Responsibilities

• Authors must ensure that data have been collected in an ethical manner. Authors must be prepared to demonstrate that their research has been approved by an institutional review board.
• Authors should submit only previously unpublished work.
• Authors of research manuscripts should ensure that the manuscript is prepared so as to facilitate the review process. (See before submission checklist.)
• Authors are responsible for disclosing potential conflicts of interest (e.g., an author evaluating the efficacy of a commercially available intervention program stands to benefit financially from a favorable pattern of results).
• Authors who receive an editorial decision of revise-resubmit are expected to submit the revised paper within the time frame provided in the action letter. Failure to do so may rescind the invitation to revise the paper. Authors are expected to return copy-edited versions and galley proofs and answer queries regarding the proofs by the provided deadlines. Failure to do so may result in the paper not appearing in the Journal as scheduled or in the article being published as is.
• If the journal implies article processing charges, all dues must be cleared by the author earnestly.

Rights

• Authors can expect to be notified that a manuscript has been received. Authors can expect that a decision on their manuscript will be made in a timely manner (i.e., within 90 days of receipt) or they can expect an explanation within 90 days of receipt as to why a decision has been delayed along with a new target date for a decision.
• Authors can inquire about the disposition of a submitted manuscript at any time, but are encouraged to wait at least 8 weeks after the manuscript has been submitted before doing so. Authors can withdraw a paper from editorial consideration at any time.
• Authors can rebut a decision to reject a manuscript for publication in writing. Further, it is up to the Editor to decide whether a case has been made and what action to follow (e.g., obtaining an additional review, upholding the original decision).
• Authors can index and store the published papers in the private or public archives or repositories like university database, internet archived, academia, researchgate etc.

This document is adapted from a Council on Scientific Editors Editorial Policy Statement appearing in Science, Vol 25 (6).

These rights and responsibilities were revised on October 20, 2017 and they will be reviewed annually (as needed) for accuracy and for integrity.