The Editorial Board adheres to the principles and recommendations issued by leading international organizations and initiatives.
- COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)
- Transparency across submission, peer review, editorial decision-making, and publication workflows.
- Impartiality and independence of editors and reviewers.
- Academic integrity, including the prevention of plagiarism, data fabrication or falsification, and duplicate publication.
- Responsible authorship, with clear attribution of each author’s contribution.
- Complaints and appeals handling, supported by public, well-defined procedures for ethics-related concerns.
- Retractions and corrections, supported by clear processes for retraction, correction, and error notification.
- WAME (World Association of Medical Editors)
- Editorial independence, ensuring decisions are made without undue influence from sponsors, institutions, or commercial interests.
- Conflict of interest (COI) disclosure, required for authors, reviewers, and editors.
- Peer review quality assurance, ensuring objective, fair, and timely expert assessment.
- Funding transparency, including disclosure of grants, sponsors, and research funding sources.
- Support for early-career researchers, enabling publication pathways for scholars at the beginning of their academic careers.
- DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment)
- Moving beyond bibliometrics (e.g., impact factor, h-index) toward evaluation based on quality, novelty, and scholarly contribution.
- Valuing diverse research outputs, including software, datasets, algorithms, and technical solutions, not only journal articles.
- Recognizing interdisciplinary research as equivalent in scholarly value to traditional disciplinary publications.
- Encouraging Open Science, including preprints and open access to data and code where appropriate.
- ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors)
- Authorship criteria, recognizing authorship only for those who have made a substantive intellectual contribution.
- Research ethics, including compliance with standards for data governance, human participants, and experimental integrity where applicable.
- Data openness, encouraging the preservation and responsible sharing of research data.