Authorship

Authorship is accredited only when a substantial contribution to the published work is made by meeting all of the following criteria: organizing the conception design of the project or analysis of the manuscript data, drafting or critically revising the content of the manuscript submitted for publication, and providing final approval for the version to be published. All three criteria must be met for an individual to be listed as an author or co-author on a published paper. Any other form of contribution should be included in the “Acknowledgements” section of the manuscript.

Ethics

Manuscripts that include information obtained from human or animal research must provide (in the text or an appropriate footnote) verification of the review and approval of the appropriate institutional research oversight committee for the work reported. We define plagiarism as a situation in which a paper reproduces another work with at least 25% similarity and without citation. If evidence of plagiarism is found before/after acceptance or after publication of the paper, the author will be offered a chance for rebuttal. If the arguments are not found to be satisfactory, the manuscript will be retracted and the author sanctioned from publishing papers for a period to be determined by the responsible Editor(s).

We endorse the principles embodied in the Declaration of Helsinki (1964) and expect that all investigation involving human materials are performed in accordance with these principles. For animal experiments, all of the processes involved, from the raising of animals to the actual experiment, must proceed according to the guidelines of the appropriate oversight committee. The manuscript must contain a statement declaring that the experiment had been approved by an ethics committee or had followed the NIH Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (1996, ILAR [Institute of Laboratory Animal Resources] Committee on NRC, National Academic Press pp125, www.nao.edu/readingroom/books/labrats/index.html). If these terms are not satisfied, the “Guiding Principles Editor-in-Chief” has the right to reject a manuscript. The authors must keep all the original laboratory data used for the articles and be able to submit them at the request of the editorial committee. For other policies regarding research and publication ethics not stated in these instructions, authors can refer to ‘Good Publication Practice Guidelines for Medical Journals (http://kamje.or.kr/publishing_ethics.html)’ or ‘Guidelines on good publication (http://www.publicationethics.org.uk/guidelines)’

Copyright

Upon the acceptance of an article, the authors should download the “Copyright Release and Author Agreement”. The copyright transfer agreement should be completed and submitted electronically when the manuscript is submitted. This transfer will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information. Articles published in this journal are open-access, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Conflict of Interest

Authors must disclose any financial, personal, and/or institutional relationships that might lead to a conflict of interest in the manuscript. If there is no conflict of interest, this should also be stated explicitly as none declared. All sources of funding should be stated in the “Acknowledgements” section.

Statement of Informed Consent

Copies of written informed consent and Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval for clinical research should be kept. If necessary, the editor or reviewers may request copies of these documents to resolve questions about IRB approval and study conduct. In addition, for studies conducted with human subjects, the method by which informed consent was obtained from the participants (i.e., verbal or written) also needs to be stated in the Methods section.