Ethical statement
● Human or Animal Subjects Research
Authors must declare at submission that research involving human or animal subjects or plants must adhere to all relevant laws and institutional guidelines.
♦ Information of Consent
Manuscripts involving human participants, human data, or human tissue must include a statement confirming informed consent for participation. Human subjects' right to privacy must always be observed. The authors should ensure that the individual rights of all the participants who are involved in the study are protected. Identifying details (e.g., names and dates of birth) of the participants that were studied should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, or genetic profiles unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the participant (or parent or guardian if the participant is incapable) gave written informed consent for publication.
♦ Ethics Approval Statements
Authors must obtain approval (or waiver) from the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board (IRB) before submitting the manuscript if the research involves human or animal subjects. If ethical approval was not needed, this must be explicitly stated in the submission system.
“For human subjects, the authors must ensure that their research was carried out following the rules of the Declaration of Helsinki, as revised in 2024. The manuscript must include a statement of IRB approval or waiver (with the reason for the waiver), or a statement confirming adherence to the Declaration of Helsinki. An example of the IRB statement is as follows: "All subjects provided informed consent for inclusion before participating in the study. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of XXX (Project identification code)."
For animal subjects, all experiments should comply with the ARRIVE guidelines and should be carried out in accordance with the U.K. Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 and associated guidelines, or EU Directive 2010/63/EU on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes, or the U.S. Public Health Service Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. A statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments, including any relevant details must be included in the manuscript. If no animal ethics committee is available to review applications, the ethics of research will be evaluated by reviewers and editors. Authors should provide a statement justifying the work from an ethical perspective.
● Research Involving Plants
Experimental research on plants (either cultivated or wild) including collection of plant material, must comply with institutional, national, or international guidelines. We recommend that authors comply with the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Convention on the Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. For each submitted manuscript, supporting genetic information and origin must be provided. For research manuscripts involving rare and non-model plants, voucher specimens must be deposited in an accessible herbarium or museum. Vouchers may be requested for review by future investigators to verify the identity of the material used in the study (especially if taxonomic rearrangements occur in the future). They should include details of the populations sampled on the site of collection, date of collection, and document the part(s) used in the study where appropriate. For rare, threatened, or endangered species, this can be waived, but it is necessary for the author to describe this in the cover letter.
Authors must include a competing interest statement including explicit acknowledgment of whether the authors or their institutions received any payments or services in the past 36 months from a third party that could be perceived to influence, or give the appearance of potentially influencing, the submitted work.
