Ethics

Ethics

1. Editor Responsibility: Editors should accept or evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content without bias towards race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors, and try the best to ensure the quality of articles published on this journal. Editorial staff must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, and the publisher. Editors would take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers involving academic misconduct. They would not encourage such academic misconduct, or knowingly allow such misconduct to take place. The editorial office would take appropriate action if there were any allegation of research misconduct. Publishers and editors should always be ready to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed.

2. Reviewer Responsibility: Reviewers shall treat all manuscripts with the most professional attitude to make the review process transparent, confidential and fair. Comments and decision should be made upon the article, instead of upon authors, without bias towards race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors. Once the reviewers find that there are mistakes, plagiarism, suspected forgery of data and other problems in the article, they are obliged to report it to the editorial office. Reviewers shall not use unpublished papers or materials in their research. If the reviewers have competition, collaboration or other relations with the author, company or institution related to the article, they should report the conflict of interest and avoid reviewing the article.

3. Author Responsibility: The journal has joined the Ethical Convention for Science and Technology Journals of National Societies. The authors should ensure the originality and integrity of the article, and there is no plagiarism, forgery, falsification, or fraud. A letter of recommendation from the author's institute should be submitted along with the manuscript, in which the authors should declare: ① the content and material of the manuscript are authentic; ②there is no dispute about the authorship and author ranking; ③there is no multiple submission or redundant publishing. Should multiple submission be found, the editorial office may impose a punishment. The journal adopts the plagiarism checking system developed by CNKI. The repetition rate should not exceed 10%. For the part of experimental method, the standard could be lowered appropriately. Should fraud or plagiarism be verified, the editorial officewill issue a warning letter, reject the submission, notify the institute, and make an announcement in our journal.

4. Authorship: Those who are named as authors should directly contribute to the research work, writing the manuscript or has an important guiding role. The first author and the corresponding author shall take overall responsibility for the article and revise the paper according to the review comments. The journal does not accept co-first author or co-corresponding author. Other contributors of the paper may be listed in acknowledgement. “Gift author” is strictly prohibited. The order of authors shall be collectively determined before submission and shall not be changed thereafter. After publishing, the journal shall not be responsible for disputes of copyright or authorship. However, if the author ranking dispute is caused by the negligence of the editing process, the editorial office shall be responsible. For a collective piece of work, the authors should specify their contribution in the Authors Contribution Form and submit it along with the manuscript.

5. Medical Ethics: The ethical issue of the study must comply with common principles of medical ethics. When research participants are humans, the author should explain whether its procedure complied with the ethical standards formulated by relevant committee (institutional, regional or national) responsible for human trials. The approval document of the committee should be submitted (the approval number should be included in the article). Consent letter from research participants or their relatives must be obtained but not submitted to the editorial office. When reporting animal experiments, the study should comply with guidelines published by relevant committee on animal rights, and the approval document should be submitted.

6. Trial Registration: Clinical trials must include the Universal Trial Number (UTN) obtained from one of the Primary Registries in the WHO Registry Network. The UTN shall be included in the abstract or the main body of the full text.

7. Conflicts of Interest: All authors must disclose all potential conflicts of interest, i.e., when the financing/ personal status/ affiliation of the authors (or the authors' organization/ employer) may affect the authors' decision, work or manuscript. When a product is involved, the author should also disclose whether there is a conflict of interest against competitive products. Authors should also submit the Statement of Competing Interests along with the manuscript.

8. Intellectual Property and Open Science: The editorial office strives to respect the protection of intellectual property and requires editors, authors and reviewers to do so. Any potential infringement should be avoided. Third-party infringement to the intellectual property of the journal is prohibited. On the premise of intellectual property protection, the journal encourages the practice of open science. Authors are encouraged to publish or share their research data whenever appropriate. The data for sharing may include original data, observation records, experimental results, etc. The journal also encourages the sharing of software, code, models, algorithms, protocols, methods and other useful materials. Authors can upload the materials above to an accessible third-party repository and make a proper citation or add a link at the end of the article.