Research and Publication Ethics
Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences adheres to the guidelines of research and publication ethics described in the ICMJE Guidelines (http://www.icmje.org) and the Guidelines on Good Publication (http://publicationethics.org/resources/guidelines).
Authorship
An 'author' is generally considered to be someone who has made substantive intellectual contributions to a published study. According to the ICMJE guidelines (https://www.icmje.org/icmje-recommendations.pdf), authorship credit should be based on:
- 1) Substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, and/or analysis and interpretation of data; AND
- 2) Drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
- 3) Final approval of the version to be published; AND
- 4) Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.
Authors wishing to make any changes to authorship will be asked to make and submit an official letter to the editor. Please note that changes to authorship cannot be made after acceptance of a manuscript.
Duplicate Publication
Any manuscripts submitted to the Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences must be original and the manuscript, or substantial parts of it, must not be under consideration by any other journals. All manuscripts submitted to the journal are checked for possible plagiarism or duplicate publication by CrossCheck’s plagiarism detection. Any suspected cases of covert duplicate manuscript submission will be handled and the editor may contact the authors’ institution
Competing interests
The Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences requires authors to declare all competing interests including financial or non-financial support related to their work. Where authors have no competing interests, the statement should read “The author(s) declare(s) that they have no competing interests”. The editor may ask for further information relating to competing interests.
Care and Use of Animals
Experimental research on vertebrates or any regulated invertebrates must comply with institutional, national, or international guidelines, and where available should have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. The manuscript must include a statement of the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) compliance that should appear as the first item in the section of materials and methods. If necessary, the editor or reviewers may request an official number of IACUC approval. The Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences maintains the right to reject any manuscripts on the basis of unethical conduct or misconduct of animal studies.
Selection and Description of Participants
Ensure correct use of the terms sex (when reporting biological factors) and gender (identity, psychosocial or cultural factors), and, unless inappropriate, report the sex and/or gender of study participants, the sex of animals or cells, and describe the methods used to determine sex and gender. If the study was done involving an exclusive population, for example in only one sex, authors should justify why, except in obvious cases (e.g., prostate cancer). Authors should define how they determined race or ethnicity and justify their relevance.
Managing Research and Publication Misconduct
The Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences may find any suspected cases of research and publication misconduct. In these cases, the ethics committee of the journal will follow the process provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (http://publicationethics.org/resources/flowcharts), discuss and finalize the cases for further publication.
Editorial Responsibilities
The editorial board of the Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences will continuously monitor research and publication ethics. The editors maintain the following responsibilities: responsibility and authority to reject and accept articles; avoiding any conflict of interest with respect to articles they reject or accept; promoting publication of corrections or retractions when errors are found; and preservation of the anonymity of reviewers.