Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement

Our ethic statements are based on Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)’s Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors. The relevant responsibilities of editors, reviewers, and authors of the journal are set out below.

Reviewers have the following responsibilities:

•  To provide written, unbiased, and informative feedback in a timely manner on the scientific value of the work, rating the work’s composition, scientific accuracy, originality, and interest to readers.

•  To treat the manuscript as confidential; not sharing, discussing with third parties, or disclosing the information in the reviewed paper.

• To return/destroy/erase the manuscript and to inform the editor should they be unqualified to review the manuscript, or lack the time to review the manuscript, without undue delay.

•  To judge the manuscript objectively and in a timely manner. Referees should not make personal criticism in their reviews.

•  To return the manuscript without review to the editor if there is a conflict of interest. Specifically, Referees should not review manuscripts authored or co-authored by a person with whom the referee has a close personal or professional relationship, if this relationship could be reasonably thought to bias the review.

•  To explain and support their judgments so that editors and authors may understand the basis of their comments, and to provide reference to published work, where appropriate.

•  To inform the editor of any similarity between the submitted manuscript and another either published or under consideration by another journal to the best of their knowledge.

• To ensure that all unpublished data, information, interpretation and discussion in a submitted article remain confidential and not to use reported work in unpublished, submitted articles for their own research.

•   To alert the editor if a manuscript contains plagiarized material or falsified data to the best of their knowledge.