Submission of a manuscript to a journal publihsed by STM Publishing Group Limited implies that all authors have read and agreed to its content and that the manuscript conforms to the journal’s policies.

Authorship

Authorship provides credit for a researcher’s contributions to a study and carries accountability. Authors are expected to fulfil the criteria below:

- The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that the descriptions are accurate and agreed by all authors.

- The role(s) of all authors should be listed, using the relevant above categories.

- Authors may have contributed in multiple roles, eg. to have made substantial contributions to the conception OR design of the work; OR the acquisition, analysis, OR interpretation of data; OR the creation of new software used in the work; OR have drafted the work or substantively revised it;

AND to have approved the submitted version (and any substantially modified version that involves the author's contribution to the study);

AND to have agreed both to be personally accountable for the author's own contributions and to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work, even ones in which the author was not personally involved, are appropriately investigated, resolved, and the resolution documented in the literature.

- All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an ‘Acknowledgements’ section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help or writing assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support.

Ethical responsibilities of authors

STM Publishing Group Limited is committed to upholding the integrity of the scientific record. We will follow the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines on how to deal with potential acts of misconduct.

Authors should refrain from misrepresenting research results which could damage the trust in the journal and ultimately the entire scientific endeavour. Maintaining integrity of the research and its presentation can be achieved by following the rules of good scientific practice, which includes:

- The manuscript has not been submitted to more than one journal for simultaneous consideration.

- The manuscript has not been published previously (partly or in full), unless the new work concerns an expansion of previous work (please provide transparency on the re-use of material to avoid the hint of text-recycling ("self-plagiarism").

- A single study is not split up into several parts to increase the quantity of submissions and submitted to various journals or to one journal over time (e.g.   "salami-publishing").

- No data have been fabricated or manipulated (including images) to support your conclusions.

- No data, text, or theories by others are presented as if they were the authors own ("plagiarism"). Proper acknowledgements to other works must be given (this includes material that is closely copied (near verbatim), summarized and/or paraphrased), quotation marks are used for verbatim copying of material, and permissions are secured for material that is copyrighted. Important note: the journal may use software to screen for plagiarism.

- Authors whose names appear on the submission have contributed sufficiently to the scientific work and therefore share collective responsibility and accountability for the results.

- Upon request authors should be prepared to send relevant documentation or data in order to verify the validity of the results. This could be in the form of raw data, samples, records, etc.

How to handle authorship dispute

If there is a suspicion of misconduct, the journal will carry out an investigation following the COPE guidelines. If, after investigation, the allegation seems to raise valid concerns, the accused author will be contacted and given an opportunity to address the issue. If misconduct has been proven, this may result in the Editor-in-Chief's implementation of the following measures, including, but not limited to:

- If the article is still under consideration, it may be rejected and returned to the author.

If the article has already been published online, depending on the nature and severity of the infraction, either an erratum will be placed with the article or in severe cases complete retraction of the article will occur. The reason must be given in the published erratum or retraction note.

The author's institution may be informed.

The journals will follow the flowchart povided by COPE:

https://publicationethics.org/authorship

Redundant or duplicate publication

We ask you to confirm that your paper is original, has not been published in its current form or a substantially similar form (in print or electronically, including on a web site), that it has not been accepted for publication elsewhere, and that it is not under consideration by another publication. The ICMJE has provided details of what is and what is not duplicate or redundant publication. If you are in doubt (particularly in the case of material that you have posted on a web site), we ask you to proceed with your submission but to include a copy of the relevant previously published work or work under consideration by other journals. Authors must draw attention to any published work that concerns the same patients or subjects as the present paper in a covering letter with their article.

Permissions to reproduce previously published material

STM requires you to send us copies of permission to reproduce material (such as illustrations) from the copyright holder. Articles cannot be published without these permissions.

Patient consent forms

The protection of a patient's right to privacy is essential. Please collect and keep copies of patients’ consent forms on which patients or other subjects of your experiments clearly grant permission for the publication of photographs or other material that might identify them. If the consent form for your research did not specifically include this, please obtain it or remove the identifying material.

A statement to the effect that such consent had been obtained must be included in the ‘Methods’ section of your paper. If necessary the individual journal Editor(s) may request a copy of any consent forms.

Ethics committee approval

All articles dealing with original human or animal data must include a statement on ethics approval at the beginning of the Methods section. This paragraph must contain the following information: the name and address of the ethics committee responsible; the protocol number that was attributed by this ethics committee; the name of the Chairperson of the ethics committee (or the person who approved the protocol) and the date of approval by the ethics committee.

Conflict of Interest

All authors of must disclose any and all conflicts of interest they may have with publication of the manuscript or an institution or product that is mentioned in the manuscript and/or is important to the outcome of the study presented. Authors should also disclose conflict of interest with products that compete with those mentioned in their manuscript.

Reporting Guidelines

- Clinical trials: CONSORT for randomizedcontrolled trials, TREND for non-randomized trials, and other specialized guidelines as appropriate.

- Systematic reviews and meta-analyses: PRISMA statement.

- Diagnostic studies: STARD requirements.

- Observational studies in epidemiology: the STROBE initiative.

- Microarray experiments:MIAME guidelines.

- Biological and biomedical research:FAIR sharing Portal.

Ethics and Registration

According to the ICMJE recommendations, the authors should follow all ethical principles for medical research involving humans and experimental animals.

Prospective and interventionalclinical trials, which are performed to evaluate the effects of the interventions (study drug, surgical procedure, equipment, and behavior therapy) on health outcomes, should be registered in advance at a clinical trial registry approved by the WHO Registry Network. The date of registration and registration number should be indicated in the submission. Purely observational studies do not require registration.

Informed consent policy

Identifying information should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, sonograms, CT scans, etc., and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian, wherever applicable) gives written informedconsent for publication. Authors should remove patients' names from figures unless they have obtained written informed consent from the patients. When informed consent has been obtained, it should be indicated in the article andcopy of the consent should be attached with the covering letter.

Data sharing Statement in Clinical Trials

As of 1 June 2018, manuscripts submitted to the Journal thatreport the results of clinical trials must contain a data-sharing statement.

Copyright and License

Copyright on any open access article in a journal published by STM Publishing Group Limited is retained by the author(s).

Authors grant the publisher a license to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher.

Authors also grant any third party the right to use the article freely as long as its integrity is maintained and its original authors, citation details and publisher are identified.

Open access statement

This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.

Article processing charges

All articles published in our journals are open access and freely available online, immediately upon publication.

Article processing charges are wavied for all journals published with STM Publishing Group Limited.