Conflicts of Interest

All authors are expected to disclose, in the manuscript submittal letter, any commercial affiliations as well as consultancies, stock or equity interests, and patent-licencing arrangements that could be considered to pose a conflict of interest regarding the submitted manuscript. Examples of potentially conflicting interests include relationships, financial or otherwise, that might detract from an author’s objectivity in the presentation of study results and interests whose value would be enhanced by the results presented. Details of the disclosure to the editor will remain confidential. It is important to note that the inclusion of a company name in the author's address lines of the manuscript does not constitute disclosure.

It is the responsibility of the authors to provide, in the Acknowledgments section, a general statement disclosing conflicting interests relevant to the study. All funding sources for the project, institutional and corporate, should be credited in the Acknowledgments section. In addition, if a manuscript concerns a commercial product, the manufacturer’s name must be indicated in the Materials and Methods section or elsewhere in the text, as appropriate, in an obvious manner.

Authors: All authors should include a statement disclosing any financial or other substantive conflicts of interest that may be construed to influence the results or interpretation of their manuscript. All sources of financial support for the project should be disclosed.

Reviewers: The Reviewers should not review the manuscripts in which they have found conflicts of interest with any of the authors, companies, or institutions. The Reviewers should disclose and try to avoid any conflict of interest. Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted paper will not be used by the editor or the members of the editorial board for their own research purposes without the author's explicit written consent.

Editors: The Editors of the journal should disclose and try to avoid any conflict of interest. Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted paper will not be used by the editor or the members of the editorial board for their own research purposes without the author's explicit written consent.