Ethical Principles

sustain is committed to adhering to the highest ethical standards and good scientific practice. Our actions are based on general ethical principles such as integrity, transparency, responsibility and respect for all those involved in the research and publication process. We are also expressly guided by the internationally recognized guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) which promote and support ethical behavior in scientific publishing.

Responsibility of the authors

Authors may never provide false or misleading answers. Fraudulent or knowingly inaccurate statements constitute unethical behavior and are unacceptable. Multiple publications of the same research results should be avoided.

Authors are asked to ensure that permission has been obtained for the publication of copyrighted material. If articles include original qualitative or quantitative data (in any format, including audio and video), authors are required to ensure that general ethical standards and ethics committee (IRB) requirements have been met to preserve privacy and protect participants from physical and psychological harm. Any financial support for research must be disclosed. 

Avoidance of conflicts of interest in the review process

No person who is currently employed at the same institution as one of the authors or who is known to have been a mentor, mentee, close colleague or co-scholarship holder within the last three years will be requested as a reviewer. When requesting a review, please inform the editors-in-chief or guest editors immediately of any potential conflicts of interest. If such an assumption is reported, the editors-in-chief or guest editors decide whether there is a conflict of interest and therefore the review is to be stopped or whether there is no conflict of interest. In cases of doubt, additional assessments are obtained from the Editors Board.

Authorship

We consider (co-)authorship to be a participation in texts that changes the text content. The use of AI can also be a co-authorship and be identified as such. In the publications themselves, the authors should describe which author made which contribution to the publication.

Editors as authors

If editors-in-chief or guest editors submit articles, the procedure is as described above, but with the exclusion of the publishing author. In such a case, the coordination of the review is taken over by another member of the Editors Board. If articles are published with the participation of editors-in-chief or guest editors, the review process is described in a commentary in the publication in detail.