Ethics

There are ethical requirements for publication to ensure high-quality scientific publications, public confidence in scientific discoveries, and proper attribution of ideas. It is essential to avoid:

1. Plagiarism

It is unjust and dishonest to take the ideas and labour of others without giving them credit. Use your own words instead of copying even one sentence from someone else's work or one of your own that has been previously published without due citation.

2. Duplicate submissions
It is unethical to simultaneously submit the same work to multiple journals. This wastes the work of editors and peer reviewers and can harm the reputation of journals if the same article gets published in many journals. Furthermore, this necessitates the publication of several identical publications based on the same experiment. It can decrease the likelihood that readers will pay attention to your writings.

3. Animal rights

For research done on regulated animals (which includes all living vertebrates and/or higher invertebrates), either international or local rules and regulations must have been followed. Before undertaking the research, authorisation from the competent authorities must have been acquired (in most cases an Institutional Review Board, or Ethics Committee). The authors must provide an ethical statement in the Methods section of their paper that provides comprehensive information on their approval (including the name of the granting organization, and the approval reference numbers). In the absence of an approved reference number, formal approval must be submitted as a secret additional file. The research on non-human primates is governed by certain standards outlined in the Weatherall (2006) report (The Use of Non-Human Primates in Research).

For research done on non-regulated animals, an explanation of why ethical approval was not necessary should be included.

Animals used in experiments should have been treated according to the author's institution's strictest guidelines.

We highly encourage all authors to adhere to the ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments) criteria created by NC3Rs.

Articles should provide detailed descriptions of the organism(s) employed in the research. When known, the description should include strain names.