Assessing Intellectual Property, Publication Ethics, and Related Legal provisions in the Islamic Republic of Iran

Abstract

Some ethical issues need to be considered before, during, and after performing a study and upon the distribution of results. If ethical issues are disregarded, the word "ethical misconduct" is used. On the other hand, since any study is a scientific work and a result of an individual's ideas and efforts, the owner or owners of that scientific work, legally have intellectual property belongs to the owner(s). In international laws, such as Helsinki's code of conduct, this intellectual property has been explicitly explained. In our country, the law adopted to protect the rights of authors and artists, adopted in 1970, and the national guideline for ethics in the distribution of scientific work, adopted by the ministry of health in 2009, support the authors' rights. Although nothing has been mentioned in this regard in the Islamic Penal Code, we can find some evidence of authors' rights in some documents. In this study, various publication misconducts will be presented and we will present some international organizations that are active in this field and have a glimpse at national laws in this regard. Conclusively, we suggest that authors, research policy makers, and people related to scientific publication pay more attention to ethical issues, in order to improve the quality of conducted research along side its quantity.