Policy on conflicts of interest

All participants in the submission and evaluation process (authors, editors, and reviewers) must disclose any relationships that may be considered potential conflicts of interest. Conflicts of interest exist when an author (or his/her institution), the editor, or the reviewer have financial and/or personal ties with each other that may improperly influence their actions.

Accordingly, all authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people and/or organizations that may inappropriately influence (create a bias in) their work. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include: employment, consultancies, stock ownership, fees, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. Authors must disclose any such interests in two places: 1. A summary statement of interest on the Cover Page file. If there is no conflict of interest, authors should just write “Nothing to declare”. 2. This summary statement will be requested again if the article is accepted. It is important that any potential conflict of interest is declared in both places and that the information is compatible.

For O Mundo da Saúde, the following relationships between editors and authors are considered conflicts of interest and are avoided: current colleagues; recent colleagues; recent co-authors; evaluators of their masters/doctoral work (dissertation or thesis). Once jobs are assigned, individual editors are required to report to the managing editor any conflicts not included in the above list. If editors have any type of conflict of interest, co-editors with fewer conflicts will be assigned to the manuscript. In addition, co-editors with fewer conflicts will be designated for all submissions of articles reviewed by the editors in the respective sessions.

All submissions to the journal O Mundo da Saúde that pass the initial screening are also evaluated by reviewers to minimize conflicts of interest. After papers are assigned, reviewers should inform the editor of any conflicts that may exist.