was compromised. | The article stays online, watermarked as retracted, with a notice stating who requested it and why. It is never deleted: the record of what was published must survive. |
| Removal | Reserved for the rare case where the article itself is defamatory, violates a legal right, or presents a serious health risk if acted on. | Metadata and title remain so citations resolve; the content is replaced by a statement. We expect never to use this. |
Research involving people and animals
Studies involving human participants must have been approved by a research ethics committee or institutional review board, named with its protocol number, and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Where approval was formally waived, give the waiving body and the grounds.
Informed consent for participation is required, and separate written consent to publish is required for any identifiable individual — including images, and including clinical detail specific enough to identify someone even with the name removed. In a small specialty, a rare tumour plus an age plus a treatment centre can identify a patient to their own community.
Animal studies must state the approving body and the guidelines followed, and we ask authors to report against ARRIVE.
Clinical trials must be prospectively registered in a public registry before the first participant is enrolled. Retrospective registration is considered only with a written explanation, and the registration status is published with the article so a reader can weigh it themselves.
Complaints
Complaints about editorial process, conduct, or a published article go to office@curerays.com with CRMSSS complaint in the subject line. We acknowledge within 5 working days and aim to respond substantively within 30.
A complaint is handled by someone not involved in the matter complained of. Where it concerns the Editor-in-Chief, it is referred to an independent editor outside CureRays. If you are not satisfied with our handling, you may escalate to COPE, and we will cooperate with any review.
Appeals against a specific editorial decision follow a separate route, set out in the Peer Review Policy.
Preservation, identifiers, and access
A journal that disappears when its publisher does was never really part of the scholarly record. CRMSSS commits to the following:
Persistent identifiers. Every article receives a DOI, so citations resolve permanently even if the site is reorganised. ORCID iDs are collected for all authors.
Third-party preservation. Content is deposited with an independent digital preservation service, so that the archive does not depend on CureRays continuing to exist. Registration of the journal's ISSN and its preservation arrangements are in hand ahead of first publication, and the identifiers will be published on this page as each is issued rather than announced in advance.
Self-archiving. Authors may deposit the accepted version in an institutional or funder repository immediately, with no embargo.
If the journal ceases. Should CRMSSS stop publishing, the full archive will be transferred to a preservation service and remain publicly accessible. That undertaking is made now, in writing, while it costs nothing to make — which is the only time such undertakings are worth anything.
Questions about any of this
Write to the editorial office. Policy questions from prospective authors and reviewers are welcome before submission, not only after.