Editor-in-Chief’s Responsibilities

1. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for ensuring that content of journal is accurate, credible, authoritative, relevant to the Journal’s scope and mission, readable, and comprehensible. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for setting and communicating Journal policies regarding authorship, conflict of interest, ethical conduct of research, and academic misconduct.

2. The Editor-in-Chief shall recognize that scientific and editorial ethics are founded upon integrity, competence, and a responsibility to protect the communal and public interest. The Editor-in-Chief shall strive to advance the reporting of science in ways that ensure the highest standards of reliability, accessibility, openness, and integrity of the scientific enterprise. The Editor-in-Chief shall promote the broader ethical and communal interests of science in the public domain.

3. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for selecting manuscripts that are new, original, and important contributions to knowledge. Published manuscripts are expected to present valid and reproducible results in sufficient detail for readers to assess the validity of the inferences drawn. Published manuscripts are expected to be logically consistent, and to refer appropriately to previous work.

4. The Editor-in-Chief is expected to utilize the expertise of the editorial board, other peer reviewers, and editorial staff in critiquing and selecting manuscripts for publication. The Editor-in-Chief may delegate manuscript selection to Section Editors or other members of the Editorial Team. However, the Editor-in-Chief remains the final arbiter for all material published in the journal.

5. The Editor-in-Chief will ensure that peer review and other related publication assignments are undertaken by qualified specialists, and that these specialists disclose relevant conflicts of interest as part of the regular review process.

6. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for clearly defining and implementing the Journal’s ethical standards. The Editor-in-Chief is not responsible for investigating, judging, or punishing the author for ethical lapses, other than deciding if authors should be barred from submission to the Journal when academic misconduct has been documented. The Editor-in-Chief will establish the Journal’s policy on notifying an author’s institution of failure to comply with the Journal’s ethical standards. Additionally, the Editor-in-Chief is responsible for informing readers and secondary services of work formally found to be plagiarized, fabricated, or falsified.

7. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for establishing procedures to help maintain journal quality, identify errors and problems, detect trends that reflect deterioration in quality, and implement corrective actions as needed. The Editor-in-Chief shall monitor the number and types of errors that appear in their journals.

8. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for monitoring editorial processing and production timelines (turn-around times for every stage from manuscript receipt to publication). This shall include monitoring acceptance and rejection rates of specific types of manuscripts, managing the inventory of accepted manuscripts, tracking reviewer performance, and assessing staffing needs.

9. The Editor-in-Chief will act professionally, without prejudice or conflict of interest. The Editor-in-Chief will not allow his/her editorial judgment to be influenced by political, commercial and other considerations that are beyond the scope of each scientific report and analysis of possible impacts and applications

10. The Editor-in-Chief will not disclose confidential information unless authorized by the source of that information, or there are allegations of misconduct that require access to that confidential information for proper investigation, or the Editor-in-Chief is required by law to disclose that information.

11. The Editor-in-Chief shall refrain from using confidential information for personal gain, and shall take reasonable steps to ensure that such information is not used for the advantage of other parties.

12. The Editor-in-Chief shall conduct at least one Editorial Team meeting each year, during which the Editor-in-Chief will provide the Editorial Team with an update on the Journal, identify and discuss areas in need of performance improvement; and explore ideas for potential enhancements to the print and online Journal.

13. He/she will also be responsible for creating an Editorial Board of no fewer than 15-20 experts in the field. Together the new Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board will review and select manuscripts for online publication on our site.

14. The Editor-in-Chief will present new Editorial Team appointments (including appointment of Section Editors, Associate Editors, and Guest Editors) to the Company. Formal invitations will be sent only after the Company has been provided an opportunity to assess the suitability of proposed candidates.

15. The Editor-in-Chief will present any changes in the structure the editorial team (such as creation of new sections or additional functions) to the Company. The Editor-in-Chief will not implement such changes in Editorial Board structure until approved by the Company.