The Robert Koch Institute (RKI): main building in Berlin. more
Germany’s Public Health institute RKI monitors the population’s health and wellbeing. more
The Robert Koch Institute is the German government's central institution for the identification, surveillance and prevention of infectious diseases in the Portfolio of the German Ministry of Health. more
The Journal of Health Monitoring (JoHM) follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors’ (ICMJE) Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, which were published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA). More detailed information about the topics set out below can be found in the following guidelines:
Authors, reviewers and the JoHM’s editorial staff are expected to adhere to the ethical guidelines outlined in the Ethical Policy and Malpractice Statement of the Journal of Health Monitoring.
An independent editorial board supports the editor in establishing and maintaining editorial policy. Details about current membership of the editorial board can be found on the website under ‘Editorial Board’.
Members of the Editorial Board may act as authors for the Journal of Health Monitoring. The status as a member of the Editorial Board has no bearing on editorial decisions concerning manuscripts.
Authors should have contributed substantially to the work and accept overall responsibility for its entire content. The corresponding author takes primary responsibility for communication with the JoHM and should be available after publication to respond to any critiques and cooperate with any requests from the Journal should questions about the paper arise after publication.
Further information can be found in the Instructions for Authors and in the Ethical Policy and Malpractice Statement of the Journal of Health Monitoring.
The ICMJE recommends that authorship be based on the following four criteria:
Further information is available in the Ethical Policy and Malpractice Statement of the Journal of Health Monitoring.
If members of the JoHM’s editorial staff provide a manuscript to the JoHM, other editors will assume responsibility for the editorial tasks related to the contribution.
Everyone involved in the review and publication process should be aware of potential conflicts of interest while exercising their role. All authors are required to complete the ICMJE Disclosure Form to declare relationships, activities and interests, and to indicate the source of their research funding. Information provided by the authors will be published with the article.
Authors will be required to declare their sources of funding in the ICMJE Disclosure Form. Published articles will include a statement declaring the authors’ funding sources.
Authors are encouraged to deposit the data underlying their contributions in a data repository, provided that doing so does not conflict with ethical guidelines, or data protection or other laws and regulations.
All research should be undertaken in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (as amended). Approval of the study should have been obtained from an independent local, regional or national review body. Participants must have been informed about the objectives and content of the study and data protection and have provided their informed consent to participate.
Further information is available in the Ethical Policy and Malpractice Statement of the Journal of Health Monitoring.
Editors will not share information about manuscripts with anyone other than the authors and reviewers. Editors will also make clear that reviewers should keep manuscripts, associated material, and the information they contain strictly confidential.
The JoHM forwards submitted manuscripts to independent experts in the respective field for review (with the exception of Editorials and Abstracts). The double-anonymous peer review process is described in more detail elsewhere (see the Review section on the website).
If readers of the JoHM believe that members of the editorial staff, the editorial board, reviewers or authors are not adhering to the JoHM’s ethical, editorial and publishing policies, they should send a written complaint to the editors at healthmonitoring@rki.de.
If the editors are unable to resolve a complaint about a published article, the matter can be referred to the corresponding author’s institution or funding agency. In cases where agreement cannot be reached, a note may be published alongside the article.
Authors have the right to appeal against edtorial decisions. Appeals should be addressed in writing to the editors of the JoHM at healthmonitoring@rki.de. If the appeal concerns an opinion provided as part of the peer review process, any exchange between authors and reviewers will be mediated by the editors. If agreement cannot be reached, the editors can commission an arbitration report. Editorial decisions after an appeal procedure are final.
If a significant error affects a small portion of an otherwise reliable article, the editors of the JoHM will decide whether a correction should be published. In particular, this applies to errors that have arisen inadvertently when drawing up the manuscript (honest error) or during editorial work. Corrections due to incorrect manuscripts are referred to as corrigenda. Corrections resulting from mistakes made during editorial work are referred to as errata.
Further information is available in the Ethical Policy and Malpractice Statement of the Journal of Health Monitoring.
Third party texts or data may not be presented in a way that creates the impression that the authors have conducted the work themselves (plagiarism). All sources must be appropriately referenced (this also applies to repeating sections verbatim, summarising text passages and/or paraphrasing). Word-for-word citations must be designated using single quotes.
The editors can provide text modules for invited contributions. For example, descriptions of the study design of studies conducted by the Robert Koch Institute. These modules can all appear in various contributions at the same time and even in one (or more) issues of the Journal without being considered plagiarism.
If scientific misconduct is alleged, the editors will initiate appropriate procedures. If the investigation proves scientific misconduct, the editor will publish a retraction of the article.
Further information is available in the Ethical Policy and Malpractice Statement of the Journal of Health Monitoring.
The JoHM does not accept manuscripts that are submitted simultaneously to more than one Journal.
Further information is available in the Ethical Policy and Malpractice Statement of the Journal of Health Monitoring.
Should the manuscript be published on a preprint server, the editorial office of the JoHM must be informed and a link must be provided that will be forwarded to the reviewers. The authors are responsible for amending the preprint in order to refer to the published article.
Contributions to the JoHM are mainly written in German. The editorial office arranges for translation into English (or German, respectively) by a translation agency. The costs of translation are met by the JoHM.
This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed permitted under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons License CC BY 4.0 (see below) to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) definition of open access.
Users are free to copy and redistribute published articles in any medium or format under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
By submitting the manuscript, the corresponding author, on behalf of all contributing authors, grants RKI the non-exclusive right to publish the manuscript under the terms of the Creative Commons License CC BY 4.0 and agrees to the terms of publication (see Assignment of Rights under "Related Links"). The contributing authors retain their copyrights and the unrestricted rights to publish or use the manuscript. Publication will only take place after acceptance of the manuscript by the editor; submitting the manuscript does not constitute a claim against the editor for publishing the manuscript.
The content published in the Journal of Health Monitoring is electronically preserved by using the Robert Koch Institutes edoc-server and the Information System of the Federal Health Monitoring to ensure its availability in the future. The English articles are additionally archived at PubMed Central.
The authors are free to deposit all versions of their paper in an institutional or subject repository, including Preprints, Author's Accepted Manuscript and Published articles (Version of Record, License CC BY 4.0). No embargo is applied.
Readers of the Journal of Health Monitoring can contribute to the scientific debate of a published article by writing a letter to the editor. Letters to the editor should be sent to healthmonitoring@rki.de within three months of an article’s publication. The editors decide whether the letter will be published. Letters to the editor will be published on the JoHM’s website, alongside a reply from the authors, if appropriate.
The JoHM is an open access journal. No fees are charged for the submission, publication or translation of contributions. The costs of publication are covered by the financial resources of the Robert Koch Institute, which is financed, as a subordinate authority, by the Federal Ministry of Health.
The Journal of Health Monitoring does not carry advertising.
Date: 16.01.2024
