Editorial Policies

Funding

The Funding section is mandatory and should appear before the Competing Interests section in the manuscript. In the interest of transparency and to help readers form their own judgments of potential bias, authors must declare sources of study funding including sponsorship (e.g. university, charity, commercial organization) and sources of material (e.g. novel drugs) not available commercially.

Funding: Research support (including salaries, equipment, supplies, reimbursement for attending symposia, and other expenses) by organizations that may gain or lose financially through this publication. The role of the funding body in the design of the study, collection and analysis of data and decision to publish should be stated.

Examples of declarations are:

FUNDING

This work was supported by a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship to MRC and NIMH-R01-MH057440 to AAG.

Competing Interests

Competing Interests: Authors must declare in this section whether or not there are any competing financial interests in relation to the work described. When submitting a manuscript, all authors are responsible for disclosing their own relevant interests in the work. In cases where the authors declare a competing financial interest, a statement to that effect is published as part of the article. If no such completing interests exist, the statement will simply read that the authors declare no competing interests.

The Competing Interests section is mandatory and should appear after the Funding section in the manuscript. In the interest of transparency and to help readers form their own judgments of potential bias, authors must declare sources of competing interests.

For the purposes of this statement, competing interests are defined as those of a financial nature that, through their potential influence on behavior or content, or from perception of such potential influences, could undermine the objectivity, integrity or perceived value of a publication. They can include any of the following:

Research support (including salaries, equipment, supplies, reimbursement for attending symposia, and other expenses) by organizations that may gain or lose financially through this publication. The role of the funding body in the design of the study, collection and analysis of data and decision to publish should be stated.
Employment: Recent (while engaged in the research project), present or anticipated employment by any organization that may gain or lose financially through this publication.
Personal financial interests: Stocks or shares in companies that may gain or lose financially through publication; consultation fees or other forms of remuneration from organizations that may gain or lose financially; patents or patent applications whose value may be affected by publication.

The statement must contain an explicit and unambiguous statement describing any potential competing interest, or lack thereof, for all of the authors as it relates to the subject of the report. Examples include "Dr. Smith receives compensation as a consultant for XYZ Company," "Dr. Jones and Dr. Smith have financial holdings in ABC Company," or "Dr. Jones owns a patent on the diagnostic device described in this report." These statements acknowledging or denying competing interests must be included in the manuscript under the heading "Competing Interests."

Following the "Competing Interests declaration" there must be a listing for each author, detailing the names of organizations, institutions, companies, and individuals, including intermediaries such as subcontractors or conference organizers, from whom they have received compensation for professional services in any of the previous three years, or from whom they anticipate receiving such compensation in the near future, whether or not these affiliations appear to have any relevance to the topic covered in the submission. Neither the precise amount received from each entity nor the aggregate income from these sources needs to be provided. Professional services include any activities for which the individual is, has been, or will be compensated with cash, royalties, fees, stock or stock options in exchange for work performed, advice or counsel provided, or for other services related to the author's professional knowledge and skills. This would include, but not necessarily be limited to, the identification of organizations from which the author received contracts or in which he or she holds an equity stake if professional services were provided in conjunction with the transaction.

The authors are expected to disclose any other financial holdings or considerations, such as stocks, bonds or donations of supplies or equipment that a reasonable person could construe as possibly influencing the objectivity of the report. When there is uncertainty about what should be listed, it is best to disclose all holdings or affiliations to ensure that there is no question about intent to withhold information. Authors should communicate with the editorial office journal@acnp.org if they have questions about this policy.

In terms of conflict of interest for editors, editorial board members and external editors are welcome to submit papers to the journal. Where an editorial board member or external editor is on the author list, they must declare this in the competing interests section on the submitted manuscript. If they are an author or have any other competing interest regarding a specific manuscript, another member of the editorial board will be assigned to assume responsibility for overseeing peer review. These submissions are subject to the same review process as any other manuscript, and their editor status has no bearing on editorial consideration. For more information about the review and handling process, visit the For Referees page.

Examples of declarations are:

COMPETING INTERESTS

Dr. Rincón-Cortés declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Dr. Grace received consultant fees from Lundbeck, Pfizer, Otsuka, Asubio, Autofony, Alkermes, Concert, and Janssen, and is on the advisory board for Alkermes, Newron, and Takeda.

AJS, GC, JA, JT, JW, TB and WY are employees of Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, Ltd and own stock or stock options. TU was an employee of Hammersmith Medicines Research at the time of the study and is now an employee of Astellas. EAR, AM, YL, GES, JP and RNG are employees of Invicro. JMTJD was an employee of Hammersmith Medicines Research at the time of the study and is now an employee of GlaxoSmithKline.

The authors declare no competing interests."

"Dr. Brown has received compensation as a member of the scientific advisory board of Rx Pharmaceutical and owns stock in the company. He also has consulted for BioScript and received compensation. Dr. Smith and Dr. Liu declare no potential competing interests."

If subsequent to publication it is learned that relevant information was not disclosed, a corrigendum describing the infraction will be published in the journal and linked to the article in PubMed. Additional actions may be taken, including restrictions placed on future publications in the journal, at the discretion of the editor and Publications Committee. For information about the financial interests of our Associate Editors, please download this PDF.

Clinical Trials

As defined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), a clinical trial is any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention and comparison groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. A medical intervention is any intervention used to modify a health outcome and includes but is not limited to drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, and process-of-care changes. A trial must have at least one prospectively assigned concurrent control or comparison group in order to trigger the requirement for registration. Nonrandomized trials are not exempt from the registration requirement if they meet the above criteria.

When reporting experiments on human subjects, it must be indicated whether the procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional or regional) or with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975 (as revised in 1983). Include Institutional Review Board or Animal Care and Use Committee approvals.

All clinical trials must be registered in a public registry prior to submission. Neuropsychopharmacology subscribes to the trials registration policy of the ICMJE (www.ICMJE.org) and considers only trials that have been appropriately registered before submission, regardless of when the trial closed to enrollment. Acceptable registries must meet the following ICMJE requirements:

Be publicly available, searchable, and open to all prospective registrants
Have a validation mechanism for registration data
Be managed by a not-for-profit organization

Examples of registries that meet these criteria include (1) the registry sponsored by the United States National Library of Medicine (http://www.clinicaltrials.gov); (2) the International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial Number Registry; and (3) the European Clinical Trials Database.

All clinical trials submitted to Neuropsychopharmacology should be accompanied by a completed CONSORT checklist (Please submit as a "Related Manuscript File"). A CONSORT flowchart should also be provided as a Figure or as Supplemental Material. Please find the flowchart at http://www.consort-statement.org/.

Springer Nature endorses the toolkits and guidelines produced by the following bodies:

Consent to Participate Policy

For all research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate is the study should be obtained from participants (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 16) and a statement to this effect should appear in the manuscript. For manuscript reporting studies involving vulnerable groups (for example unconscious patients) where there is the potential for coercion (for example prisoners) or where consent may not have been fully informed, manuscripts will be considered at the editor’s discretion. In the case of articles describing human transplantation studies, authors must include a statement declaring that no organs/tissues were obtained from prisoners and must also name the institution(s)/clinic(s)/department(s) by which organs/tissues were obtained.

Publishing images from human research participants

When publishing identifiable images from human research participants in Nature Research journals, authors include a statement in the published paper affirming that they have obtained informed consent for publication of the images. All reasonable measures must be taken to protect patient anonymity. Black bars over the eyes are not acceptable means of anonymization. In certain cases, we may insist upon obtaining evidence of informed consent from authors.

For manuscript reporting studies involving vulnerable groups (for example unconscious patients) where there is the potential for coercion (for example prisoners) or where consent may not have been fully informed, manuscripts will be considered at the editor’s discretion. In the case of articles describing human transplantation studies, authors must include a statement declaring that no organs/tissues were obtained from prisoners and must also name the institution(s)/clinic(s)/department(s) via which organs/tissues were obtained.

Systematic Reviews & Meta-Analyses

All systematic reviews or meta-analyses submitted to Neuropsychopharmacology should be accompanied by a completed PRISMA checklist (Please submit as a “Related manuscript File”). A PRISMSA flowchart should also be provided as a Figure or as Supplemental Material. Please find the checklist and flowchart a http://prisma-statement.org/.

Animal Models (Effective June 1, 2019)

Manuscripts should be free of data over-interpretation and/or sensationalism. Authors should refrain from the use of language to imply that they are able to replicate in laboratory animals complex neuropsychiatric disorders or traits that are unique to the human species. Terminology such as “Animal model of [psychiatric disorder X]” lacks precision and perpetuates misconceptions. Instead, authors should use terminologies such as “Animal model useful for the study of [psychiatric disorder X]” and/or focus on the objective endpoints being measured. When describing outcomes, authors should use the suffix “-like” (e.g., “antidepressant-like effects”).

As a broadly representative example: rather than stating “An SSRI had antidepressant effects in the tail suspension model of depression”, a more accurate description of the procedure and its outcome would be “An SSRI increased struggling time in the tail suspension test, an animal model useful in the study of depression, indicating an antidepressant-like effect”.

For more detail on the basis for this policy, see Bale et al., 2019, Neuropsychopharmacology,

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-019-0405-9.pdf

Peer Review Policy

All contributions that are selected for peer review are sent to two or more independent reviewers. The identity of reviewers is confidential and manuscripts are considered private information. Papers may be rejected without external review at the Editor's discretion. Authors are encouraged to suggest or recommend for exclusion reviewers at the time of submissions.

Anonymity

Reviewers' identities are not released to authors, except when reviewers specifically ask to be identified. If reviewers wish to reveal their identities while the manuscript is under consideration, this should be done through the Editor. Should a reviewer contact an author directly, we ask authors to inform the Editor as soon as possible. We prohibit any attempt by authors to confront reviewers or determine their identities. Our own policy is to neither confirm nor deny any speculation about reviewers' identities, and we encourage reviewers to adopt a similar policy.

Selection of peer reviewers

Reviewer selection is critical to the publication process, and we base our choices on many factors, including expertise, reputation, and specific recommendations.

Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium

NPP is a member of the Neuroscience Peer Review Consortium (NPRC). The purpose of the NPRC is to decrease the time and effort involved in the peer review process, and reduce the burden placed on reviewers. Authors of papers that have been rejected after review may request that NPP transfer reviews to other member journals, and or request member journals transfer requests to NPP.

Authors can request to have reviews transferred by contacting NPP's editorial office . For a complete list of member journals, please see the list on the NPRC website.

Authors who transfer a manuscript to NPP through the NPRC should:

Per the NPRC, contact the previous journal and ask the editorial office to send reviewer comments and reviewer identities to journal@acnp.org.
Include a rebuttal letter at initial submission to NPP to address previous reviews and outline changes or comments.
Include a note in the "Manuscript Comment" box indicating the paper is an NPRC transfer.

Authorship

Requirements for all categories of articles largely conform to the "Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals," developed by the ICMJE. It is not the role of editors to make authorship/contributorship decisions or to arbitrate conflicts related to authorship. A manuscript will be considered for publication with the understanding that:

all named authors have agreed to its submission
it is not currently being considered for publication by another journal
if the paper is accepted, it will not subsequently be published in the same or similar form in any language without the consent of publisher

Each author must have contributed sufficiently to the intellectual content of the submission. The corresponding author should list all authors and their contributions to the work in the submitted manuscript. Please see the “Author Contributions” section for more information, including the qualifications for authorship according to ICMJE. Please note, as per ICMJE best practice, information provided in this section is the responsibility of the authors. Any changes to the author list after submission, such as a change in the order of the authors, or the deletion or addition of authors, must be approved by every author. By agreeing to be a corresponding author, the author affirms that he or she has had full access to the data in the study and final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication. Medical writers and industry employees can be contributors. Their roles, affiliations, and potential conflicts of interest should be included in the author list or noted in the Acknowledgments section concurrent with their contribution to the work submitted.

First and senior authorships are limited to no more than two individuals. Corresponding authorship is also limited to two on the title page of your manuscript. Please note our online submission system can only accommodate one corresponding author. If your manuscript exceeds these limitations it will be returned for you to modify. The editors will not make exceptions to this policy.

Consortia Authorship

If a consortium is listed as a collective of authors, all members of the consortium are considered authors and must be listed in the published article as such. If not all members of the consortium agree to the responsibilities of authorship, the members that are authors will be listed separately from those who are not. To ensure correct indexing and for consortia formatting instructions, see here.

AUTHOR NAME CHANGE POLICY

An author who has changed their name for reasons such as gender transition or religious conversion may request for their name, pronouns and other relevant biographical information to be corrected on papers published prior to the change. The author can choose for this correction to happen silently, in which case there will be no note flagging the change on either the pdf or the html of the paper, or alternatively they may do so by a formal public Author Correction.

Copyright

Authors are not required to grant the copyright in their articles to the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, Springer Nature, or Neuropsychopharmacology. Instead, authors provide Neuropsychopharmacology with an exclusive license. Authors are free to reuse their own papers in any future published work and on their own website or institutional repository.

Copyright permissions

If a table or figure has been published previously, the authors must obtain written permission from the copyright owner to reproduce the material in both print and electronic formats. It is the authors' responsibility to secure all requisite permissions. This is applicable to quotes, illustrations and other materials taken from previously published works not in the public domain. The original source should be cited in the figure caption or table footnote. Color figures can be reproduced if necessary, but the authors will be expected to contribute toward the cost of publication.

Plagiarism and Fabrication

Plagiarism is when an author attempts to pass off someone else's work as his or her own. Duplicate publication, sometimes called self-plagiarism, occurs when an author reuses substantial parts of his or her own published work without providing the appropriate references. Plagiarism without dishonest intent is relatively frequent, for example, when an author reuses parts of an introduction from an earlier paper.

CrossCheck is a multi-publisher initiative to screen published and submitted content for originality. Neuropsychopharmacology uses CrossCheck to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. To find out more about CrossCheck visit www.crossref.org/crosscheck.html.

If a case of plagiarism comes to light after a paper is published, the journal will conduct a preliminary investigation, utilizing the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics. If plagiarism is proven, the journal will contact the author's institute and funding agencies as appropriate. The paper containing the plagiarism may also be formally retracted or subject to correction.

Duplicate Publication

Papers must be original and not previously published or submitted for publication elsewhere. This rule also applies to non-English language publications. Springer Nature allows and encourages prior publication on recognized community preprint servers for review by other scientists before formal submission to a journal. The details of the preprint server concerned and any accession numbers should be included in the comment section accompanying manuscript submission. This policy does not extend to preprints available to the media or that are otherwise publicized outside the scientific community before or during the submission and consideration process.

Image Manipulation

Images submitted with a manuscript for review should be minimally processed. Authors should retain their unprocessed data and metafiles, as Editors may require them to aid in manuscript evaluation. If unprocessed data is available, manuscript evaluation may be stalled until the issue is resolved.

A certain degree of image processing is acceptable for publication (and for some experiments, fields and techniques is unavoidable), but the final image must correctly represent the original data and conform to community standards. The guidelines below will aid in accurate data presentation at the image processing level.

Authors should list all image acquisition tools and image processing software packages used. Authors should document key image-gathering settings and processing manipulations in the Materials and Methods section.
Images gathered at different times or from different locations should not be combined into a single image, unless it is stated that the resultant image is a product of time-averaged data or a time-lapse sequence. If juxtaposing images is essential, the borders should be clearly demarcated in the figure and described in the legend.
Touch-up tools, such as cloning and healing tools in Photoshop, or any feature that deliberately obscures manipulations are to be avoided.
Processing (such as changing brightness and contrast) is appropriate only when it is applied equally across the entire image and is applied equally to controls. Contrast should not be adjusted so that data disappears. Excessive manipulations, such as processing to emphasize one region in the image at the expense of others (for example, through the use of a biased choice of threshold settings), is inappropriate, as is emphasizing experimental data relative to the control.

Positive and negative controls, as well as molecular size markers, should be included on each gel and blot - either in the main figure or an expanded data supplementary figure. The display of cropped gels and blots in the main paper is encouraged if it improves the clarity and conciseness of the presentation. In such cases, the cropping must be mentioned in the figure legend.

Vertically sliced gels that juxtapose lanes that were not contiguous in the experiment must have a clear separation or a black line delineating the boundary between the gels.
Cropped gels in the paper must retain important bands.
Cropped blots in the body of the paper should retain at least six band widths above and below the band.
High-contrast gels and blots are discouraged, as overexposure may mask additional bands. Authors should strive for exposures with gray backgrounds. Immunoblots should be surrounded by a black line to indicate the borders of the blot, if the background is faint.
For quantitative comparisons, appropriate reagents, controls and imaging methods with linear signal ranges should be used.

Microscopy adjustments should be applied to the entire image. Threshold manipulation, expansion or contraction of signal ranges and the altering of high signals should be avoided. If pseudo coloring and nonlinear adjustment (for example, “gamma changes”) is used, this must be disclosed. Adjustments of individual color channels are sometimes necessary on merged images, but this should be noted in the figure legend. We encourage inclusion of the following with the final revised version of the manuscript for publication:

In the Materials and Methods section, specify the type of equipment (microscopes/objective lenses, cameras, detectors, filter model and batch number) and acquisition software used. Although we appreciate that there is some variation between instruments, equipment settings for critical measurements should also be listed.
The display lookup table (LUT) and the quantitative map between the LUT and the bitmap should be provided, especially when rainbow pseudo color is used. It should be stated if the LUT is linear and covers the full range of the data.
Processing software should be named and manipulations indicated (such as type of deconvolution, three-dimensional reconstructions, surface and volume rendering, "gamma changes," filtering, thresholding and projection).
Authors should state the measured resolution at which an image was acquired and any downstream processing or averaging that enhances the resolution of the image.

Correction and Retraction Policy

Content published as Advance Online Publication (AOP) is final and cannot be amended. The online and print versions are both part of the published record; hence, the original version must be preserved and changes to the paper should be made as a formal correction. If an error is noticed in an AOP article, a correction should accompany the article when it publishes in print. An HTML (or full-text) version of the correction will also be created and linked to the original article. If the error is found in an article after print publication, the correction will be published online and in the next available print issue.

Decisions about corrections are made by the editors (sometimes with peer-reviewers' advice), and this sometimes involves author consultation. Requests to make corrections that do not affect the paper in a significant way or impair the reader's understanding of the contribution (a spelling mistake or grammatical error, for example) are not considered.

In cases where co-authors disagree about a correction, the editors will take advice from independent peer-reviewers and impose the appropriate correction, noting the dissenting author(s) in the text of the published version.

Note: An author who has changed their name for reasons such as gender transition or religious conversion may request for their name, pronouns and other relevant biographical information to be corrected on papers published prior to the change. The author can choose for this correction to happen silently, in which case there will be no note flagging the change on either the pdf or the html of the paper, or alternatively they may do so by a formal public Author Correction.

Research Data Policy

Neuropsychopharmacology adheres to a Research Data Policy Type 3. This means that a submission to Neuropsychopharmacology implies that materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data, will be freely available to any researcher wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes, without breaching participant confidentiality. It also means that a Data Availability Statement (see below for more details) is required by the journal.

Data Policy Details

The journal requires that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers. We require authors to ensure that their datasets are either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files whenever possible. Please see the journal's information on recommended repositories.

General repositories – for all types of research data – such as figshare and Dryad may be used where appropriate.

Where a widely established research community expectation for data archiving in public repositories exists, submission to a community-endorsed, public repository is mandatory*.

Persistent identifiers (such as DOIs and accession numbers) for relevant datasets must be provided in the paper.

*For the following types of data set, submission to a community-endorsed, public repository is mandatory:

Mandatory deposition	Suitable repositories
Protein sequences	Uniprot
DNA and RNA sequences	Genbank DNA DataBank of Japan (DDBJ) EMBL Nucleotide Sequence Database (ENA)
DNA and RNA sequencing data	NCBI Trace Archive NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA)
Genetic polymorphisms	dbSNP dbVar European Variation Archive (EVA)
Linked genotype and phenotype data	dbGAP The European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA)
Macromolecular structure	Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB) Biological Magnetic Resonance Data Bank (BMRB) Electron Microscopy Data Bank (EMDB)
Microarray data (must be MIAME compliant)	Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) ArrayExpress
Crystallographic data for small molecules	Cambridge Structural Database

Data Availability Statement

As part of the journal's Data Availability Policies, all original articles must include a Data Availability Statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

Data Availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI Authorship

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, do not currently satisfy our authorship criteria. Notably an attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs. Use of an LLM should be properly documented in the Methods section (and if a Methods section is not available, in a suitable alternative part) of the manuscript.

Generative AI Images

The fast moving area of generative AI image creation has resulted in novel legal copyright and research integrity issues. As publishers, we strictly follow existing copyright law and best practices regarding publication ethics. While legal issues relating to AI-generated images and videos remain broadly unresolved, Springer Nature journals are unable to permit its use for publication.

Exceptions are images/art obtained from agencies that we have contractual relationships with that have created images in a legally acceptable manner. Other exceptions to this policy include images and video that are directly referenced in a piece that is specifically about AI and will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis.

As we expect things to develop rapidly in this field in the near future, we will review this policy regularly and adapt it if necessary.

Please note: Not all AI tools are generative. The use of non-generative machine learning tools to manipulate, combine or enhance existing images or figures should be disclosed in the relevant caption upon submission to allow a case-by-case review.

Gene Nomenclature

Authors should use approved nomenclature for gene symbols, and use symbols rather than italicized full names (Ttn, not titin). Please consult the appropriate nomenclature databases for correct gene names and symbols. Approved human gene symbols are provided by HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC), e-mail: nome@galton.ucl.ac.uk; see also http://www.genenames.org. Approved mouse symbols are provided by The Jackson Laboratory: e-mail: nomen@informatics.jax.org; see also here. For proposed gene names that are not already approved, please submit the gene symbols to the appropriate nomenclature committees as soon as possible, as these must be deposited and approved before publication of an article. Avoid listing multiple names of genes (or proteins) separated by a slash, as in 'Oct4/Pou5f1', as this is ambiguous (it could mean a ratio, a complex, alternative names or different subunits). Use one name throughout and include the other at first mention: 'Oct4 (also known as Pou5f1)'.

Nueroscience-Based Nomenclature (NbN)

Neuropsychopharmacology encourages the use of Neuroscience-based Nomenclature (NbN-2) terminology for psychotropic medications, as it reflects contemporary pharmacological knowledge, rather than arbitrary descriptors based on indications or chemical structure.

Please download the free app for NbN-2 and the Instructions for Authors.

Bioethics

Human and other animal experiments

For primary research manuscripts reporting experiments on live vertebrates and/or higher invertebrates, the corresponding author must confirm that all experiments were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. The manuscript must include a statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments, including any relevant details regarding animal welfare, patient anonymity, drug side effects and informed consent.

For experiments involving human subjects, authors must identify the committee approving the experiments and include with their submission a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all subjects.

Biosecurity policy

The Editor may also seek advice about submitted papers that raise concerns. These may include, for example, ethical issues

or issues of data or materials access. Very occasionally, concerns may also relate to the implications of publishing a paper to the society, including threats to security. In such circumstances, advice will usually be sought simultaneously with the technical peer-review process. As in all publishing decisions, the decision whether to publish is at the discretion of the Editor.

Last Updated: October 2023