Ethical Compliance Checklist

All authors should

• obtain permission to use unpublished instruments, procedures, or data that other researchers might consider theirs (proprietary).
• obtain permission for the use of any copyrighted material included in the submissions.
• properly cite other published work presented in portions of the manuscripts.
• review the manuscript and agree on responsibility for its content.
•  adequately protect the confidentiality of research participants, organizations, third parties, or others who were the source of information presented in this manuscript.
• agree to the order of authorship.

Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscripts and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics. In the case of using any AI tools in the write-up, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, authors must disclose that in the Method Section of the paper, explaining how AI tools were used.

Authors are responsible for complying with ethics approvals and any other pre-project or pre-submission procedures specified by their institution, organisation or government.