Retraction Note

Kowsar Publishing Company Legal Department in accordance with ethics committee of Ahvaz Jundishapur University ofMedical Sciences (on behalf of editorial board of Jundishapur Journal of Microbiology – JJM) and ethics committee of Iranian Hospital in Dubai (on behalf of editorial board of Iranian Red Crescent Medical Journal – IRCMJ) investigated several cases of authorship manipulations and illegal guest and gift authorship cases in 13 published (12 articles in Iranian Red Crescent Medical Journal (IRCMJ) and 1 article in Jundishapur Journal of Microbiology (JJM), full list is in Table 1) and 52 accepted (but not published, Table 2) articles. The mentioned group decided to retract published items from journals and also stop the publishing process of other 52 articles and withdraw them from both journal websites. The decision was made after a close investigation about the evidences from authorship manipulation and illegal access to manuscript files and changing the text of manuscript without journal’s permission. Based on a legal case registered in court of Tehran, Iran (place of the claimed crime) and evidences provided by cyber police of Iran, journals retracted/withdraw the below mentioned articles from publication. We hereby would like to request authors to respect the decision made by the journals. On the other hand, we have notified COPE, committee of publication ethics about this authorship manipulation and sent them the complete list of people and whom we think might be responsible for this scientific misconduct. All retraction notes and retracted XML packages have also been sent to PMC for removing these articles from their database. We also keep the rights for our journals and their editorial board members to follow this case legally. As a result of this scientific misconduct, we changed a few of our authorship changes rules and regulations. The letter with complete list of changes might be found in publisher website, in the link below: (link: http://kowsarpub.com/en/index.php/events/news/842-no-authorship-changes-after-accept) We, Kowsar Publishing Company, completely understand our huge duty on keeping the safety of science world and publishing environment and will follow all next coming suspicious cases to guarantee that nothing same will happen again. A complete list of the articles and authors might be found from the Tables 1 and 2.