Compliance with COPE, WAME, and DORA Principles and Recommendations

The Editorial Board adheres to the principles and recommendations issued by leading international organizations and initiatives, as outlined below.

1. COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics)

The journal follows the ethical standards articulated by COPE, including:

• 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.

2. WAME (World Association of Medical Editors)

WAME guidance is used as a transferable governance baseline for editorial operations, including:

• 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.

3. DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment)

The journal supports responsible and fair research assessment practices, including:

• 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.

4. ICMJE (International Committee of Medical Journal Editors)

The journal applies the following principles as broadly relevant good practice:

• 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.

5. Additional Contemporary Frameworks (Open Science, Plan S, FAIR Data, and responsible AI use)

The journal aligns with current best practices in scholarly communication, including:

• Open Access, supporting barrier-free access to research outputs.
• FAIR Data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) to strengthen reusability and reproducibility of research data.
• Plan S, supporting publishing models and infrastructures that enable immediate open access.

Ethical and transparent AI use, ensuring accountability and disclosure where AI technologies are applied in research and manuscript preparation.