Ethical policy

1. Publication and authorship:

1-1. List of references and financial support;

Corresponding author should have the approval of all other listed authors for the submission, review, and publication of all versions of the manuscript. All people who have the right to be recognized as authors should be included on the list of authors, and everyone listed as an author should have made an independent material contribution to the manuscript.
Data, information, and ideas described in the manuscript should have been acquired following modern ethical standards and should not contain materials copied from other reports without explicit written permission of the authors. In addition, all materials and information derived from prior works, including those by the authors of the current report, should be properly attributed by citation in the list of references. Financial supports should be acknowledged as should any potential conflicts of interest. Acknowledgement of financial contribution may help the funding agency to determine the influence of their support. Funding from commercial sponsors may represent a potential conflict of interest. This should be informed in the acknowledgement section so that editors, reviewers, and readers can see this in evaluating the manuscript.

1-2. Plagiarism and fraudulent data;

Researchers and others should be able to trust the validity of published data. Data that have been fabricated or falsified greatly diminish the value of this scientific resource for investigators in the scientific community. Such fraudulent conducts undermine the integrity of the proceedings and the EUBCE in the broad scientific community. Fraudulent conducts include but are not limited to falsification, forgery, and plagiarism.
Falsification is the act of deliberate mishandling of data by deleting, adding or artificially transforming.
Forgery is the act of converting non-existent data or findings into the data for publication.
Plagiarism is the act of misrepresenting work or ideas of other authors as one's own without specifying or disclosing its source.
Acts of republishing a part of an article or book already published as one's own work would represent self-plagiarism. This violates the first disclosure principle of findings.

1-3. Dual submission and dual publication;

Data and information presented in the manuscript should be original and has not been published elsewhere and should not be under review or consideration of publication by other journals. Publishing the same findings based on the same data in two different articles without explicit acknowledgement of the relationship is duplicate publication and is not acceptable. However, the poster or oral presentation of parts of the work including a single page abstract is not considered as prior publication.

2. Author's responsibilities:

2-1. Authors are obliged to follow the editorial policy during the review process;

For the submission of the revised manuscript, all changes in all parts of the manuscript should be explicitly described in a note to the editor. This applies to the list and order of authors, text, data, figures, tables and references.
When and if modifications are made to the manuscript during the review process, it should be done only with the consent of all the authors listed in the manuscript.
If the manuscript is rejected or withdrawn from a journal and then submitted to EUBCE, the co-authors should be asked again to affirm their consents to authorship even if no substantive changes have been made.

2-2. All authors should have significantly contributed to the research;

Authorship should be determined on the basis of substantial contribution to the research.
Honorary authors who have not made a substantive intellectual contribution to the work are unacceptable.
The list of authors on the manuscript has several purposes; it represents who is responsible for the work and to whom questions about the work should be addressed.
Authors should have been involved in conception, design, acquisition of data or analysis and interpretation of data, drafting of revising the manuscript and final approval of the revised version to be published in a substantive manner.
In ordinary situations, authors should be listed in descending order of their contribution to the manuscript. The corresponding author should be clearly marked and identifiable.
Each author should write only the parts of the manuscript he or she has been directly involved. He or she may cite another author's findings and their sources but should not present part or all of them like one's own work. The corresponding author should be responsible for ascertaining the accuracy of data, determining the list of authors and obtaining the approval of final manuscript as a representative of all authors.

2-3. All data reported should be real and authentic;

Experimental data and findings should be collected in reliable ways and kept for a sufficient period to be available if necessary.
It is important that researchers should be able to trust the validity of published data in order to facilitate the progress of science. Intentional, premeditated or reckless, fabrication or falsification is misconduct and greatly diminishes the value of the resource for researchers in the community. This guideline applies to numerical data as well as images.
Any data involving human or animal subjects must be obtained in compliance with the policy set by relevant institutional review boards.

2-4. All authors are obliged to provide corrections or retractions of mistakes;

Once a manuscript has been published, care should be taken that every aspect of the manuscript is correct.
Every effort should be taken to make corrections when errors are found after it has been published. Nevertheless, it is far more preferable to find errors before a manuscript is published.
Should a significant error be found either after submission or during review or after publication, the authors should contact the editor and make appropriate arrangements to correct the error.

3. Review / responsibility for the reviewers:

3-1. Evaluation should be objective;

Objectivity, thoroughness and promptness are essential qualities of a review.
Reviewers should carry out a careful, thorough, and timely evaluation so that authors profit from timely feedback and are able to publish their findings before others do so.
Reviewers should comment tactfully and not use harsh language or launch personal attacks on the authors. Editors may also choose to modify review comments to ensure that civility is preserved if necessary.

3-2. Reviewers should have no conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors and/or the research funders;

It is essential that reviewers should not abuse their privileges by trying to benefit from their privileged access to new data, methods, and ideas.
Reviewers should be sensitive to any conflict of interest regarding a particular manuscript that they are asked to review.
A reviewer who feels inadequate to judge the manuscript should return the manuscript promptly without review and inform the editor of any potential conflict of interest regarding the manuscript.

3-3. Reviewers should perform thorough scientific review;

Agreeing to review a manuscript implies that reviewers should consider the quality and significance of the experimental work, the completeness of the description of material and methods, and the logical interpretation of the results.
Reviewers should point out not only constructive suggestions for revision but also the potential unethical treatment of animals and human subjects, plagiarism, fabrication or falsification, the improper analysis of data, the use of misleading graphics, duplicate publication, improper or omitted citation of the work of others.

3-4. Reviewed manuscripts should be treated confidentially;

Any information in a manuscript under review must be considered confidential and not shared with others.
The reviewer to whom the manuscript was originally sent has the ultimate responsibility for the accuracy of the review and should ensure that others with access to the manuscript do not compromise the integrity of the review process.
Reviewers should understand that the manuscript is the property of the authors until a copyright agreement between the publisher and the authors is signed.

4. Editorial responsibilities:

4-1. Editors have the sole responsibility and full authority to reject or accept an article;

An editor may reject a manuscript without seeking additional opinions if it is deemed inappropriate with respect to subject, format, quality, or scientific significance.
After initial screening, the editor may seek advice from reviewers as to the appropriateness of the manuscript for publication in the proceedings.
Editors should make efforts to choose reviewers who possess proper expertise and good sense of judgment.
Although editors have no obligation to reconsider the rejected manuscript, they may offer the authors an opportunity to prepare a revised version through responding to all the criticisms.

4-2. Editors must establish a review process that minimizes bias.

Editors should have no conflict of interest with respect to articles they reject or accept.
In case that editors have potential conflict of interest regarding the manuscript, they should avoid handling the manuscript by recusal and the manuscript should be delegated to another qualified person.
Editors should give unbiased consideration to all manuscripts and judge each manuscript solely on its merits.
Editors should consider manuscripts submitted for publication with all reasonable speed.
Editors should generally accept the request of an author who asks that a selected reviewer be excluded from the review of a manuscript.
Editors urge reviewers to be objective in their evaluation of a manuscript.

4-3. Editors should handle manuscripts with consistency and fairness;

It is essential that special credit is provided to the authors who publish a finding first. Therefore, editors should endeavor to have all manuscripts reviewed with a consistent degree of promptness, select two or more reviewers for better inputs and thorough evaluations, and provide to the authors a written rationale for the editorial decision.
Editors are charged with the responsibility of ensuring that manuscripts be accepted solely based on the importance and quality of the work reported and its relevance to the proceedings's mission but not their own interests.

4-4. Editors should correct errors if they are found before publication or publish corrections if they are found afterwards;

If an author or someone else brings an apparent error to editor's attention, the editor should notify all authors and ask for corrections to be made.
If the authors do not conform to the request in a timely manner, the editor should publish a notice of correction or retract the article.
All notices of correction or retraction should appear in the proceedings in which the original report appeared, and they should also be listed in the contents page and be appropriately labeled (e.g. erratum or retraction).

4-5. Editors must preserve anonymity of reviewers;

Until a manuscript is published, editors and members of their editorial staffs should treat it as a privileged document. Furthermore, should a reviewer elect to remain anonymous, editors and members of the editorial staff should not reveal the identity of the reviewers before or after the publication.

5. Publishing ethics issues:

5-1. Monitoring/safeguarding publishing ethics by the editorial board;

Editors should be receptive to the opinions of authors, reviewers and editorial board members about ways to improve any aspects of the proceedings.
Editors should actively monitor the fair performance of reviewers and make sure that this performance is of high quality.
Editors should actively consult editorial board members periodically to attain their opinions about the proceedings, informing them of any changes and future challenges in proceedings policies or rules.

5-2. Guidelines for retracting articles;

Editors should consider retracting a publication if:

• they have apparent evidences that the results are not reliable, either as a result of data fabrication or miscalculation or experimental error.
• the results have been published elsewhere without proper citation, permission or justification.
• the manuscript contain plagiarized data, writings, or ideas
• the manuscript reports ethical research

5-3. Maintaining integrity of the published reports;

Editors should be responsible for the integrity of all the manuscripts published in the proceedings.
Editors should have appropriate procedures and rules in place to make sure that the results they publish are of high quality.

5-4. Preclusion of non-scientific considerations from compromising intellectual and ethical standards; 

Funding sponsors for research should not veto the publication of results that do not favor their product or status.
Researchers should not make agreements that allow the funding sponsor to veto the publication of the results, except for the exceptional situations for which the researchers should make written petition fully explaining the relevant circumstances.

5-5. Responsibility for publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed;

When authors discover a significant error or inaccuracy in their own published paper, they are obliged to promptly inform the editor and cooperate with the editor to correct or retract the paper.
If the editor or the publisher learns from a third party that a published paper contains a significant error or inaccuracy, authors are obliged to promptly correct or retract the paper.

5-6. Policy on plagiarism and fraudulency;

Authors should be aware of the publication requirement that submitted manuscript is original and has not been published elsewhere. This includes non-English publications.
Manuscripts should not be submitted concurrently to more than one journal or publication. 
Applicable copyright laws and conventions should be followed. Copyrighted materials (e.g. tables or figures) should be reproduced only with appropriate permissions and acknowledgements.
Relevant previous findings and publications including the authors' own works should be appropriately acknowledged and cited. 
Authors should inform editors if similar findings have been published previously or if multiple analyses of a single data set have been submitted or are under consideration for publication elsewhere.
Authors should provide copies of related publications or work submitted to other journals.
Translations in other languages than English should acknowledge the original paper, and should respect relevant copyright conventions and permission requirements. If in doubt, authors should receive permission from the original publisher before republishing any part of the manuscript.