Editors should adhere to the following ethic requirement:
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 their 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.The journal and its editors should always be ready to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed.If there is a competing interest between an editor and the manuscript, the editor should avoid processing the manuscript.
Reviewers should adhere to the following ethic requirement:
Reviewers shall treat all manuscripts with the most professional attitude to make the review process 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data and other problems in the article, they are obliged to report it to the editorial office.Reviewers shall not use unpublished papers or materials in their research.If the reviewers have competition, collaboration or other relations with the author, company or institution related to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.
Authors should adhere to the following ethic requirement:
(1) Proper credit should be given when citing achievements of others.The cited part should not constitute main or substantial part of the submitted paper.When citing results of a third-party from another person's work, the source and the credit should be properly marked.
(2) Collaborative research results should be signed in the order of contribution to the research (except for special convention or agreement), and the order of authors shall not be changed once the manuscript is submitted. Authors should describe their contribution in the Authors Statement Form and submit it to the editorial office.All signatories are responsible for the research results, while the presider of collaborative research is responsible for the overall research.
(3) When introducing and evaluating one's own or others' works, the principles of objectivity, impartiality, and accuracy should be followed.
(4) Authors should ensure validity and accuracy of data, and ensure completeness, authenticity, and safety of experimental records.Research results and statistical data must be authentic, complete, and accurate.Mistake and errors in published content should be acknowledged and announced in appropriate manner.
(5) 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 disclose the conflict of interest in the Authors Statement Form and submit it to the editorial office.
(6) When reporting animal experiments, the study should comply with guidelines published by relevant committee on animal rights, and the approval document should be submitted.For articles involving such topics, authors need to indicate in the article the ethical approval status and the number of certificates obtained.
Authors should avoid the following academic misconduct:
(1) Plagiarizing and tampering with academic achievements of others
Plagiarizing or tampering with others' works, achievements, academic viewpoints, academic ideas or experimental data, survey results; making use of others researchers’ academic knowledge, assumptions, theories, or research plans without license.
(2) Counterfeit
Falsification or tampering with scientific experimental data or conclusions.
(3) Multiple submission
Multiple submission has two kinds of situations: (1) submitting the same article to multiple journals simultaneously; (2) Although expression is different, the theories, main data, and figures/tables involved are identical, or the core content is the same.
(4) Improper or Abusive Authorship
People not participating in the scientific research or writing work being included in authorship; People don’t consent signing but included in authorship; Moving up the rank of an author against one's actual contribution; infringing other people’s copyright or right of authorship, or excluding those who have made substantial contributions from authorship.
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.