Editorial Policies

Researchers should conduct their research – from research proposal to publication – in line with best practices and codes of conduct of relevant professional bodies and/or national and international regulatory bodies.

Springer Nature is committed to upholding the integrity of the scientific record. As a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Bone Research abides by COPE’s principles on how to deal with potential acts of misconduct, which includes formal investigation of all perceived transgressions.

Authorship

Requirements for all categories of articles largely conform to the standard practices of life sciences journals. A manuscript will be considered for publication with the understanding that:

all named authors have agreed to its submission
it is not currently being considered for publication by another journal
if the paper is accepted, it will not subsequently be published in the same or similar form in any language without the consent of publisher

Each author must have contributed sufficiently to the intellectual content of the submission. The corresponding author should list all authors and their contributions to the work. Any changes to the author list after submission, such as a change in the order of the authors, or the deletion or addition of authors, must be approved by a signed letter from every author. The corresponding author must confirm that he or she has had full access to the data in the study and final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication. To qualify as a contributing author, one must meet all of the following criteria:

Conceived and/or designed the work that led to the submission, acquired data, and/or played an important role in interpreting the results
Drafted or revised the manuscript
Approved the final version

Other individuals who made direct contributions to the work but do not meet all of the above criteria may be recognized in the Acknowledgments section of the manuscript.

Professional writers and industry employees can be contributors. Their roles, affiliations, and potential conflicts of interest should be included in the author list or noted in the Acknowledgments and/or Contributors section concurrent with their contribution to the work submitted. Signed statements from any medical writers or editors declaring that they have given permission to be named as an author, as a contributor, or in the Acknowledgments section is also required. Failure to acknowledge these contributors can be considered inappropriate, which conflicts with the editorial policy of the Bone Research.

Competing Interests

In the interests of transparency and to help readers form their own judgements of potential bias, authors must declare whether or not there are any competing interests in relation to the work described. The corresponding author is responsible for submitting a competing interests' statement on behalf of all authors of the paper. This statement must be included in the cover letter and after the acknowledgements of their manuscript. In cases where the authors declare a competing interest, a statement to that effect is published as part of the article. If no such conflict exists, the statement will simply read that the authors have nothing to disclose.

Definition

For the purposes of this policy, competing interests are defined as financial and non-financial interests that could directly undermine, or be perceived to undermine the objectivity, integrity and value of a publication, through a potential influence on the judgements and actions of authors with regard to objective data presentation, analysis and interpretation.

Financial competing interests include any of the following:

Funding: Research support (including salaries, equipment, supplies, and other expenses) by organizations that may gain or lose financially through this publication. A specific role for the funder in the conceptualization, design, data collection, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript, should be disclosed.
Employment: Recent (while engaged in the research project), present or anticipated employment by any organization that may gain or lose financially through this publication.
Personal financial interests: Stocks or shares in companies that may gain or lose financially through publication; consultation fees or other forms of remuneration (including reimbursements for attending symposia) from organizations that may gain or lose financially; patents or patent applications (awarded or pending) filed by the authors or their institutions whose value may be affected by publication. For patents and patent applications, disclosure of the following information is requested: patent applicant (whether author or institution), name of inventor(s), application number, status of application, specific aspect of manuscript covered in patent application.

It is difficult to specify a threshold at which a financial interest become significant, but note that many US universities require faculty members to disclose interests exceeding $10,000 or 5% equity in a company (see, for example, B. Lo et al. New Engl. J. Med. 343, 1616-1620; 2000). Any such figure is necessarily arbitrary, so we offer as one possible practical alternative guideline: "Any undeclared competing financial interests that could embarrass you were they to become publicly known after your work was published." We do not consider diversified mutual funds or investment trusts to constitute a competing financial interest.

The statement must contain an explicit and unambiguous statement describing any potential conflict of interest, or lack thereof, for any of the authors as it relates to the subject of the report. Examples include “Dr. Smith receives compensation as a consultant for XYZ Company,” “Dr. Jones and Dr. Smith have financial holdings in ABC Company,” or “Dr. Jones owns a patent on the diagnostic device described in this report.” These statements acknowledging or denying conflicts of interest must be included in the manuscript under the heading Conflict of Interest. The Conflict of Interest disclosure appears in the cover letter, in the manuscript submission process and before the References section in the manuscript.

Following the Competing Interests heading, there must be a listing for each author, detailing the professional services relevant to the submission. Neither the precise amount received from each entity nor the aggregate income from these sources needs to be provided. Professional services include any activities for which the individual is, has been, or will be compensated with cash, royalties, fees, stock or stock options in exchange for work performed, advice or counsel provided, or for other services related to the author’s professional knowledge and skills. This would include, but not necessarily be limited to, the identification of organizations from which the author received contracts or in which he or she holds an equity stake if professional services were provided in conjunction with the transaction.

Examples of declarations are:

Conflict of Interest.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Conflict of Interest.
Dr Caron's work has been funded by the NIH. He has received compensation as a member of the scientific advisory board of Acadia Pharmaceutical and owns stock in the company. He also has consulted for Lundbeck and received compensation. Dr Rothman and Dr Jensen declare no potential conflict of interest.

Non-financial competing interests:

Non-financial competing interests can take different forms, including personal or professional relations with organizations and individuals. We would encourage authors and referees to declare any unpaid roles or relationships that might have a bearing on the publication process. Examples of non-financial competing interests include (but are not limited to):

Unpaid membership in a government or non-governmental organization
Unpaid membership in an advocacy or lobbying organization
Unpaid advisory position in a commercial organization
Writing or consulting for an educational company
Acting as an expert witness

Ethics and biosecurity

Studies involving animals and other human subjects

Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. A statement detailing this, including the name of the ethics committee and the reference number where appropriate, along with a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all subjects, must appear in all manuscripts reporting such research.

For primary research manuscripts reporting experiments on live vertebrates and/or higher invertebrates, the corresponding author must confirm that all experiments were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. The manuscript must include in the Supplementary Information (methods) section (or, if brief, within of the print/online article at an appropriate place), a statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments, including any relevant details regarding animal welfare, patient anonymity, drug side effects and informed consent. Sex and other characteristics of animals that may influence results must be described. Details of housing and husbandry must be included where they are likely to influence experimental results. Bone Research recommends following the ARRIVE reporting guidelines when documenting animal studies.

Clinical Trials

As defined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), a clinical trial is any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention and comparison groups to study the cause-and effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. A medical intervention is any intervention used to modify a health outcome and includes but is not limited to drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioural treatments, and process-of-care changes. A trial must have at least one prospectively assigned concurrent control or comparison group in order to trigger the requirement for registration. Nonrandomised trials are not exempt from the registration requirement if they meet the above criteria.

When reporting experiments on human subjects, please indicate whether the procedures were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional or regional) or with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975 (as revised in 1983). Include Institutional Review Board or Animal Care and Use Committee approvals.

All clinical trials must be registered in a public registry prior to submission. The journal follows the trials registration policy of the ICMJE (www.icmje.org) and considers only trials that have been appropriately registered before submission, regardless of when the trial closed to enrolment. Acceptable registries must meet the following ICMJE requirements:

be publicly available, searchable, and open to all prospective registrants
have a validation mechanism for registration data
be managed by a not-for-profit organization

The trial registry number for eligible papers will be collected during the submission process.

Informed Consent

When publishing identifiable images from human research participants, authors must include a statement attesting that they have obtained informed consent for publication of the images. If the participant is deceased, consent must be sought from the next of kin of the participant. All reasonable measures must be taken to protect patient anonymity. Black bars over the eyes are not acceptable means of anonymization. In certain cases, the journal may insist upon obtaining evidence of informed consent from authors. Images without appropriate consent will be removed from publication.

Biosecurity Policy

The Editor may seek advice about submitted papers not only from technical reviewers but also on any aspect of a paper that raises concerns. These may include, for example, ethical issues or issues of data or materials access. Occasionally, concerns may also relate to the implications to society of publishing a paper, including threats to security. In such circumstances, advice will usually be sought simultaneously with the technical peer-review process. As in all publishing decisions, the ultimate decision whether to publish is the responsibility of the editor.

Image Integrity and Standards

Images submitted with a manuscript for review should be minimally processed (for instance, to add arrows to a micrograph). Authors should retain their unprocessed data and metadata files, as editors may request them to aid in manuscript evaluation. If unprocessed data is unavailable, manuscript evaluation may be stalled until the issue is resolved.

A certain degree of image processing is acceptable for publication, but the final image must correctly represent the original data and conform to community standards. The guidelines below will aid in accurate data presentation at the image processing level:

Authors should list all image acquisition tools and image processing software packages used. Authors should document key image-gathering settings and processing manipulations in the Methods section.
Images gathered at different times or from different locations should not be combined into a single image, unless it is stated that the resultant image is a product of time-averaged data or a time-lapse sequence. If juxtaposing images is essential, the borders should be clearly demarcated in the figure and described in the legend.
Touch-up tools, such as cloning and healing tools in Photoshop, or any feature that deliberately obscures manipulations, is to be avoided.

Processing (such as changing brightness and contrast) is appropriate only when it is applied equally across the entire image and is applied equally to controls. Contrast should not be adjusted so that data disappear. Excessive manipulations, such as processing to emphasize one region in the image at the expense of others (for example, through the use of a biased choice of threshold settings), is inappropriate, as is emphasizing experimental data relative to the control.

Research Data Policy

An inherent principle of publication is that others should be able to replicate and build upon the authors' published claims. We strongly encourage that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers. We encourage authors to ensure that their datasets are either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files whenever possible. If a public repository does not exist, the information must be made available to editors and referees at submission, and to readers promptly upon request. Any restrictions on material availability or other relevant information must be disclosed in the manuscript’s Methods section and should include details of how materials and information may be obtained.

Please see the journals guidelines on Research Data policy here.

Misconduct

Springer Nature takes seriously all allegations of potential misconduct. As a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Bone Research will follow the COPE guidelines outlining how to deal with cases of suspected misconduct. As part of the investigation, the journal may opt to do one or more of the following:

suspend review or publication of a paper until the issue has been investigated and resolved;
request additional information from the author, including original data or images or ethics committee or IRB approval;
make inquiries of other titles believed to be affected;
forward concerns to the author’s employer or person responsible for research governance at the author’s institution;
refer the matter to other authorities or regulatory bodies (for example, the Office of Research Integrity in the US or the General Medical Council in the UK); or
submit the case to COPE in an anonymized form for additional guidance on resolution.

Please note that, in keeping with the journal’s policy of the confidentiality of peer review, if sharing of information with third parties is necessary, disclosure will be made to only those Editors who the Editor believes may have information that is pertinent to the case, and the amount of information will be limited to the minimum required.

Duplicate Publication

Papers must be original and not published or submitted for publication elsewhere. This rule also applies to non-English language publications.

Springer Nature allows and encourages prior publication on recognized community preprint servers for review by other scientists before formal submission to a journal. The details of the preprint server concerned and any accession numbers should be included in the cover letter accompanying manuscript submission. This policy does not extend to preprints available to the media or that are otherwise publicized outside the scientific community before or during the submission and consideration process.

Springer Nature also allows publication of meeting abstracts before the full contribution is submitted. Such abstracts should be included with the journal submission and referred to in the cover letter accompanying the manuscript. Again this policy does not extend to meeting abstracts and reports available to the media or which are otherwise publicised outside the scientific community during the submission and consideration process.

Permissions

If a table or figure has been published before, the authors must obtain written permission to reproduce the material in electronic format from the copyright owner and submit it with the manuscript. This follows for illustrations and other materials taken from previously published works not in the public domain. The original source should be cited in the figure caption or table footnote. Permission to reproduce material can usually be obtained through the Copyright Clearance Center.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is when an author attempts to pass off someone else's work as his or her own. Duplicate publication, sometimes called self-plagiarism, occurs when an author reuses substantial parts of his or her own published work without providing the appropriate references. This can range from getting an identical paper published in multiple journals, to 'salami-slicing', where authors add small amounts of new data to a previous paper.

Plagiarism can be said to have clearly occurred when large chunks of text have been cut-and-pasted. Minor plagiarism without dishonest intent is relatively frequent, for example, when an author reuses parts of an introduction from an earlier paper. Journal editors judge any case of which they become aware (either by their own knowledge of and reading about the literature, or when alerted by referees) on its own merits.

Springer Nature is a member of Similarity Check (formerly CrossCheck), a multi-publisher initiative used to screen published and submitted content for originality. Bone Research uses Similarity Check to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. To find out more about visit the Similarity Check website.

If a case of plagiarism comes to light after a paper is published, the Journal will conduct a preliminary investigation, utilising the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics. If plagiarism is proven, the Journal will contact the author's institute and funding agencies as appropriate. The paper containing the plagiarism may also be formally retracted or subject to correction.

Data Fabrication & Falsification

Falsification is the practice of altering research data with the intention of giving a false impression. This includes, but is not limited to, manipulating images, removing outliers or “inconvenient” results, or changing, adding or omitting data points. Fabrication is the practice of inventing data or results and recording and/or reporting them in the research record. Data falsification and fabrication call into question the integrity and credibility of data and the data record, and as such, they are among the most serious issues in scientific ethics.

Some manipulation of images is allowed to improve them for readability. Proper technical manipulation includes adjusting the contrast and/or brightness or colour balance if it is applied to the complete digital image (not parts of the image). The author should notify the Editor in the cover letter of any technical manipulation. Improper technical manipulation refers to obscuring, enhancing, deleting and/or introducing new elements into an image. See Image Integrity & Standards below for more details.

Toolkits

Springer Nature endorses the toolkits and guidelines produced by the following bodies:

Committee on Publication Ethics
Good Publication Practice
Medical Publishing Insights and Practices Initiative

Supplementary information for editors and reviewers

Any manuscripts under review or accepted for publication elsewhere should accompany the submission if they are relevant to its scientific assessment.

Authors should also provide upon submission any kind of supplementary material that will aid the review process.

Peer Review

The journal operates single blind peer review. Manuscripts sent out for peer review are evaluated by at least one independent reviewer (often two or more). Authors are welcome to suggest independent reviewers to evaluate their manuscript, as well as request individuals or laboratories. All recommendations are considered, but the choice of reviewers is at the editors’ discretion. To expedite the review process, only papers that seem most likely to meet editorial criteria are sent for external review. Papers judged by the editors to be of insufficient general interest or otherwise inappropriate are rejected promptly without external review. The editors then make a decision based on the reviewers' evaluations:

Accept, with or without editorial revisions.
Revise, with the author addressing concerns raised by the reviewers before a final decision is reached.
Reject, but indicate to the authors that further work might justify a resubmission.
Reject outright, typically on grounds of specialist interest, lack of novelty, insufficient conceptual advance or major technical and/or interpretational problems.

Selecting Peer Reviewers

Reviewer selection is critical to the publication process, and the editors’ choice is based on many factors, including expertise, reputation, and specific recommendations. A reviewer may decline the invitation to evaluate a manuscript where there is a perceived conflict of interest (financial or otherwise).

Appeals

Even in cases where editors did not invite resubmission, some authors ask the editors to reconsider a rejection decision. These are considered appeals, which, by policy, must take second place to the normal workload. In practice, this means that decisions on appeals often take several weeks. Only one appeal is permitted for each manuscript, and appeals can only take place after peer review.

Decisions are reversed on appeal only if the editors are convinced that the original decision was a serious mistake, not merely a borderline call that could have gone either way. Further consideration may be merited if a referee made substantial errors of fact or showed evidence of bias, but only if a reversal of that referee's opinion would have changed the original decision. Similarly, disputes on factual issues need not be resolved unless they were critical to the outcome. Thus, after careful consideration of the authors' points, most appeals are rejected by the editors.

If an appeal merits further consideration, the editors may send the authors' response or the revised paper to one or more referees, or they may ask one referee to comment on the concerns raised by another referee. On occasion, particularly if the editors feel that additional technical expertise is needed to make a decision, they may obtain advice from an additional referee.

Pre- and Post-Submissions

Authors are welcome to post pre-submission versions or the original submitted version of the manuscript on a personal blog, a collaborative wiki or a recognized preprint server (such as ArXiv or BioRXiv) at any time (but not subsequent pre-accept versions that evolve following peer review).

For open access content published under a Creative Commons license, authors can replace the submitted version with the final published version at publication as long as a publication reference and URL to the published version on the journal website are provided.

Correction and Retraction Process

We recognize our responsibility to correct errors. Content published online is final and cannot be amended. The online version is part of the published record; therefore the original version must be preserved and changes to the paper should be made as a formal correction. If an error is noticed after online publication an HTML (or full-text) version of the correction will be created and linked to the original article. Please note the following policy for making corrections to online peer-reviewed content:

Publisher Correction. Notification of an important error made by the journal that affects the publication record or the scientific integrity of the paper, or the reputation of the authors, or of the journal.
Author Correction. Notification of an important error made by the author(s) that affects the publication record or the scientific integrity of the paper, or the reputation of the authors or the journal.
Retraction. Notification of invalid results. All co-authors must sign a retraction specifying the error and stating briefly how the conclusions are affected.

Decisions about corrections are made by the Editor (sometimes with advice of peer reviewers) and this sometimes involves author consultation. Requests to make corrections that do not affect the paper in a significant way or impair the reader's understanding of the contribution (a spelling mistake or grammatical error, for example) are not considered. In cases where co-authors disagree about a correction, the Editor will take advice from independent peer reviewers and impose the appropriate correction, noting the dissenting author(s) in the text of the published version.