Focus, Scope and Objectives

Lo SCALPELLO Journal is the official journal of the Ortopedici Traumatologi Ospedalieri d’Italia (O.T.O.D.I.) and publishes original articles and clinical applications concerning the most recent news in the orthopedic field, as well as reviews of international literature, letters to the editor and congress posters. The journal is a training tool for the young specialist and an update for the most experienced orthopedist, who will find in it not only basic knowledge of the subject, but also new clinical pathways, innovative diagnostic frameworks and the description of the most recent methods of treatment. The journal publishes once a year a selection of contents of the annual Trauma Meeting Congress.

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Submit new article via our new Editorial Manager System

(Please before submitting your manuscript check our Authors Guidelines)

Editorial Policies

Lo SCALPELLO Journal follows the 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 (joint statement by COPE, DOAJ, WAME, and OASPA)

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

This is an open access journal distributed in accordance with the CC-BY-NC-ND (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International) license: the work can be used by mentioning the author and the license, but only for non-commercial purposes and only in the original version. For further information: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en

Pre- and post-prints

Lo SCALPELLO Journal allows and encourages authors to deposit both their pre- and post-prints in Open-Access institutional archives or repositories. The primary benefit of pre- and post-print self-archiving is reaching a larger audience which enhances the visibility and impact of your research.

Authorship and Contributorship

Lo SCALPELLO Journal endorses the ICMJE criteria for defining the roles of Authors and Contributors to justify authorship. According to the ICMJE, authorship criteria should be based on 1) substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work, 2) drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content and 3) final approval of the version to be published and 4) agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, 3 and 4. It is a requirement that all authors have been accredited as appropriate upon submission of the manuscript. Contributors who do not qualify as authors should be mentioned under Acknowledgements.

 Acknowledgements

Under acknowledgements please specify contributors to the article other than the authors accredited. Please also include specifications of the source of funding for the study and any potential conflict of interests if appropriate.

Ethical Approvals (Statement of human rights and Statement on welfare of animals)

Researches involving human subjects, human material or data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki as revised in 2013 and must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee.

When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether institutional and national standards for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed. Further guidance on animal research ethics is available from the World Medical Association (2016 revision). When reporting experiments on ecosystems involving non-native species, Authors are bound to ensure compliance with the institutional and national guide for the preservation of native biodiversity.

All manuscripts submitted to Lo SCALPELLO Journal must include a statement detailing this, including the name of the ethics committee and the reference number where appropriate. In case a study has been granted an exemption from requiring ethics approval, this should be detailed in the manuscript, together with the name of the ethics committee that granted the exemption.
Manuscripts may be rejected if the Editor considers that the research has not been carried out within an appropriate ethical framework.

If a study has not been submitted to an ethics committee prior to commencing, retrospective ethics approval usually cannot be obtained and it may not be possible to consider the manuscript for peer review. How to proceed in such cases is at the Editor(s)’ discretion.

Authors will be expected to have obtained ethics committee approval and informed patient consent for any experimental use of a novel procedure or tool where a clear clinical advantage based on clinical need was not apparent before treatment.

For retrospective/protocol studies in which only aggregate data (e.g., incidences of TB in a certain region) are analysed, the Ethical Approval by an appropriate Committee is usually not required, as the data cannot be traced back to specific patients.

Data Availability

To promote transparency of data supporting the results reported in the article, the Journal encourages authors to provide a statement of data availability, provided that the research data can be made publicly. This should be included at the end of the “Materials and Methods” section under a separate “Data availability” subheading. Data availability statement should include information on where data can be found, whether data are deposited on publicly available data research repositories or they are available on reasonable request from the corresponding author (examples of data availability statements: 1) the data associated with the paper are available in the [NAME] repository; 2) the data associated with the paper are not publicly available but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request; 3) the data associated with the paper will be available in the [NAME] repository following an embargo period). Such data will not be published as Supplementary Digital Material.

Clinical Trials

Clinical trials should be reported using the guidelines available at www.consort-statement.org. The Journal encourages authors submitting manuscripts reporting from a clinical trial to register the trials in any of the following free, public clinical trials registries: www.clinicaltrials.gov, http://clinicaltrials.ifpma.org/clinicaltrials/, http://isrctn.org/. The clinical trial registration number and name of the trial register will then be published with the paper.

The authors are expected to ensure that they have met the requirements of their funding and regulatory agencies regarding aggregate clinical trial results reporting in clinical trial registries.

It is the authors’, and not the journal editors’, responsibility to explain any discrepancies between results reported in registries and journal publications.

Systematic Reviews

Systematic reviews should be reported using the PRISMA guidelines available at http://prisma-statement.org. A PRISMA checklist and flow diagram (as a Figure) should also be included in the submission material.

Conflict of Interest and Source of Funding

A conflict of interest occurs when any financial interest may affect the content of an article. This does not imply that any financial involvement with a sponsor that supported the research or funded a consultation is problematic.

Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, and paid expert testimony) are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and of science itself.

All participants in the peer-review and publication process must disclose all relationships that could be viewed as potential conflicts of interest. Disclosure of such relationships is also important in connection with editorials and review articles, because it can be more difficult to detect bias in these types of publications than in reports of original research.

To promote transparency and avoid any possible bias of the readers towards the article, each author must disclose any potential conflict of interest both in the Authorship responsibility – Financial disclosure – Copyright Transfer Form and at the end of the manuscript file in the notes under the “Conflicts of interest” section. Editors may use information disclosed in conflict-of-interest and financial-interest statements as a basis for editorial decisions, and may ask for further information relating to competing interests. Potential conflicts of interest can be directly or indirectly related to an article and may include but are not limited to research funds from organizations that have financial interest in the results of publication, financial support for attending symposia or educational programs, consultant relationships, employment funds, personal financial interests. The conflict of interest disclosure should follow the recommendations of the ICMJE. All submitted manuscripts must include a ‘conflict of interest’ section listing all competing interests (financial and non-financial). If there is no conflict of interest, the authors should state at the end of the manuscript file in the notes under the “Conflicts of interest” section: “The Authors declare to have no conflict of interest”.

All sources of funding should be acknowledged at the end of the manuscript file in the notes under the “Funding” section. The role of the sponsor, if any, in the study design, in the acquisition analysis and interpretation of data, in drafting the manuscript should be briefly described. If the sponsor has not been specifically involved in the research this should be stated.

Informed Consent

For all manuscripts that include details, images, or videos relating to individual participants, written informed consent for the publication of these must be obtained from the participants (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 16) and a statement to this effect should appear in the manuscript. If the participant has died, then consent for publication must be sought from the next of kin of the participant. This documentation must be made available to Editors on request, and will be treated confidentially. In cases where images are entirely unidentifiable and there are no details on individuals reported within the manuscript, consent for publication of images may not be required. The final decision on whether consent to publish is required is at the Editor(s)’ discretion.

Lo SCALPELLO Journal strictly follows the ICMJE Protection of Research Participants policy. Patients have a right to privacy that should not be violated without informed consent. When informed consent has been obtained, editors may request authors to provide a copy before making the editorial decision.

Publication Ethics

Lo SCALPELLO Journal meets and upholds ethical behavior at all stages of the publication process, by following the standards for best practices by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICJME) and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME).

Following a summary of duties of editors, peer-reviewers, and authors we expect our journals to comply with.

Editors are expected to:

• act in a balanced, objective and fair way while evaluating manuscripts, considering solely their intellectual merit without regard to authors' race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy.
• handle submissions for sponsored supplements or special issues in the same way as other submissions, so that articles are considered without commercial influence.
• adopt and follow reasonable procedures in the event of complaints of an ethical or conflict nature, in accordance with the policies and procedures of the Journal, where appropriate.
• give authors a reasonable opportunity to respond to any complaints. Documentation associated with any such complaints should be retained.
• not disclose any information about a manuscript that is submitted to the journal to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.

Reviewers are expected to be professional, honest, courteous, prompt, and constructive. They should:

• assist in improving the quality of the published paper by reviewing the manuscript objectively, in a timely manner.
• comment on major strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript as a written communication, independent of the design, methodology, results, and interpretation of the study.
• maintain the confidentiality of any information supplied by the editor or author and not retain or copy the manuscript.
• alert the editor to any published or submitted content that is substantially similar to that under review.
• be aware of any potential conflicts of interest (financial, institutional, collaborative or other relationships between the reviewer and author) and to alert the editor to these.

Authors have an ethical obligation to submit creditable research results for publication. They should:

• confirm that the manuscript as submitted is not under consideration or accepted for publication elsewhere.
• confirm that all the work in the submitted manuscript is original and to acknowledge and cite content reproduced from other sources. To obtain permission to reproduce any content from other sources.
• declare any potential conflicts of interest.
• maintain records of data associated with their submitted manuscript, and to supply or provide access to these data, on reasonable request.
• ensure that any studies involving human or animal subjects conform to national, local and institutional laws and requirements and confirm that approval has been sought and obtained where appropriate. Authors should obtain express permission from human subjects and respect their privacy.
• notify promptly the journal editor or publisher if a significant error in their publication is identified.

Peer Review Process

Peer reviewed articles include:

1. Original article
2. Review article (Meta-analysis)
3. Case report
4. Editorial
5. Letter to the Editor-in-Chief

The Editorial Board of the Journal will immediately screen all articles submitted for publication in that journal. Those articles which fail to reach the scientific standards of the journal may be declined without further review. Those articles which satisfy the requirements of the Editorial Board will be sent to the Section Editor, that will be responsible for identifying reviewers and, after receiving reviews, for making a recommendation on the acceptability of the manuscript for publication. The reviewers are experts in the field who have agreed to provide a rapid assessment of the article. Every effort will be made to provide an editorial decision as to acceptance for publication within 3 months of submission. Referees may request a revision of the article to be made. In this case, it is generally understood that only one revised version can be considered for a further appraisal under the peer-review system. The Editorial Board, and in particolarly the Section Editors, of the journal are responsible for the final selection of referees to conduct the peer-review process for that journal. The names of referees will not be made available to authors. However, referees will be informed as to the identity of the authors whose articles are subject to review. All selected members of the Editorial Board and referees are asked to declare any competing interests they may have in reviewing a manuscript. If on receiving the editorial decision concerning their manuscript authors are not satisfied they are invited to appeal to the Scientific Secretariat. In cases in which this is considered appropriate a second opinion on the manuscript will be requested.

All final decision on acceptability will be made by the Editor-in-Chief or the Managing Editor.

Lo SCALPELLO Journal is published four-monthly and is sent, free of charge, to all members of “Ortopedici Traumatologi Ospedalieri d’Italia, (O.T.O.D.I.)” up to date with annual dues.

“Ortopedici Traumatologi Ospedalieri d’Italia, (O.T.O.D.I.)” and Pacini Editore srl inform readers and users of Lo SCALPELLO Journal, that the published articles reflect only the research and the opinion of the authors signing the contents. These articles therefore do not represent and do not in any way constitute indications or guidelines of the O.T.O.D.I. itself. This differs from the texts and contents that are explicitly declared as official institutional matrix and published in the appropriate sections of the Journal, which are dedicated to the Guidelines of O.T.O.D.I.

Lo SCALPELLO Journal, is sent by Newsletter to O.T.O.D.I. members, subscribers, doctors, health professionals, exclusively for professional training and improvement and to inform and promote activities and products/services, strictly related to the professional activities of users, always ensuring a strong affinity between the message and the user's interest. Please read the Privacy Policy at the following link: https://www.loscalpellojournal.com/privacy-policy. For communications/information: info@pacinieditore.it

Photocopies, for personal use (for reading, consultation and study purposes), are permitted within the limits of 15% of each volume or journal issue, excluding advertising, by following payment to SIAE of the charge due, in compliance with current regulations on copyright (Law 633, 1941), and specific authorization in writing from CLEARedi: https://www.clearedi.org/topmenu/HOME.aspx

Subscriptions. The annual subscriptions for non members are: Italy: € 140; Elsewhere: € 160; Current issue: € 55. For information and subscriptions contact: Pacini Editore Srl. via Gherardesca 1 - 56121 Ospedaletto (Pisa), Italy. Tel. +39 050 313 011 - Fax +39 050 313 0300 - E-mail: abbonamenti@pacinieditore.it Subscriber data are treated according to Italian law in DLgs, 30 June 2003, n. 196 as updated with the UE General Data Protection Regulation 2016 - by means of computers operated by specifically responsible personnel. These data are used by the Publisher to mail this publication. In accordance with Art. 7 of the above mentioned DLgs, 30 June 2003, n. 196, subscribers can, at any time, view, change or delete their personal data or withdraw their use by writing to Pacini Editore S.r.L. - Via A. Gherardesca 1, 56121 Ospedaletto (Pisa), Italy. For further information refer to the website: http://www.pacinieditore.it/privacy/

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