are accountable and should take responsibility for everything they publish;
should make fair and unbiased decisions independent of commercial considerations, and should ensure a fair and appropriate peer review process;
should guard the integrity of the published record by issuing corrections and retractions when needed and pursuing suspected or alleged research and publication misconduct;
should pursue issues involving reviewer and editorial misconduct;
should make it clear to peer reviewers and authors what is expected of them;
should have appropriate policies in place for handling editorial conflicts of interest.
Authors:
may submit papers without incurring any fees for submission or eventual publication if their work is accepted;
should submit papers only on work that has been conducted in an ethical and responsible manner and that complies with all relevant legislation;
should present their results clearly, honestly, and without fabrication, falsification or inappropriate data manipulation;
should provide references to support the claims and ideas presented in their work;
should endeavour to describe their methods clearly and unambiguously so that their findings can be confirmed by others;
should adhere to publication requirements that submitted work is original, is not plagiarized, has not been published previously, and is not under review elsewhere;
should take collective responsibility for submitted and published work;
should ensure that the authorship accurately reflects individuals’ contributions to the work and its reporting;
should disclose relevant funding sources and any existing or potential conflicts of interest;
should include a statement of research ethics for research-based papers dealing with, or affecting, human participants. Studies dealing with minors are to be particularly scrutinized for such ethical procedures;
should be allowed to retract, withdraw or amend their work if the content is proven in some manner to be false or misleading.
Publication ethics:
All papers which are screened into the blind peer review system undergo a plagiarism check and cannot be sent out for review if found to include plagiarized content.
During the review process, any instances of plagiarized content identified by reviewers and editors should be reported to the authors with evidence clearly given.