Guide for Authors

Peer review

This journal follows a double anonymized review process. Your submission will initially be assessed by our editors to determine suitability for publication in this journal. If your submission is deemed suitable, it will typically be sent to a minimum of one reviewer for an independent expert assessment of the scientific quality. The decision as to whether your article is accepted or rejected will be taken by our editors.

Our editors are not involved in making decisions about papers which:

  • they have written themselves.
  • have been written by family members or colleagues.
  • relate to products or services in which they have an interest.

Any such submissions will be subject to the journal’s usual procedures and peer review will be handled independently of the editor involved and their research group.

Special issues and article collections

The peer review process for special issues and article collections follows the same process as outlined above for regular submissions, except, a guest editor may send the submissions out to the reviewers and may recommend a decision to the journal editor. The journal editor oversees the peer review process of all special issues and article collections to ensure the high standards of publishing ethics and responsiveness are respected and is responsible for the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of articles.

Ethics and policies

When authors submit an article to our journal it is implied that:

  • the work described has not been published previously except in the form of a preprint, an abstract, a published lecture, academic thesis or registered report.
  • the article is not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
  • the article’s publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out.
  • if accepted, the article will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, including electronically, without the written consent of the copyright-holder.

To verify compliance with our journal publishing policies, we may check your manuscript with our screening tools.

Changes to authorship

The editors of this journal generally will not consider changes to authorship once a manuscript has been submitted. It is important that authors carefully consider the authorship list and order of authors and provide a definitive author list at original submission.

The policy of this journal around authorship changes is as follows:

  • Any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should only be made prior to acceptance, and only if approved by the journal editor.
  • Requests to change authorship should be made by the corresponding author, who must provide the reason for the request to the journal editor with written confirmation from all authors, including any authors being added or removed, that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement.
  • Only in exceptional circumstances will the journal editor consider the addition, deletion or rearrangement of authors post acceptance.
  • Publication of the manuscript may be paused while a change in authorship request is being considered.
  • Any authorship change requests approved by the journal editor will result in a corrigendum if the manuscript has already been published.
  • Any unauthorized authorship changes may result in the rejection of the article, or retraction, if the article has already been published.

Declaration of competing interests

All authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence or bias their work. If there are no conflicts of interest to declare, authors should explicitly state so in their submission.