Publication ethics and malpractice

For information on Ethics in publishing and Ethical guidelines for journal publication see http://www.elsevier.com/publishingethics and http://www.elsevier.com/journalauthors/ethics.

Submission of an article to the EMJ implies that the work described has not been publishedpreviously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis or as an electronic preprint, see http://www.elsevier.com/postingpolicy), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, including electronically without the written consent of the copyright-holder. In particular, translations into English of papers already published in another language are notaccepted.

No other forms of scientic misconduct are allowed, such as plagiarism, falsication, fraudulent data, incorrect interpretation of other works, incorrect citations, etc. The EMJ follows the Code of Conduct of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and follows the COPE Flowcharts for Resolving Cases of Suspected Misconduct (http : ==publicationethics:org=files=u2=NewCode:pdf). To verify originality, your article may be checked by the originality detection service CrossCheck http://www.elsevier.com/editors/plagdetect.

The authors are obliged to participate in peer review process and be ready to provide corrections, clarications, retractions and apologies when needed. All authors of a paper should have signicantly contributed to the research.

The reviewers should provide objective judgments and should point out relevant published works which are not yet cited. Reviewed articles should be treated condentially. The reviewers will be chosen in such a way that there is no conict of interests with respect to the research, the authors and/or the research funders.

The editors have complete responsibility and authority to reject or accept a paper, and they will only accept a paper when reasonably certain. They will preserve anonymity of reviewers and promote publication of corrections, clarications, retractions and apologies when needed. The acceptance of a paper automatically implies the copyright transfer to the EMJ.

The Editorial Board of the EMJ will monitor and safeguard publishing ethics.