Editorial Policy and Ethical Guidelines
Editorial Policy and Ethical Guidelines
As a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), ASM adheres to its Best Practice Guidelines and expects authors to observe the high standards of publication ethics set out by COPE. ASM requirements for submitted manuscripts are consistent with the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, as last updated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors in December 2014.
Authors are expected to adhere to the highest ethical standards. The following sections of these Instructions include detailed information about ASM’s ethical standards. Failure to comply with the policies described in these Instructions may result in a letter of reprimand, a suspension of publishing privileges in ASM journals, and/or notification of the authors’ institutions. Authors employed by companies whose policies do not permit them to comply with ASM policies may be sanctioned as individuals and/or ASM may refuse to consider manuscripts having authors from such companies.
For additional information regarding ASM's ethical standards and publishing ethics in general, please visit ASM Journals' Ethics Portal. Included in the portal are ASM's policies and procedures, an author checklist, ethical guidelines and primary sources on topics in publishing ethics.
Use of Microbiological Information
The Council on Microbial Sciences (COMS) of the American Society for Microbiology affirms the long-standing position of the Society that microbiologists will work for the proper and beneficent application of science and will call to the attention of the public or the appropriate authorities misuses of microbiology or of information derived from microbiology. ASM members are obligated to discourage any use of microbiology contrary to the welfare of humankind, including the use of microbes as biological weapons. Bioterrorism violates the fundamental principles expressed in the Code of Ethics of the Society and is abhorrent to ASM and its members.
ASM recognizes that there are valid concerns regarding the publication of information in scientific journals that could be put to inappropriate use as described in the COMS resolution mentioned above. Members of the ASM Journals Board will evaluate the rare manuscript that might raise such issues during the review process. However, as indicated elsewhere in these Instructions, primary-research articles must contain sufficient detail, and material/information must be made available, to permit the work to be repeated by others. Supply of materials should be in accordance with laws and regulations governing the shipment, transfer, possession, and use of biological materials and must be for legitimate, bona fide research needs. We ask that authors pay particular attention to the NSAR Select Agent/Toxin list on the CDC website and the U.S. Government Policy for Oversight of Life Sciences Dual Use Research of Concern (March 2012).
Publishing Ethics
Authorship. ASM journals follow the criteria for authorship as outlined in the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (“Defining the Role of Authors and Contributors”). Briefly, an author is one who makes a substantial contribution to the design, execution, and/or analysis and interpretation of experiments in addition to drafting, revising, and/or approving the initial submission and any subsequent versions of the article. All authors of a manuscript must have agreed to its submission and are responsible for appropriate portions of its content. Submission of a paper before all coauthors have read and approved it is considered an ethical violation.
Author contribution statements. As explained in the ICMJE recommendations, all persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed. ASM encourages transparency in authorship by publishing author contribution statements. Authors are strongly encouraged to include such statements in the Acknowledgments section.
Corresponding author. The corresponding author takes primary responsibility for communicating with the journal and coauthors throughout the submission, peer review, and publication processes. The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that all coauthors have read and approved submissions, including appropriate citations, acknowledgments, and byline order. Additionally, the corresponding author and the study's primary investigator(s), if different, are required to have examined the raw data represented in the manuscript, affirm that such representations accurately reflect the original data, and ensure that the original data are preserved and retrievable.
Consortium authorship. A study group, surveillance team, working group, consortium, or the like (e.g., the Active Bacterial Core Surveillance Team) may be listed as a coauthor in the byline if its contributing members satisfy the requirements for authorship and accountability as described in these Instructions. The names (and institutional affiliations, if desired) of the contributing members only may be given as a separate paragraph in the Acknowledgments section. If the contributing members of the group associated with the work do not fulfill the criteria of substantial contribution to and responsibility for the paper, the group may not be listed in the author byline. Instead, it and the names of its contributing members may be listed in the Acknowledgments section.
Professional writers. “Ghost authorship” is not permitted by ASM. Professional writers should be mentioned in the Acknowledgments section, rather than be included in the byline. To avoid perceived conflicts of interest, writer affiliations and specific contributions (e.g., writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, or proofreading) must be disclosed.
Nonauthor contributions. Contributions from individuals who do not meet the ICMJE criteria for authorship should be acknowledged in the Acknowledgments section. Those who provided assistance, e.g., supplied strains or reagents or critiqued the paper, should not be listed as authors. Acquisition of funding, data collection, or general supervision of the research group does not qualify a person or persons for authorship. As mentioned above, professional writers do not meet authorship criteria and should be mentioned in the Acknowledgments section. Specific contributions for each nonauthor contributor should be included.
Byline order and changes. All authors must agree to the order in which their names are listed in the byline. Statements regarding equal contributions by two or more authors (e.g., “C.J. and Y.S. contributed equally to . . .”) are permitted as footnotes to bylines and must be agreed to by all of the authors. A change in authorship (order of listing, addition or deletion of a name, or corresponding author designation) after submission of the manuscript will be implemented only after receipt of signed statements of agreement from all parties involved.
Authorship disputes. Disputes about authorship may delay or prevent review and/or publication of the manuscript. Should the individuals involved be unable to reach an accord, review and/or publication of the manuscript can proceed only after the matter is investigated and resolved by the authors’ institution(s) and an official report provided to ASM. ASM does not itself investigate or attempt to resolve authorship disputes but will follow institutional recommendations, as appropriate.
ORCID. ASM Journals is a member of Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) and publishes author ORCID numbers in articles. ORCID is an open, nonprofit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers; it is a transparent method of linking research activities and output to these identifiers. In the eJournalPress (eJP) submission system, authors are encouraged to use or create an ORCID number, which can be linked to manuscripts and publications for which a researcher serves as an author. This can be helpful in distinguishing authors with common names. Additional information about ORCID is available on ORCID’s website.
Plagiarism. Misappropriating another person’s intellectual property constitutes plagiarism. This includes copying sentences or paragraphs verbatim (or almost verbatim) from someone else’s work, even if the original work is cited in the references. The NIH Office of Research Integrity publication “Avoiding Plagiarism, Self-Plagiarism, and Other Questionable Writing Practices: a Guide to Ethical Writing” can help authors identify questionable writing practices.
Plagiarism is not limited to the text; it can involve any part of the manuscript, including figures and tables, in which material is copied from another publication without permission and attribution. An author may not reuse his or her own previously published work without attribution; this is considered text recycling (also known as self-plagiarism).
ASM has incorporated plagiarism detection software into its journal-wide submission system in order to help editors verify the originality of submitted manuscripts. Selected manuscripts are scanned and compared with databases. If plagiarism is detected, COPE guidelines on plagiarism will be followed.
Image manipulation. Submitted figures must reflect original data. Please refer to the “Image manipulation” section in Illustrations and Tables for an overview of permissible manipulations, unacceptable adjustments, and required information to disclose in the figure legends of images.
ASM applies forensic imaging tools to screen selected manuscripts for inappropriate manipulation of figures. If unacknowledged and/or inappropriate image manipulations are detected, the matter will be referred to the journal’s ethics panel for consideration.
Fabrication, manipulation, and falsification of data. ASM encourages authors to consult COPE’s Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors. Fabrication, manipulation, and falsification of data constitute misconduct. As defined by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, fabrication is “making up data or results and recording or reporting them,” and falsification is “manipulating research materials, equipment, or processes, or changing or omitting data or results such that the research is not accurately represented in the research record” (42 Code of Federal Regulations, §93.103). All sources and methods used to obtain and analyze data, including any electronic preprocessing, should be fully disclosed; detailed explanations should be provided for any exclusions.
Primary publication. Manuscripts submitted to the journal must represent reports of original research, and the original data must be available for review by the editor if necessary. By submitting a manuscript to the journal, the authors guarantee that they have the authority to publish the work and that the manuscript, or one with substantially the same content, was not published previously, and is not being considered or published elsewhere. It is incumbent upon the author to acknowledge any prior publication, including his/her own articles, of the data contained in a manuscript submitted to an ASM journal. A copy of the relevant work should be submitted with the paper as supplemental material for review only. Whether the material constitutes the substance of a paper and therefore renders the manuscript unacceptable for publication is an editorial decision.
In the event that the authors’ previously published figures and/or data are included in a submitted manuscript, it is incumbent upon the corresponding author to (i) acknowledge the source of the duplication on the submission form, (ii) obtain permission from the original publisher (i.e., copyright owner), (iii) acknowledge the previous publication in the figure legend, and (iv) cite the original manuscript.
A paper is not acceptable for submission to an ASM journal if it, or its substance, has been made publicly available in the following:
- A serial, periodical, or book
- A conference report or symposium proceedings
- A technical bulletin or company white paper
- A public website
- Any other retrievable source
The following do not preclude submission to, or publication by, an ASM journal:
- Posting of a method/protocol on a public website
- Posting of a limited amount of original data on a personal/ university/corporate website or websites of small collaborative groups working on a problem
- Deposit of unpublished sequence data in a public database
- Preliminary disclosures of research findings as meeting posters, webcast as meeting presentations, or published in abstract form as adjuncts to a meeting, e.g., part of a program
- Posting of theses and dissertations on a personal/university-hosted website
Conflict of Interest
All authors are expected to disclose, in the cover letter and in the appropriate field on the submission form, any commercial affiliations as well as consultancies, stock or equity interests, and patent-licensing arrangements that could be considered to pose a conflict of interest regarding the submitted manuscript. (Inclusion of a company name in the author address lines of the manuscript does not constitute disclosure.) Details of the disclosure to the editor will remain confidential. However, it is the responsibility of authors to provide, in the Acknowledgments section, a general statement disclosing financial or other relationships that are relevant to the study. Examples of potentially conflicting interests that should be disclosed include relationships that might detract from an author’s objectivity in presentation of study results and interests whose value would be enhanced by the results presented. All funding sources for the project, institutional and corporate, should be credited in the Acknowledgments section. In addition, if a manuscript concerns a commercial product, the manufacturer’s name must be indicated in the Materials and Methods section or elsewhere in the text, as appropriate, in an obvious manner.
Copyright
To maintain and protect the Society’s ownership and rights and to continue to afford scientists the opportunity to publish in high-quality journals, ASM requires the corresponding author to sign a copyright transfer agreement on behalf of all the authors. Unless this agreement is executed (without changes and/or addenda), ASM will not publish the manuscript.
In the copyright transfer agreement signed by an author, ASM grants to that author (and coauthors) the right to republish discrete portions of his/her (their) article in any other publication (print, CD-ROM, and other electronic forms) of which he/she is (they are) the author(s) or editor(s), on the condition that appropriate credit is given to the original ASM publication. This republication right also extends to posting on a host computer to which there is access via the Internet. Except as indicated below, significant portions of the article may not be reprinted/posted without ASM’s prior written permission, however, as this would constitute duplicate publication.
Authors may post their own published articles on their personal or university-hosted (but not corporate, government, or similar) websites without ASM’s prior written permission provided that appropriate credit is given (i.e., the copyright lines shown at the bottom of the first page).
Works authored solely by U.S. Government employees are not subject to copyright protection, so there is no copyright to be transferred. However, the other provisions of the copyright transfer agreement, such as author representations of originality and authority to enter into the agreement, apply to U.S. Government employee authors as well as to other authors.
Copyright for supplemental material (see “Supplemental Material”) remains with the author, but a license permitting the posting by ASM is included in the article copyright transfer agreement. (If the author of the article is not also the copyright owner of the supplemental material, the corresponding author must send directly to the editor in chief, outside the eJP online manuscript submission and peer review system and no later than the modification stage, signed permission from the owner that allows posting of the material, as a supplement to the article, by ASM. The corresponding author is also responsible for incorporating into the supplemental material any copyright notices required by the owner.)
Permissions
The corresponding author is responsible for obtaining permission from both the original author and the original publisher (i.e., the copyright owner) to reproduce or modify figures and tables and to reproduce text (in whole or in part) from previous publications.
Permissions must be secured at the modification stage and submitted with the revised manuscript in the eJP online manuscript submission and peer review system. Written, signed permissions should be scanned and submitted as supplemental material not for publication. If they cannot be scanned and transmitted this way, they should be e-mailed, mailed, or faxed to the editor. Permissions granted by e-mail must include the full chain of correspondence and header information (“From,” “To,” “Sent,” and “Subject” lines) for each message. Permissions obtained online must be supplied in their entirety, including information about terms and conditions. Permissions should be identified as to the relevant item in the ASM manuscript (e.g., “permissions for Fig. 1 in submitted manuscript”). In addition, a statement indicating that the material is being reprinted with permission must be included in the relevant figure legend or table footnote of the manuscript. Reprinted text must be enclosed in quotation marks, and the permission statement must be included as running text or indicated parenthetically.
It is expected that the authors will provide written assurance that permission to cite unpublished data or personal communications has been granted. For supplemental material intended for posting by ASM (see “Supplemental Material”), if the authors of the MMBR manuscript are not also the owners of the supplemental material, the corresponding author must send to ASM signed permission from the copyright owner that allows posting of the material, as a supplement to the article, by ASM. The corresponding author is also responsible for incorporating in the supplemental material any copyright notices required by the owner.
Warranties and Exclusions
Articles published in this journal represent the opinions of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of ASM. ASM does not warrant the fitness or suitability, for any purpose, of any methodology, kit, product, or device described or identified in an article. The use of trade names is for identification purposes only and does not constitute endorsement by ASM.
Editorial Style
The editorial style of ASM journals conforms to the ASM Style Manual for Journals (American Society for Microbiology, 2018, in-house document [you may find the ASM Word List helpful]) and How To Write and Publish a Scientific Paper, 7th ed. (Greenwood, Santa Barbara, CA, 2011), as interpreted and modified by the editorial board and the ASM Journals Department.
The editors and the Journals Department reserve the privilege of editing manuscripts, whether invited or not, to conform with the stylistic conventions set forth in the aforesaid publications and in these Instructions. Any deviations from this style must be approved by the Journals Department.