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Editors must manage their own conflicts of interest as well as those of their Associate Editors, staff, authors, reviewers and Editorial Board members. Editors and reviewers must reject /decline to be involved with a submission when they have a recent/current publication or submission with the author, share or recently shared affiliations with the author, collaborate, or have close relationships with the author or financial interest/gain, or feel unable to be objective. Article submissions from the Editors, Editorial Board members, or employees are managed so that no details of the review process, other than the anonymous reviews and decisions, are accessible to the Editor or employee.

A reviewer is entrusted to provide an unbiased assessment of the scientific merit of a manuscript under review. Reviewers are tasked with evaluating any author-disclosed conflicts of interest as well as self-disclosing any situation or relationship to the Editor that could bias or be perceived to bias their assessment of the submitted manuscript. These include personal relations to the authors, concurrent competitive research on the same subject in the manuscript, or professional or financial ties to an organization with interests in the subject under review. In such cases where an actual or apparent Conflict-of-Interest is disclosed, the use of a review provided or requested is at the discretion of the Editor.