ETHICAL POLICY
PUBLICATION ETHICS
TRENDS in Sport Sciences follow Best Practice Guidelines established by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Guidelines)
CONFIDENTIALITY
The Editor-in-Chief, the members of the Editorial Board, and any editorial staff must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the authors of the manuscript, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.
Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript will not be used in the own research of the Editor-in-Chief or the members of the Editorial Board without the express written consent of the author.
AUTHORSHIP
TRENDS in Sport Sciences follow Best Practice Guidelines established by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (https://publicationethics.org/guidance/Guidelines)
The Editor-in-Chief and the reviewers evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors.
Research Ethics (human subjects)
When reporting on research that involves human subjects, human material, human tissues, or human data, authors must declare that the investigations were carried out following the rules of the Declaration of Helsinki (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/). The approval from an ethics committee should be obtained before undertaking the research, and an adequate statement should be placed in the Methods Section of the article (including the project identification code, date of approval, and name of the ethics committee).In addition, a scan of such consent should be attached during the submission process.
Example of an ethical statement: "All subjects gave their informed consent for inclusion before they participated in the study. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of ........ (identification code)."
Research Ethics (animals)
Authors should ensure that their research follows the commonly-accepted '3Rs':
- Replacement of animals by alternatives wherever possible,
- Reduction in number of animals used, and
- Refinement of experimental conditions and procedures to minimize the harm to animals.
Authors are encouraged to follow the ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines (https://www.nc3rs.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Guidelines/NC3Rs%20ARRIVE%20Guidelines%202013.pdf). Studies on animals must be approved by an appropriate committee and the approval should be indicated in Methods Section of the article.
Editors reserve the right to reject any submission that does not meet these requirements.
Research Ethics (human subjects)
When reporting on research that involves human subjects, human material, human tissues, or human data, authors must declare that the investigations were carried out following the rules of the Declaration of Helsinki (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/). The approval from an ethics committee should be obtained before undertaking the research, and an adequate statement should be placed in the Methods Section of the article (including the project identification code, date of approval, and name of the ethics committee).In addition, a scan of such consent should be attached during the submission process.
Example of an ethical statement: "All subjects gave their informed consent for inclusion before they participated in the study. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of ........ (identification code)."
Research Ethics (animals)
Authors should ensure that their research follows the commonly-accepted '3Rs':
- Replacement of animals by alternatives wherever possible,
- Reduction in number of animals used, and
- Refinement of experimental conditions and procedures to minimize the harm to animals.
Authors are encouraged to follow the ARRIVE (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments) guidelines (https://www.nc3rs.org.uk/sites/default/files/documents/Guidelines/NC3Rs%20ARRIVE%20Guidelines%202013.pdf). Studies on animals must be approved by an appropriate committee and the approval should be indicated in Methods Section of the article.
Editors reserve the right to reject any submission that does not meet these requirements.
CONFIDENTIALITY
The Editor-in-Chief, the members of the Editorial Board, and any editorial staff must not disclose any information about a submitted manuscript to anyone other than the authors of the manuscript, reviewers, potential reviewers, other editorial advisers, and the publisher, as appropriate.
Unpublished materials disclosed in a submitted manuscript will not be used in the own research of the Editor-in-Chief or the members of the Editorial Board without the express written consent of the author.
AUTHORSHIP
Authorship credit is to be based on:
- substantial contributions to the conception and design, data acquisition, analysis and interpretation;
- drafting an article or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
- final approval of the version to be published.
Authors should meet all three requirements. If research has been carried out by multiple authors, individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript should be identified. When submitting a co-authored manuscript, the corresponding author should clearly indicate the preferred citation order of authors and clearly identify all individual authors as well as the name of any authoring team(s). The authorship order on the byline should be a joint decision of the co-authors. All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed. Each author should contribute sufficiently to the work and take public responsibility for respective fragments of the study, the content and any conflict of interests. All contributors who do not meet the authorship criteria should be listed in the acknowledgments section.
Conflict of interests
The authors must disclose all conflicts of interest to the Editor and describe them on a separate page enclosed with the manuscript:
- financial relationships (employment, consultation, stock ownership, remuneration, paid expertise),
- personal relationships,
- academic competition and others which could affect, according to the Editor or Readers, the content of the study,
- sponsorship of the whole or part of the study – draft, collection, analysis and interpretation of data, report writing and decision on submitting for publication.
The reviewers and editors are also obliged to disclose in a letter to Editor-in-Chief all connections which could be suspected as conflict of interests with the Author. The letter should contain all links with commercial companies dealing with products described in the manuscript.
Additional requirements for authors
Authors are obliged to state their contribution to the article in a short cover letter. Ghost authorship exists when someone has made substantial contributions to writing a manuscript and this role is not mentioned in the manuscript itself. Ghost authorship is not permitted in any form and under any circumstances. All persons involved in the preparation of the manuscript submitted to TSS must be declared as authors or identified in an acknowledgments section. No persons whose contribution to the submitted work was insignificant may be included among the authors.
Civil responsibility
The Editor is responsible for the content of the manuscript; however, full responsibility for the content of the article lies with the Author, and for the advertisements with the sponsoring company or marketing company. The Editorial Board and the Publisher do not take responsibility for any possible unreliability of presented research results.
Copyright
Unless otherwise specified, when submitting the manuscript to the Editor the Authors transfer copyright (including printing, electronic publishing and on-line publishing) to the Publisher.
Author self-archiving
The authors are permitted and encouraged to post published articles on their personal or institutional website, with a clear indication of that the paper was published in this journal and with a link to the journal's site.
PUBLICATION DECISION
The Editor-in-Chief of the journal is responsible for deciding which of the articles submitted to the journal should be published. The editor may be guided by the editorial policies of the journal and constrained by such legal requirements as shall then be in force regarding libel, copyright infringement, and plagiarism. The editor may confer with the members of the Editorial Board or reviewers in making this decision.