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Policies

Peer Review

ACE-QI uses a double-anonymized peer review process. All research articles are reviewed by at least two independent peer reviewers. Reviewers are not aware of the authors’ identities, and the reviewers’ names are not shared with the authors. Anonymized reviews are shared with the author in the editorial decision letter. Final decisions are made by the editor-in-chief. The final decision will be made by the editor-in-chief. The journal adheres to the Committee on Publication Ethics guidelines on peer review. More information is available on the Peer Reviewer Instructions. Special issues with guest editors follow the same peer review procedures.

No transfer of copyright is required because the copyright of all articles published in ACE-QI remains with the author. All articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International).

Open Access and Article Processing Charges

ACE-QI is a "gold" open-access journal and all articles are made freely available immediately upon publication. There are no article processing fees or any other type of fees for authors.

PubMed Central, Europe PMC, and NIH Public Access Policy

ACE-QI helps authors meet the requirements of the NIH Public Access Policy and other funders who require articles to be deposited in PubMed Central or Europe PMC. ACE-QI deposits the final published version of articles for funded authors into PubMed Central immediately upon publication.

Authorship

All authors must meet all four criteria for authorship, as defined by the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.

  • Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the study or to the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data
  • Drafting or critically revising the manuscript
  • Final approval of the submitted article
  • Accountable for all aspects of the work

Individuals or organizations that contributed to the manuscript but do not meet the criteria for authorship should be included in the Acknowledgments section. These include funding sources and individuals who have provided editorial support, technical assistance, or substantive feedback on the paper, or those who have provided study subjects or materials.

Corresponding authors are responsible for communication with the journal during the submission, peer review, and revision of the manuscript and for all communication relating to the article after publication.

Author agreement

A completed author agreement form, signed by all authors, must be submitted before submissions can be published in Advances in Cancer Education and Quality Improvement.

Author contributions

All manuscript submissions must include an author contribution statement in which the specific responsibilities of each author are listed. Advances in Cancer Education and Quality Improvement uses Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) for reporting contributions.

  • Conceptualization Generation of ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims
  • Methodology Development or design of methodology; creation of models
  • Software Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components
  • Validation Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs
  • Formal Analysis Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data
  • Investigation Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection
  • Resources Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools
  • Data Curation Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use
  • Writing-Original Draft Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation)
  • Writing-Review & Editing Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre- or post-publication stages
  • Visualization Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation
  • Supervision Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team
  • Project Administration Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution
  • Funding Acquisition Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication

Sample statement:

  • Zhang San: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software
  • Priya Singh: Data Curation, Writing-Original Draft
  • Wang Wu: Visualization, Investigation
  • Jan Jansen: Supervision
  • Ajay Kumar: Software, Validation
  • Sun Qi: Writing- Review and Editing

Conflicts of Interest

ACE-QI adheres to the conflict of interest recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. All authors, editors, editorial board members, and peer reviewers are expected to disclose their conflicts of interest, including financial relationships and other interests that may represent conflicts, such as personal or professional relationships.

Self-Archiving

ACE-QI encourages authors to self-archive the final version (i.e., the peer-reviewed version that is published in the journal) if they choose to do so. Self-archiving can be done on a personal website or a public or institutional repository. Please note that in the case of post-publication changes (e.g., correction, retraction, author name change), the author is responsible for replacing the outdated version of a self-archived article with the most current version.

Data Management and Sharing

Authors of original research articles are required to indicate whether their study data are being shared and if so, how these data may be accessed (e.g., via a data repository or by contacting the corresponding author). Authors should comply with the data sharing and repository requirements of their funding agency. 

Accessibility

ACE-QI is committed to making our journal and its content as accessible as possible to all readers. We strive to meet recognized accessibility standards and continually improve the usability of our website and published materials. If you experience difficulty accessing any content or require materials in an alternative format, please contact the ACE-QI editorial office for assistance.

Ethics

Advances in Cancer Education and Quality Improvement (ACE-QI) follows the Principles of Transparency and Best Practices developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME). Concerns about potential ethical violations in any of the ACE-QI content should be sent to the editors and will be investigated as described in the Allegations of Misconduct section below.

Plagiarism

The WAME defines plagiarism as “the use of others’ published and unpublished ideas or words (or other intellectual property) without attribution or permission and presenting them as new and original rather than derived from an existing source.” Before publication, all manuscripts are screened using iThenticate for text similarity. Any concerns identified during screening will be discussed with the authors.

The WAME defines self-plagiarism as “practice of an author using portions of their previous writings on the same topic in another of their publications, without specifically citing it formally in quotes.” Text recycling (repeating text from a previously published paper) may be acceptable in the Methods section if the submitting author is describing a technique described in previous studies. The recycled text should be from a paper written by the submitting author or their co-authors, and the original paper should be cited. Authors who need to recycle text in their Methods section should note this in their cover letter and explain why the circumstances require it.

Plagiarism (including self-plagiarism that is not deemed acceptable text recycling) will be considered on a case-by-case basis as outlined in the Allegations of Misconduct section.

Duplicate Submission and Publication

Articles should not be submitted to more than one journal at the same time (this practice is unethical and causes an unnecessary duplication of work for peer reviewers). Likewise, publication of an article that was previously published is unethical. Both practices are forms of misconduct (please see the ICMJE Overlapping Publications page for examples) and will be dealt with as described in the Allegations of Misconduct section.

Please note that having posted a draft of your article on a preprint server (e.g., bioRxiv) is not considered prior publication, nor is having presented your work at a conference or seminar. Both practices are allowed but should be noted in your cover letter and title page.

GENERATIVE AI POLICY

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools do not meet the ICMJE authorship criteria and thus cannot be listed as authors on manuscripts submitted to ACE-QI. All authors are responsible for the content of their manuscript. Generative AI tools should not be used to analyze or interpret data, draw conclusions, or generate clinical recommendations. They also should not be used to create or modify text or images. Authors who do use such tools should disclose which AI tools they have used and how they were used in a statement at the end of the manuscript or in the Methods section. This policy will be updated as needed to reflect ongoing advancements in technology and changes to ethical standards. 

Allegations of Misconduct

Any ethical concerns about a paper before or after publication will be brought to the author(s), who will have a chance to rebut and possibly revise the article. If the editors are not satisfied, the article will be withdrawn or retracted, and the author(s) may be suspended from publication in Advances in Cancer Education and Quality Improvement for a period to be determined by the Editorial Board.

Any ethical concerns about a paper before or after publication will be brought to the author(s), who will have a chance to rebut and possibly revise the article. If the editors are not satisfied, the article will be withdrawn or retracted, and the author(s) may be suspended from publication in ACE-QI for a period to be determined by the Editorial Board. Decisions regarding the retraction of a published article or publication of an expression of concern will be made in accordance with the COPE retraction guidelines. Reasons for retraction include plagiarism, falsification/manipulation of data or images, duplicate publication, copyright infringement, manipulation of the peer review process, failure to disclose a conflict of interest, and other legal and ethical issues.

Contact Information

Please contact the ACE-QI staff with any questions.