Publication ethics

Editors

Editors decide on scholarly merit alone — never an author’s nationality, institution, seniority, gender, or any commercial relationship. Editors disclose nothing about a submission to anyone other than the author, the reviewers and the publisher. An editor with a conflict on a submission hands it to another editor and takes no part in the decision.

Reviewers

Reviewers must decline where they cannot review objectively or in time, must treat the manuscript as confidential, must not use unpublished material for their own advantage, and must tell the editor of any substantial similarity with published work. A manuscript under review must not be uploaded to any AI service — doing so discloses another person’s unpublished work to a third party.

Authors

Authors must present original work with accurate data, retain their raw data for a reasonable period after publication, and must not submit the same manuscript to more than one journal at a time. An author who discovers a significant error in their own published work is obliged to tell us, so it can be corrected or retracted.

Misconduct

Allegations are investigated regardless of when the paper was published and regardless of who raises them. We follow COPE’s flowcharts. Outcomes may include a correction, an expression of concern, a retraction, and notification of the author’s institution.

The record is permanent

A published article is never quietly edited and never deleted. Where something is wrong we publish a linked notice, and the article stays online clearly marked. Removing it would break every citation to it and hide the fact that it existed.