Terms of Use

By accessing this website, creating an author account, or submitting a manuscript, you agree to these Terms of Use. If you do not accept them, please do not use the site or its services.

These terms should be read together with our Privacy Policy and with the publication ethics, peer review, open access, and copyright policies set out in the About section of this site.

You may read, download, and print published articles for research, teaching, and personal scholarly use. You may not attempt to gain unauthorised access to any part of the site, interfere with its operation, or use automated tools to harvest content at a rate that degrades service for other users.

You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account credentials and for all activity carried out under your account. Please notify the editorial office promptly if you believe your account has been compromised.

By submitting a manuscript you warrant that the work is original, that it has not been published elsewhere in whole or in substantial part, and that it is not under consideration by another journal.

You warrant that all listed authors have contributed materially to the work and have approved the submission, that no person entitled to authorship has been omitted, and that you are authorised to submit on behalf of all co-authors.

You warrant that you have obtained any permissions required to reproduce third-party material, and that research involving human participants or animals was conducted in accordance with the applicable ethical approvals, which must be identified in the manuscript.

Submission does not guarantee publication. All manuscripts are screened by the editorial office and, if judged suitable in scope and quality, sent for peer review. The editors' decision on acceptance or rejection is final.

Publication in this journal is free of charge; there are no submission fees and no article processing charges.

Manuscript and supplementary files must be supplied as PDF or Word documents and may not exceed 90MB per file. Files are stored on our hosting infrastructure and are accessible to the editorial office and to assigned reviewers for the purpose of evaluating the submission.

You must not upload files containing malicious code, or material that you do not have the right to share.

Articles published by the journal are open access. Authors retain copyright in their work and grant the journal a licence to publish and to distribute the article in all formats.

Unless stated otherwise on the article itself, published articles are made available under a Creative Commons Attribution licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium provided the original author and source are properly credited.

The journal's name, logo, and site design remain the property of the publisher and are not covered by the licence applied to article content.

The journal follows established practice in issuing corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions where errors or misconduct are identified after publication. Retracted articles remain available with a prominent retraction notice so that the scholarly record stays complete.

We reserve the right to remove or refuse content that infringes the rights of others or that breaches our publication ethics policy.

The views expressed in published articles are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors or the publisher. The journal makes no warranty as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the content published on this site.

This site is provided on an “as is” basis. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted or error free, and we are not liable for loss arising from reliance on its content.

We may revise these terms from time to time. The version published on this page at the time you use the site is the version that applies. Continued use of the site after changes are posted constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.