Privacy Statement

Policies on Conflict of Interest, Human and Animal rights, and Informed Consent

“Conflict of interest
At the point of submission, policy requires that each author reveal any financial interests or connections, direct or indirect, or other situations that might raise the question of bias in the work reported or the conclusions, implications, or opinions stated – including pertinent commercial or other sources of funding for the individual author(s) or for the associated department(s) or organization(s), personal relationships, or direct academic competition.

If the manuscript is accepted, Conflict of Interest information will be communicated in a published statement.

Privacy
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 Editors 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; and the date of approval by the ethics committee.

In addition and as stated above, for studies conducted on human participants you must state clearly that you obtained written informed consent from the study participants;  Similarly, for experiments involving animals you must state the care of animal and licensing guidelines under which the study was performed and report these in accordance with the ARRIVE (Animals in Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments) statement.

If ethics clearance was not necessary, or if there was any deviation from these standard ethical requests, please state why it was not required.

Please note that the editors may ask you to provide evidence of ethical approval. If you have approval from a National Drug Agency (or similar) please state this and provide details, this can be particularly useful when discussing the use of unlicensed drugs.”