Editorial Responsibilities

The Editor-in-Chief, editors, and members of the Editorial Board are responsible for safeguarding the scientific quality, integrity, fairness, transparency, and independence of the journal’s editorial process.

Editorial decisions must be based on the scientific merit, originality, methodological rigor, reliability, ethical acceptability, and relevance of the manuscript to the journal’s Aims and Scope. Decisions must not be influenced by authors’ nationality, institutional affiliation, personal characteristics, commercial considerations, financial relationships, or other irrelevant factors.

Editors must:

• conduct or oversee an appropriate initial editorial assessment to determine whether a manuscript meets the journal’s scientific, ethical, methodological, and technical requirements before external peer review;
• ensure that eligible research manuscripts undergo the journal’s declared double-anonymous peer review process and are normally evaluated by at least two independent reviewers with appropriate subject expertise;
• select reviewers on the basis of relevant expertise, independence, and ability to provide an objective assessment, and take reasonable measures to prevent fraudulent, compromised, or inappropriate peer review;
• ensure that peer review is conducted fairly, objectively, confidentially, and within a reasonable timeframe;
• evaluate reviewer recommendations critically rather than treating them as automatic decisions and obtain additional expert assessment when reviews are conflicting, insufficient, or raise significant scientific or ethical concerns;
• protect the confidentiality of submitted manuscripts, reviewer reports, personal information, unpublished data, and other materials obtained through the editorial process;
• disclose relevant conflicts of interest and recuse themselves from handling manuscripts where their impartiality could reasonably be questioned;
• ensure that manuscripts submitted by editors, Editorial Board members, or persons with close professional or personal relationships to journal decision-makers are handled through an independent process in which the interested editor has no role in reviewer selection or the final decision;
• verify, where applicable, that manuscripts involving human participants provide appropriate information on ethical approval, informed consent, protection of participant privacy, and other relevant research-ethics requirements;
• give particular attention to the ethical protection of newborns, infants, children, adolescents, and other vulnerable participants in research submitted to the journal;
• consider disclosures relating to authorship, funding, sponsor involvement, competing interests, clinical trial registration, data integrity, and relevant use of artificial intelligence where applicable;
• respond appropriately to credible concerns about plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, inappropriate authorship, peer-review manipulation, citation manipulation, undisclosed conflicts of interest, unethical research, or other forms of research and publication misconduct;
• cooperate in maintaining the integrity of the scholarly record through appropriate corrections, expressions of concern, retractions, or other post-publication actions when justified by the evidence.

Editors must not use unpublished information obtained from submitted manuscripts for personal research, professional advantage, or the benefit of another person without appropriate authorization. Confidential manuscripts, peer-review reports, or other protected editorial materials must not be uploaded to external AI systems when confidentiality cannot be assured.

The Editor-in-Chief or an appropriately authorized editor retains final responsibility for editorial decisions. Decisions must be independent of the journal owner, publisher, sponsors, advertisers, technical service providers, or other commercial or institutional interests. Acceptance or rejection of a manuscript must not depend on the payment of publication charges or other financial considerations.

Editors are responsible for applying journal policies consistently and proportionately and for providing authors with clear editorial decisions. Where scientific opinions differ, legitimate academic disagreement must be distinguished from misconduct.

Detailed procedures are provided in the journal’s Editorial Independence, Peer Review, Conflicts of Interest and Funding, Research Ethics, Research Misconduct, Complaints and Appeals, and Corrections and Retractions policies.