1. Allegations of misconduct

Any proposed or published article is subject to allegations of misconduct, pre-publication or post-publication. Any allegation should be presented to the journal’s director. These allegations are analyzed by the Executive Editorial Committee and, if needed, a process is opened to access the authors explanations about the allegations of misconduct.

2. Authorship and contributorship

All authors submit a declaration of authorship, indicating that all contributors of the work developed associated with the proposed article are clearly identified as authors or contributors. If any dispute occurs, a process is opened and analyzed by the Executive Editorial Committee.

3. Complaints and appeals

Complaints and appeals against the journal, its staff, editorial board or publisher, should be presented to the journal’s director. These allegations are analyzed by the Executive Editorial Committee and, if needed, an External element is consulted to analyze the complaints and appeals, in order to answer in a proper manner to the allegations.

4. Conflicts of interest/Competing interests

If a conflicts of interest of authors, reviewers, editors, journals and publishers, identified before or after publication, the journal’s director and the Executive Editorial Committee replace the necessary elements to eliminate this conflicts of interest.

5. Data and reproducibility

The authors should provide availability to the data used in the articles, if adequately justified by potential interested researchers. The reporting guidelines and registration of clinical trials and other study designs should be conducted accordingly to standard practice in the research area.

 6. Ethical oversight

Ethical procedures should include declarations on consent to publication by the populations or samples studied in the proposed articles.

7. Intellectual property

An article proposed for publication must be original, have not been published or submitted for publication elsewhere, and the lead author/ correspondent must declare compliance with these conditions.

The authors of the proposed articles are legally responsible for ensuring compliance with copyright and ethical standards of scientific work and the content of the proposed articles is the sole responsibility of their authors.

The Journal is published in Open Access, but the copyright is the property of the Journal. There are no costs associated with publishing.

The plagiarism and redundant/overlapping publication is analyzed with a proper software and decisions upon this matter is the responsibility of the Executive Editorial Committee.

 8. Journal management

The journal has i) an Executive Editorial Committee, composed of its Director and other members identified in each issue of the Journal, responsible for the coordination and ii) an Extended Editorial Committee responsible for the review process of articles, also identified in each issue of the Journal.

The Editorial Board is responsible for the scientific management of the journal: editorial policy, guaranteeing quality standards and evaluation criteria of the materials submitted for publication, defining the editorial orientation of special editions, defining and approving the Journal's Reviewers, promoting the participation of authors and the dissemination and to comment on other matters not provided for in these Bylaws.

9. Peer review processes

The Reviewers of the Journal are Portuguese and foreign academic and scientific individuals, of recognized merit in the areas of publication, being selected by the Executive Editorial Committee, either permanently or temporarily.

The Reviewers appreciate the proposed articles and prepare scientific opinions, paying special attention to the following criteria: relevance to the development of the scientific area, originality, formulation and verification of the objectives, methodology, analysis and discussion of results, relevance of the conclusions, timeliness of the bibliography and compliance with APA standards, overall quality and suitability for the editorial policy and standards of the Journal.

Proposed articles are reviewed by two or more reviewers anonymously using the quality assessment criteria defined above within a maximum period of one month and are classified into four levels: 1 - publish article, unchanged, 2 - publish article with some changes, 3 - publish the article with changes, subject to further review by the Reviewer; 4 - Do not publish the article.

Authors receive the Reviewer's decision and an anonymous opinion with their comments, taking 30 days to submit a new version of the article when required.

10. Post-publication discussions and corrections

The Journal allows post publication debate, through letters to the director, with the possibility of correcting, revising or retracting articles after publication.