Ethical standards

All manuscripts submitted to EPJ Nonlinear Biomedical Physics should adhere to the journal's Editorial standards, as described below.

The journal is committed to the standards outlined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and the Council of Science Editors (CSE) regarding all aspects of publishing and all actors involved in the publication process, authors, journal editors and the publisher (http://www.icmje.org/ and http://www.councilscienceeditors.org/). This concerns issues of publishing ethics, the publication itself, authorship, the author's responsibilities, the peer review process, as well as theeditor's responsibilities. Major aspects are also the protection of research participants, the patient's right to privacy, the respect of animals' rights,the requirement for informed consent, the necessity to have a registration of a clinical trial, as well as reporting guidelines depending on the studiesdesign. In addition, at any stage, any conflict of interest has to be declared, allowing that no biased decisions will be taken by the Editors or thereviewers, and that the reader has full insight into the financial or other conflicts of interest related to the accepted article. The journal also follows the standards and guidelines provided by COPE, especially regarding misconduct and fraud, and how to act in front of such a case. COPE provides a code of conduct with best practices in publishing and flow charts that describe the publisher's and editor's actions, if such a case has to be resolved: http://publicationethics.org/. To authors with proven misconduct or fraud the actionsavailable in the flowcharts will be applied.

The journal's ethical practice and policy is adapted from those published on the pages of EDP OPEN.

1 Conditions for submission of an article

Submission of a manuscript implies that the work has not been published and is not submitted for publication anywhere else. Publication must be approved by all authors. Authors should accept publication fees. For ethics in publishing consult COPE http://publicationethics.org/.

Authors are invited to comply with the “Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals”, which were established and made available by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) at: http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/.

The journal has adopted a rigorous examination of every submitted manuscript towards plagiarism or text recycling using Similarity Check. This tool allows the Section Editors to quickly identify even partial use of already published content, which cannot be re-published in this journal for various reasons, such as copyright issues, autoplagiarism, plagiarism, etc. In case of doubt, and in order to avoid any forms of plagiarism or text recycling, authors are invited to visit relevantwebpages of universities across the world dealing with this topic, or probably the websites of their own institutions.

Please visit these few examples:

• MIT
• Plagiarism.org
• Standford University
• University of Toronto
• Université du Québec
• Universität Bamberg
• Univesität Heidelberg
• Université de Paris Descartes

If nevertheless an article is submitted containing any forms of already published content without citing the sources, the authors will be informed by the Section Editors. For a not yet published article, in case of conflicts, the relevant COPE guidelines are applied. The detailedand updated version of the way of action of the Section Editors is available on the website of COPE.

2 Authorship

CSE, ICMJE and others recommend that all those designated as authors meet all of the criteria they describe. The list of criteria is available here for ICMJE and here for CSE. Those contributors who donot meet all of the criteria shall be acknowledged.

3 Conflict of interest

Authors must disclose whether or not they have a financial relationship with the organization that sponsored the research. They should also state that theyhave full control of all primary data and that they agree to allow the journal to review their data if requested.

Therefore the manuscript must be accompanied by the "Conflicts of Interest Disclosure Form" at the initial submission.

Any additional conflict of interest, on personal or any other level must also be disclosed.

4 Peer Reviewing

EPJ Nonlinear Biomedical Physics operates a single-blind peer-review system, where the reviewers are aware of the names and affiliations of the authors, but the reviewer reports provided to authors are anonymous Publication of research articles by EPJ Nonlinear Biomedical Physics is dependent primarily ontheir scientific validity and coherence as judged by our external expert editors and/or peer reviewers, who will also assess whether the writing iscomprehensible and whether the work represents a useful contribution to the field.

Submitted manuscripts will generally be reviewed by two to three experts who will be asked to evaluate whether the manuscript is scientifically sound andcoherent, whether it duplicates already published work, and whether or not the manuscript is sufficiently clear for publication. Reviewers will also beasked to indicate how interesting and significant the research is. The Editors will reach a decision based on these reports and, where necessary, they will consult with members of the Editorial Board.

The Section Editors have full authority for acceptation/rejection of the submitted manuscripts. Persons with a conflict of interest towards a submittedmanuscript shall declare it and be withdrawn from the peer reviewing of this particular article.

5 Falsification/fabrication of data

Reporting manipulated or fabricated research data is considered the most extreme case of misconduct in scientific publishing.

EPJ reserves the right not to work with authors who are abusive to staff, referees and/or editors.

EPJ follows the Policies on Publishing Integrity of its co-publishers:
Springer, EDPS, and SIF. These publishers are all participating members of the non-profit international Committee on Publishing Ethics (COPE). All journals in the EPJ family, and the Editors-in-Chief of the journals, are also registered members of COPE.

6 Policies for publication of errata and for article retraction

Despite careful peer reviewing and article production, situations might occur where errata should be published or articles retracted. The Section Editors, together with the publisher therefore follow the flowcharts established by COPE and published on their website (http://publicationethics.org/).