DCM. Author's Ethics

Author Ethics.

1 Ethical disclaimers

• The editorial board has decided to introduce a section with ethical disclaimers in the journal.
• A disclaimer is a note of disclaimer of responsibility.
• For example, authors’ statements about conflicts of interest, author contributions, acknowledgements, etc.
• Some disclaimers are integrated as metadata in international citation databases.
• Disclaimers are usually placed at the end of the manuscript before the reference list.
• If the full text of the manuscript is not available in the public domain, the disclaimers are usually placed on the journal’s website together with other public bibliographic data of the article.
• We suggest using a mandatory standardized template of the journal’s disclaimer.
• In a situation where a particular disclamer is not applicable to the research, the author should point out the irrelevance of its use.
• Let’s take a closer look at the disclaimers used.

2 Author contributions

• Researchers always face the problem of authorship [1]:
  • the list of authors includes very different people from those who have made a principled contribution to the work;
  • people are added against their wishes or without their knowledge;
  • the order does not reflect the contribution of each author.
• Contribution to authorship is determined by the overall involvement of the research participant in the study.
• The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) draws attention to the problem of authorship [2].
• The CRediT system (https://credit.niso.org/) is proposed to formalize author roles.
• The CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy) offers 14 possible author roles [3] (cite. Contributor Roles).
• This is not really a taxonomy, but a faceted classification. Author roles are not always independent in themselves.

2.1 Contributor Roles

1. Conceptualization
   • Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
2. Data curation
   • Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use.
3. Formal analysis
   • Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.
4. Funding acquisition
   • Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
5. Investigation
   • Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
6. Methodology
   • Development or design of methodology; creation of models.
7. Project administration
   • Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
8. Resources
   • Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
9. Software
   • Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
10. Supervision
    • Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
11. Validation
    • Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
12. Visualization
    • Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
13. Writing—original draft
    • Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
14. Writing—review & editing
    • Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision—including pre- or post-publication stages.

3 Acknowledgments

• Acknowledgments should be addressed to specific individuals for specific contributions to the study and manuscript.
• Acknowledgments should refrain from thanking individuals who abstractly inspired or anonymously participated in the review.
• Acknowledgments are made to:
  • people who contributed to the research and preparation of the manuscript of the article, but who do not meet all the criteria for authorship;
  • people and organizations that have supported the research and preparation of the manuscript to some extent, or partially funded certain stages at the initiative of the authors.
• It is advisable for authors to assure the journal (e.g., in a cover letter) that they have obtained permission to mention certain people in the acknowledgments section.

4 Funding

• Disclaimer funding refers primarily to external funding if the research was externally initiated.
• If the research is entirely the initiative of the author’s team, it is better to indicate gratitude for partial funding of some of the stages of the research in the Acknowledgments section.
• The fact that the author’s team has received external funding should be recorded in the disclaimer as a matter of course.
• When mentioning the sponsor, its exact data (name of the organization, grant number, etc.) and the country of its location should be specified.
• If there is any support, it is recommended to clarify in the Conflicts of interest section at which stages of the research and how the support was used.
• If there is no external funding, it is written: This research received no external funding.
• If it is impossible to obtain information from the authors about the source of funding, then write: Not specified.

5 Data Availability Statement

• Data are particularly important in reproducible researches (see Reproducible Research).
• In particular, when statistical methods are used.
• The data availability statement tells the reader where the research data related to the article are located and under what conditions the data can be accessed.
• References to the dataset are also provided.
• Basic information provided to the reader:
  • where the data can be accessed (data repository);
  • a persistent identifier, such as a digital object identifier (doi) or access number, or a link to a permanent record of the dataset;
  • details of any restrictions on access to the data and a reasonable explanation (e.g. for ethical, legal or commercial reasons).

5.1 Possible options for accessing the data and examples of description

• The data are publicly available in the repository.
  • “The data supporting this study are publicly available in repository name at (doi, url).”
• Data are available in the repository but are embargoed.
  • “Data supporting this study will be available from repository name at (doi, url) after a 6-month embargo.”
• Data are available from the repository but access is restricted due to legal, ethical or commercial reasons.
  • “The data supporting this study are available in repository name at (doi, url). Access to the data is subject to approval and data sharing agreement due to reason “.
• Secondary analysis of third-party data subject to restrictions.
  • “This study used third-party data provided under license, which the author does not have permission to disclose. Requests for access to the data should be directed to third party at contacts.”
• Data available as supplementary information.
  • “Data supporting this study are included in the article and/or supporting materials.”
• Data cannot be shared due to ethical, legal, or commercial restrictions.
  • “Data supporting this study cannot be made available due to what reason ”.
• No new data is created or analyzed.
  • “No new data were created or analyzed in this study. Data sharing is not applicable.”

6 Conflicts of interest

• This disclaimer must be included.
• If there is no conflict of interest, then the corresponding statement should also be included (The authors declare no conflict of interest).
• Conflicts of interest can comment on various aspects, but usually the author’s past or current employment is indicated.
• Grants (especially from for-profit companies) received not only by the author but also by the organization for which he or she works are indicated.
• If the author is associated with a sponsor, it is indicated where the research was conducted.

7 Bibliography

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