Ethical Standards

Statement of Human and Animal Rights

In experiments where human subjects or materials were included, authors must indicate whether the procedures were conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (both institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 and 2008. If questionable, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach, and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the ambiguous aspects of the study. When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.

Statement of Informed Consent

Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information, including patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) provides written informed consent for publication. Authors should also identify individuals who provide writing assistance and disclose the funding source for this assistance. Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve; however, informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt. For example, masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate to ensure anonymity. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect the patient, such as in genetic pedigrees, authors should guarantee that alterations do not distort scientific meaning.

Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement

Editor’s responsibilities

The editor is responsible for deciding which of the submitted papers will be published on the basis of the importance of the paper and relevance to the scope of EXCLI Journal, originality, clarity, study’s validity, and quality of the manuscript. The editor and editorial staff will keep the manuscripts confidential and may not pass on any information about a submitted manuscript to other persons, with the exception of the relevant author(s), the reviewers, other editorial advisors and the publisher. They will not use this material for their own research purposes without the authors‘ explicit written consent.

Reviewers‘ responsibilities

The peer reviewing process will give the editor the possibility to decide whether to publish or to decline the submission. Reviewers who do not see themselves technically or temporally in a position to assess, indicate this immediately to the journal manager so that they are released from the review process and further reviewers can be sought.

Reviewers should note whether the necessary relevant literature was cited in the reference section or whether important publications were not used. The methods and logic of the experimental set-up are critically examined as far as possible. A plagiarism check is used to control whether significant text overlaps and similarities with already published works can be excluded.

Like editors, reviewers are required to use the information provided to them through the review process confidentially and not for personal purposes. Conflicts of interest arising from collaborations or joint publications not more than 10 years ago must be disclosed to the editor and then excluded from the review process.

Authors‘ responsibilities

Authors should include in their original works a detailed account of what has been done so that others may replicate the work. Any form of fraud or knowingly misrepresentation is unethical and unacceptable.

Authors should be prepared to submit their raw data for editorial review upon request. Depending on the scope of the publication, they may be published as supplementary material or it is the authors' responsibility to store their data in a repository. In any case, the data should be kept for at least 10 years.

Furthermore, authors should - upon request - provide one of their most relevant articles in the field of the current submission.

Only manuscripts containing new research should be submitted and the manuscript should not be submitted anywhere else simultaneously.

Only those persons should be named as authors who have contributed significantly to the creation of the publication in terms of both content and concept. The corresponding author will verify that all co-authors have approved the final version of the manuscript and agreed to the submission for publication.

All authors are invited to declare conflicts of interest, if any. The sources of financial support for this work must be indicated.

If, after publication, the author finds a serious error in his work, he must immediately inform the editor-in-chief, in order to discuss with him how to proceed, to correct or even to withdraw the paper.

Sources