Ethical Disclosure

Transparency and integrity are fundamental to credible scholarly research and publication. This journal requires disclosure of all relevant interests and relationships that could influence, or appear to influence, the conduct of research, peer review, and editorial decision-making. These requirements apply to all parties—authors, reviewers, and editors—and are essential to maintaining public trust and protecting the integrity of the scholarly record.

To support these standards, the journal requires full and honest disclosure of conflicts of interest, funding sources, and third-party contributions, as well as proper acknowledgment and documented permission for any reused materials. Ethical disclosure enables readers, reviewers, and editors to accurately assess research conduct and interpretation, ensuring that all published work meets the highest standards of accountability and ethical integrity.

Conflict of Interest

Authors, reviewers, and editors must disclose any actual or potential conflicts of interest that could reasonably be viewed as influencing the research, its interpretation, the peer-review process, or editorial decisions. Conflicts may arise from financial relationships such as employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership, patents, research funding, or other relevant interests; personal or family relationships; academic competition; or institutional affiliations that may bias judgment.

  • Authors are required to include a clear Conflict of Interest statement in their manuscript, explicitly declaring all financial and non-financial relationships, including funding sources, employment affiliations, and patent holdings. Authors must explicitly state if no conflicts exist.
  • Reviewers must disclose any personal, financial, academic, or institutional conflicts that may affect their objectivity and must decline to evaluate manuscripts when such relationships could compromise their impartiality. Reviewers who discover a conflict of interest after accepting a review assignment must immediately notify the editorial office and withdraw from the review. In such cases, the editor will seek an alternative reviewer. Reviewers should not discuss the manuscript with colleagues who may have conflicts or share any information about the manuscript outside the peer-review process.
  • Editors must recuse themselves from handling submissions when conflicts may affect their independence and ensure that any manuscript in which they have a potential conflict of interest is reassigned to an independent, qualified editor.

Funding Disclosure

Authors must clearly disclose all sources of financial support for their research, including the names of funding organizations and grant numbers. This section must explicitly define the role of the funders in the study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation of data, or the writing of the manuscript.

If the funders had no involvement in these processes, authors must explicitly state: "The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript."

Any institutional or organizational financial support specifically allocated to the project should be listed here rather than in the acknowledgments.

Disclosure of Prior Dissemination and Manuscript Versions

Authors must disclose all prior public dissemination of the research at the time of submission, including:

  • Preprint postings (with repository name, DOI, and posting date). 
  • Presentations at conferences, or scientific meetings.
  • Prior publication of subsets of data or preliminary results related to the current submission.
  • Related manuscripts that are under consideration or have been published elsewhere.

Authors must clearly indicate which version of the manuscript is being submitted and confirm that the submitted version is not simultaneously under consideration by another journal. Any substantive differences between a preprint version and the submitted manuscript must be clearly described.

Permissions and Acknowledgements

Authors must ensure proper attribution of all sources and obtain necessary permissions for any reused materials, including figures, tables, images, and datasets from previously published works. Copyright permissions must be documented and submitted with the manuscript where required. Any third-party content must be accompanied by a proper citation.

All individuals who contributed to the research or manuscript preparation but do not meet the criteria for authorship—such as those providing technical assistance, professional writing, or developmental editing—must be clearly acknowledged.

Data Transparency and Reproducibility

Authors must ensure transparency and reproducibility by making the data underlying their research available to the fullest extent possible, whenever ethically and legally appropriate. Manuscripts must include a Data Availability Statement clearly describing where and how the supporting data can be accessed, such as through recognized public repositories, institutional databases, or upon reasonable request. Where applicable, persistent identifiers (e.g., DOIs or accession numbers) should be provided.

Authors must retain and make available the underlying data for a minimum of five (5) years following publication, or longer if required by institutional, funding agency, or regulatory policies. Requests for data access should be responded to within thirty (30) days.

If data cannot be made publicly available due to ethical, legal, privacy, confidentiality, or proprietary restrictions, authors must clearly justify these limitations in the Data Availability Statement. For commercially sensitive or proprietary data, authors should provide sufficient information to allow independent verification of findings.

Authors must ensure that all shared data are accurate, complete, and sufficient to enable verification and replication of the reported findings, and must make data available to the journal upon request during peer review or post-publication assessment.

Disclosure Requirements and Compliance

  • All disclosures must be made at the time of manuscript submission and updated promptly if circumstances change during peer review or after publication. The editorial office may request additional information or documentation to verify disclosed interests and funding statements, and reserves the right to assess whether disclosed relationships may compromise the integrity or objectivity of the work.
  • Declared conflicts of interest and funding information may be published as part of the final article to ensure transparency for readers.
  • Individuals or organizations acknowledged must have provided legitimate support or contributions and must not have engaged in activities that constitute undisclosed authorship or conflicts of interest.
  • Failure to disclose relevant conflicts of interest, funding sources, third-party contributions, or other required information may result in editorial action, including manuscript rejection, publication of a correction or an expression of concern, retraction of the article, or notification of the authors’ institutions, depending on the severity of the omission and in accordance with the journal’s research integrity policies.