Journal Policies

The Journal is committed to maintaining high standards of academic and ethical excellence in scholarly publishing. The following policies provide a comprehensive framework to ensure integrity, fairness, and transparency throughout the publication process. These policies cover the handling of submitted manuscripts, editorial decision-making, conflicts of interest, misconduct, copyright, open access, language, submission, licensing, and plagiarism.

Upon receive of an article, Editor-in-Chief should evaluate the merit of a manuscript as soon as it is received. An acknowledgement with a reference number must be sent to the Authors once the manuscript is received. Rejection straight away may due to out of the journal’s scope, insufficient general interest and inappropriate contents. Only manuscript deemed to be in good order and seem most likely to meet our editorial criteria are sent to Section Editor for appointment of reviewers without delay.

The Editor-in-Chief together with the Section Editor have to provide the Authors with an explanation of the editorial decision on a manuscript. Editor-in-Chief should write high-quality editorial letters that integrate reviewers’ comments and offer additional suggestions to the Author.

All manuscripts submitted to The Journal undergo a rigid double-blind review process including those received from the Editorial Board members. In addition, when making editorial decisions about peer reviewed articles where an editor is an Author or is acknowledged as a contributor, The Journal will ensure that the affected editors exclude themselves from the publication process including the review process and decision on the manuscript. Although editors are allowed to submit manuscript to The Journal, too many submissions from the Journal’s own Editorial Board are not allowed.

When editors are presented with manuscript where their own interests may influence their ability to make an unbiased editorial decision, they should hand over the handling of the manuscript to a suitably qualified editor in the board. The Editorial Board will appoint a suitable member to handle the manuscripts objectively, fairly and professionally free of personal biases that may affect his/her judgments.

The Journal’s Editorial Board has the sole responsibility and authority to determine the proper sanction. Plagiarism is a scientific misconduct and is an unacceptable violation of publication ethics. The Journal takes scientific misconduct seriously and will be dealt with promptly and fairly. The Editors-in-Chief, Editorial Boards, and the Reviewers are the primary means of detecting plagiarism in manuscripts submitted to The Journal. Given the serious nature of a charge of plagiarism, it is required that confidentiality be maintained throughout the process. The charge of plagiarism, supporting materials and outcome are only to be made known to those persons who are involved in the review process. Due process and confidentiality are important in all cases of alleged plagiarism, falsification and other unethical conduct. Such cases will be handled according to the Publication Code of Ethics of the Editorial Board.

In cases where the Editorial Board determined that an unethical conduct occurred, the manuscript will be rejected. If the article has been published, it will be retracted promptly. The Authors may be barred from submitting to The Journal for a period of time (one to two years) depending on the nature of the misconduct. The Journal reserves the right to evaluate issues of misconduct such as plagiarism and redundancy, on a case-by-case basis.

Any work in the manuscript that has been proven to contain any form of plagiarism, falsification, fabrications, or omission of significant material constitutes unethical publishing behaviour and is unacceptable. Section Editor and/or reviewers shall report cases of suspected unethical publishing behaviour of the Author(s) to the attention of the Editor-in-Chief who shall ensure an appropriate action and subsequently bring it to The Journal’s Editorial Board for a suitable action below depending upon the severity of the case:

Journal reputation depends heavily on the conduct and fairness of its Board members. The Editorial Board members shall demonstrate their dedicated efforts to this effect at all times. Complainants shall bring cases of suspected members’ misconduct to the attention of the Editor-in-Chief who shall ensure that the relevant documentation substantiating an unacceptable violation of publication ethics is made available to the Journal’s Editorial Board for a suitable action. Any member who holds an editorial office at The Journal with proven unethical conducts will be dismissed from that office. Additionally, penalties would typically include the sanctions as in the case of Authors found guilty.

The works are made available under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. Users have the right to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of articles published in IMRJ and to use them for any lawful purposes.

Manuscript must be written and submitted in English.

Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all Authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or any other language, without the written consent of the Penerbit IMRJ.

All new submissions of manuscripts should be submitted through the online submission system, Open Journal Systems (OJS), created by the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), and released under the GNU General Public License. For first-time users, authors are required to register at https://imrj.nih.gov.my/ and create accounts for manuscript submission and future access. This online submission system will streamline the review process as well as the final decision process.

All articles published in IMRJ are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The work is the author’s own and there are no falsifications or fabrication of data. Plagiarism includes duplicate publication of the author’s work without proper citation. Authors are expected to use plagiarism checker software and ensure proper citation of all sources and are required to submit a plagiarism report during manuscript submission and the similarity index should be less than 20%. If clear plagiarism is identified (≥ 20%), the article will be rejected. Authors must cite others’ work and ideas explicitly, even if the work or ideas are not quoted exactly or being paraphrased. This applies to previous work published or unpublished in any form.

Self-plagiarism (or “redundancy”) includes reusing portions of previous writings by using identical or nearly identical sentences or paragraphs from earlier writings in research manuscripts, without quotation or acknowledgement. Authoring several manuscripts that are slightly modified from each other and submitted for publication in different journals without acknowledgement of the other manuscript/articles is also a form of self-plagiarism. Self-plagiarism can be minimised or avoided by citing Author’s previous publications where appropriate.

Plagiarism is a misconduct and unacceptable publishing behaviour that may lead to serious consequences to the Authors. In order to avoid plagiarism Authors should: