UOJM employs a double-blind peer review to minimize bias in reviewing submissions. Each submission is reviewed by at least 3 reviewers who evaluate the significance, scientific validity and originality. Reviewers are students and/or faculty members at the University of Ottawa. Please note, all manuscripts will be screened for plagiarism via Turnitin prior to peer review.

1.  Privacy

Please note that all information submitted as part of this document will be confidential and will only be used for the review process of UOJM, unless as otherwise stated to be necessary in the final publication.

2.   Conflicts of Interest

To ensure high level of integrity and minimal bias in the works presented in the UOJM, authors must disclose and declare all potential conflicts of interest. These include, but are not limited to, all personal assistance, financial relationships and sources of funding leading to the submission, and all organizations that could potentially profit or lose through the publication of the manuscript.

Authors must explicitly state all potential conflicts in a specific section as part of the submission to the UOJM, and provide additional documentation if necessary. Investigators are also expected to disclose these conflicts to all participants in the study, and should state whether they have done so in their manuscript. The declaring of conflicts does not exclude a submission from publication, but would be taken into consideration during the review process to ensure transparency. All declared information remains confidential. Upon approval of a manuscript, the editors will discuss with the authors on ways of disclosing these conflicts in the publication.

3.  Copyright

Authors publishing in the UOJM retain copyright of their articles, including all the drafts and the final published version in the journal. While UOJM does not retain any rights to the articles submitted, by agreeing to publish in UOJM, authors are granting the journal right of first publication and distribution rights of their articles. Authors are free to submit their works to other publications, including journals, institutional repositories or books, with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in UOJM. Copies of UOJM are distributed both in print and online, and all materials will be publicly available online. The journal holds no legal responsibility as to how these materials will be used by the public. Works are  licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

4.  Informed consent from patients

Patients have rights to their privacy and clinical information, and efforts will be made to conceal patients’ identities in all publications. Clinical information pertaining to a patient, or identifying information including names, hospital numbers, or images of body parts, would not be published unless they are deemed essential for a particular study and consent has been obtained from the patient. However, patients should recognize that anonymity cannot be guaranteed. Prior to informed consent, the patients must be shown the manuscript to be published. Informed consent should be stated in the published article.