Manuscript Submission

Submission of a manuscript implies: that the work described has not been published before; that it is not under consideration for publication anywhere else; that its publication has been approved by all co-authors, if any, as well as by the responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – at the institute where the work has been carried out. The publisher will not be held legally responsible should there be any compensation claims.

Online Submission

Please follow the hyperlink “Submit Manuscript online” on the right and upload all of your manuscript files following the instructions given on the screen.

Please ensure you provide all relevant editable source files. Failing to submit these source files might cause unnecessary delays in the review and production process.

Proofreading

The purpose of the proof is to check for typesetting or conversion errors and the completeness and accuracy of the text, tables, and figures. Substantial changes in content, e.g., new results, corrected values, title, and authorship, are not allowed without the approval of the Editor.

After online publication, further changes can only be made in the form of an Erratum, which will be hyperlinked to the article.

Ethical Responsibilities of Authors

Authors should refrain from misrepresenting research results which could damage the trust in the journal, the professionalism of scientific authorship, and ultimately the entire scientific endeavor. Maintaining the integrity of the research and its presentation is helped by following the rules of good scientific practice, which include*:

• The manuscript should not be submitted to more than one journal for simultaneous consideration.
• The submitted work should be original and should not have been published elsewhere in any form or language (partially or in full), unless the new work concerns an expansion of previous work. (Please provide transparency on the re-use of material to avoid the concerns about text-recycling (‘self-plagiarism’).
• A single study should not be split up into several parts to increase the number of submissions and submitted to various journals or to one journal over time (i.e. ‘salami-slicing/publishing’).
• Concurrent or secondary publication is sometimes justifiable, provided certain conditions are met. Examples include translations or a manuscript that is intended for a different group of readers.
• Results should be presented, honestly, and without fabrication, falsification or inappropriate data manipulation (including image-based manipulation). Authors should adhere to discipline-specific rules for acquiring, selecting, and processing data.
• No data, text, or theories by others are presented as if they were the author’s own (‘plagiarism’). Proper acknowledgments to other works must be given (this includes material that is closely copied (near verbatim), summarized, and/or paraphrased), quotation marks (to indicate words taken from another source) are used for verbatim copying of material, and permissions secured for material that is copyrighted. 

Fundamental errors

Authors should correct mistakes once they discover a significant error or inaccuracy in their published article. The author(s) is/are requested to contact the journal and explain in what sense the error is impacting the article. A decision on how to correct the literature will depend on the nature of the error. This may be a correction or retraction. The retraction note should provide transparency on which parts of the article are impacted by the error.

Article Processing Charge

The journal is published in both print and online versions and all articles published in the journal are fully open-access and freely available online, immediately upon publication. Publication Fee is free of charge.