Ethical Guidelines and Conflict of Interest

4.0 Referees

Referees have the following responsibilities:

• To treat the manuscript as confidential. The manuscript (or its existence) should not be shown to, disclosed to, or discussed with others, except in special cases, where specific scientific advice may be sought; in that event the editor must be informed and the identities of those consulted disclosed.
• To return/destroy/erase the manuscript and to inform the editor should they be unqualified to review the manuscript, or lack the time to review the manuscript, without undue delay.
• To judge the manuscript objectively and in a timely fashion. Referees should not make personal criticism in their reviews.
• To return the manuscript without review to the editor if there is a conflict of interest (see Appendix A.1). Specifically, Referees should not review manuscripts authored or co-authored by a person with whom the referee has a close personal or professional relationship, if this relationship could be reasonably thought to bias the review.
• To explain and support their judgements so that editors and authors may understand the basis of their comments, and to provide reference to published work, where appropriate.
• To inform the editor of any similarity between the submitted manuscript and another either published or under consideration by another journal.
• To ensure that all unpublished data, information, interpretation and discussion in a submitted article remain confidential and not to use reported work in unpublished, submitted articles for their own research.
• To alert the editor if a manuscript contains plagiarised material or falsified data.
• Not to retain or copy the submitted manuscript in any form; to comply with data protection regulations, as appropriate.
• To make known any conflicts of interest that might arise (see Appendix A.1)