JBRMS Policies
JBRMS ensures that any manuscript submitted complies with the ethical standards outlined by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and meets JBRMS's general article requirements. All submitted manuscripts undergo thorough plagiarism detection software checks.
Falsification or fabrication of data, plagiarism (including duplicate publication without proper citation), and misappropriation of work are strictly prohibited practices at JBRMS. Any instances of ethical misconduct are treated seriously and will be handled in accordance with COPE guidelines.

Authorship and Author Responsibilities
At JBRMS, we uphold a robust authorship policy to ensure that all intellectual contributors receive due credit for their contributions to the work. Authors and contributors alike are expected to take ownership of the final published material.
We request that individuals contributing to academic endeavors are distinctly identified either as named authors, whose details are published in the byline and specified in the contributions statement, or as contributors, acknowledged for their contributions in the acknowledgments section.

Conferences, proceedings, and abstracts Manuscripts that first appeared as conference papers must be expanded upon if they are to be considered as original work. Authors are required to add a substantial amount of original content in the form of new raw material (experiments, data) or new treatment of old data sets which lead to original discussion and/or conclusions, providing value that significantly exceeds the original conference version. As a rule of thumb, at least 30% of the content must be original. Authors submitting such work are required to:

• seek permission for reuse of the published conference paper if the author does not hold the copyright
• cite the conference in the acknowledgements section, or the references section if applicable.

Blogs
Although permissible, manuscripts with extended content previously published online in non-academic media, like blogs, should be disclosed at the time of submission in the acknowledgments section of the manuscript.

Retractions
JBRMS adheres to the COPE guidelines and recommendations when assessing potential retractions.
Furthermore, we uphold two fundamental principles, as endorsed by COPE:

• Retractions serve to correct the scholarly record and are not punitive measures.
• Retraction statements are made publicly available and linked to the original article that is retracted.

All cases of potential retractions are evaluated individually and undergo internal investigation or, if necessary, are guided by recommendations from institutional investigations involving the author(s). JBRMS identifies the following reasons as grounds for concern and potential retraction:

• Substantial evidence indicating unreliable findings due to misconduct (e.g., data fabrication) or genuine error (e.g., miscalculation or experimental error).
• Prior publication of findings elsewhere without proper attribution, permission, or justification (i.e., redundant publication).
• Significant instances of plagiarism.
• Publication of research lacking the necessary ethics committee approval.
• Legal issues surrounding the article's content, such as libel.
• Major concerns regarding authorship, including confirmed or strongly suspected cases of ghostwriting or unauthorized authorship.
• Articles with potential political biases compromising objectivity.
• Targeting individuals or organizations in a hostile manner.
• Matters of faith, such as advocating for intelligent design.
• Articles making extraordinary claims lacking sufficient scientific or statistical evidence (e.g., pseudoscience).

Readers who wish to bring attention to published work that may warrant retraction are encouraged to contact the authors directly and notify the journal, providing all relevant correspondence for consideration.

Editorial policies

Conflicts of interest
At JBRMS, we define a conflict of interest as anything that could potentially disrupt or be perceived as disrupting the impartiality of peer review, decision-making, or publication of submitted articles. This includes personal, financial, and professional affiliations or relationships.
All authors and members of JBRMS editorial boards are obligated to disclose any actual or potential conflicts of interest either upon submission or when accepting an editorial or review assignment.
Our review system is meticulously crafted to ensure transparency and objectivity throughout the editorial and review processes. Since the names of handling editors and reviewers are made public upon article publication, any conflicts of interest become readily apparent. Failure to disclose competing interests may lead to manuscript rejection. Should an undisclosed competing interest emerge post-publication, JBRMS will take appropriate action in accordance with internal policies and guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics.
Any potential conflicts of interest should be disclosed within the statements section during submission. A conflict-of-interest statement will be automatically generated and included in both the PDF file for peer review and the final published version of the article.

What should you disclose? As an author, during the submission process, disclose any potential conflicts of interest by considering the following questions and disclosing any affirmative responses.

Possible conflicts of interest: authors

1. Have you or your institution received payment or services from a third party for any aspect of the submitted work?
2. Do you have financial ties with entities that could be interpreted as influencing, or that may appear to influence, the content of your submission?
3. Do you hold patents or copyrights, whether pending, granted, licensed, and/or receiving royalties, related to the research?
4. Are there other relationships or activities that readers might perceive as influencing, or that may appear to influence, the content of your submission?

Potential conflicts of interest: editors and reviewers

Handling editors and reviewers will be required to assess the following potential conflicts of interest prior to accepting any editing or review tasks.
Personal Relationships

• Are any of the authors your spouse, significant other, family member, or close personal friend?
• Review editors should not be related to the handling editor by family ties.

Collaborations

• Have you hosted a Research Topic with any of the authors within the last 2 years?
• Are you currently or have you recently collaborated on a research project or publication with any of the authors within the last 2 years?
• Have you served as an advisor or supervisor to any of the authors within the last 5 years?
• Have you been a student or subordinate to any of the authors within the last 5 years?
• Review editors should decline assignments if they have a close professional relationship with the handling editor that could compromise review objectivity.

Affiliation

• Are you affiliated with the same institution as any of the authors? If so, have you had interactions, collaborations, or shared interests with the authors that might compromise your impartiality?
• Are you a current member of a committee or department that shares an affiliation with any of the authors?

Financial Interests

• Do you have a business or professional partnership with any of the authors?
• Do you have financial interests or business connections with any organization involved in the research or manuscript preparation?
• Do you have any financial or competing interests in the manuscript content that could affect your ability to conduct an unbiased review?

Funding Disclosure
 All funding sources, including grant numbers if applicable, must be disclosed in the funding section of the manuscript. JBRMS articles are published under the CC-BY Creative Commons attribution license, ensuring open access. This fulfills or surpasses open access requirements mandated by various institutions and funding bodies, such as the National Institutes of Health, the Medical Research Council, Research Councils UK, and the Wellcome Trust. JBRMS provides funding data to the Open Funder Registry, a funder identification service by CrossRef, in collaboration with scholarly publishers and funding agencies.

Disclaimer
Any necessary disclaimers to be included in the published article should be clearly indicated in the manuscript.

Research Ethics
All research submitted to JBRMS for evaluation must adhere to our guidelines on study ethics. In alignment with COPE guidelines, JBRMS retains the authority to decline any manuscript that, in the opinion of editors, fails to maintain rigorous ethical standards, regardless of whether authors have obtained ethical approval or if such approval is deemed unnecessary.

Animal Research Studies
All research involving regulated animals (including all live vertebrates and higher invertebrates) must undergo ethics committee review and approval before the study commences. It should be conducted in accordance with relevant institutional and national guidelines and regulations. JBRMS adheres to the guidelines provided by the International Association of Veterinary Editors (AVMA) for publishing studies involving animal research. Clinical studies involving animals and interventions beyond routine care necessitate oversight by an ethics committee, following the standards set by the American Veterinary Medical Association. Authors are required to furnish ethics approval details through the submission system, which generates an ethics statement for inclusion in the submission. The ethics statement, in the format provided below, will be incorporated into the reviewer file:

"The animal study was reviewed and approved by [Full name and affiliation of ethics committee]."

If the study is not subject to ethics approval, authors are required to specify the reasons for exemption within the generated statement.


Humane Endpoints
 All manuscripts describing studies with mortality as an endpoint will undergo additional ethical scrutiny. JBRMS reserves the right to decline manuscripts lacking sufficient justification.

Studies Involving Human Subjects
Research involving human subjects must adhere to the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki. It should align with relevant institutional and national guidelines, receiving prior approval from the appropriate institutional ethics committee. Informed written consent from all human participants, including consent for publication of results, is essential. Authors are required to provide details of ethics committee approval within the submission system, which generates an ethics statement for inclusion in the submission. Information regarding participant consent should also be provided within the submission system. Frontiers mandates that participant consent be both informed and written, unless waived by an ethics committee or as per local regulations. The generated ethics statement, as shown below, will be included in the final published manuscript:

"The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by [Full name and affiliation of ethics committee]. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study."

Authors must clearly state reasons for exemption from ethics approval or consent procedures if applicable. In cases where full review and approval have been waived by the ethics committee, JBRMS may request a letter from the authors obtained from the committee.
To safeguard participant anonymity, identifying information should be omitted from the manuscript unless absolutely necessary for scientific purposes and explicit approval has been obtained from the participants.

Materials and Data Policies
At JBRMS, we are dedicated to promoting open science and open data practices. We mandate that authors provide access to all data pertinent to the findings of their manuscript. The data generated should be made publicly accessible and cited following our 'Data citation guidelines' outlined below. Our goal is to uphold the highest community standards concerning data availability, thereby enhancing transparency and reproducibility in our published articles.

Availability of Research Materials
JBRMS mandates that authors make all research materials utilized in their studies accessible to fellow researchers. Materials essential for replicating an experiment must be explicitly stated in the Materials and Methods section. Pertinent materials such as protocols, analytical methods, and study materials should ideally be deposited in an online repository with a globally persistent link or identifier. If online deposition is not feasible, authors are strongly urged to provide this material upon request to interested researchers, with a declaration to this effect in the manuscript.

Guidelines for Data Citation
Authors are advised to include citations for all datasets produced or examined during their research. To optimize future utility, these datasets should be listed in the references.

Experimental Procedures
Authors are obligated to specify the number of times experiments were conducted in their figure legends, with a minimum requirement of n=3 in general, and to detail the specific statistical analyses employed.

Image Integrity