We are committed to transparent and bias-free research. To ensure that all publications are as open as possible all authors, reviewers and editors are required to declare any interests that could appear to compromise, conflict or influence the validity of the publication. This process is designed to reinforce the readers' trust in the research data.

Competing interests (also referred to as conflicts of interest or CoIs) can take the form of both financial and non-financial relationships. The declaration of such relationships helps to ensure that academic rigour is maintained and that publications cannot be accused of undue bias or misinformation. A competing interest must be declared if there is any reason why the information or the interpretation of information being produced may be influenced by a personal or financial relationship with other organisations or individuals, or if these relationships could be reasonably perceived by other people as having influenced objective data or decision-making.

Everyone involved in the submission, editorial processing, peer review and publication should declare any competing interests that they may have as early as possible.

Note that a declaration of a competing interest is not implicitly a negative judgement, but a positive effort to increase transparency and reduce bias (positive or negative) within the publication process.

The full Competing Interests policy is available at: https://www.ubiquitypress.com/site/competinginterests/

Examples of competing interests

• Financial ties, such as: receipt of payment, in any form, from an organisation or individual related to the subject matter; ownership of stocks or shares in organisations directly related to the subject matter; receipt of grants or funding; related patents/applied for patents; commercial interests; receipt of gifts.
• Political, religious or ideological beliefs. This includes commitments to academic approaches or ideas.
• Personal and professional relationships, with family, friends, enemies, competitors, or colleagues.
• Institutional affiliations and membership of boards. This includes links to the journal itself - e.g. an author submitting to a journal on which they also work as an editor or serve on the editorial board.

Competing interests should generally be declared to cover at least the previous 5 years - e.g., if a reviewer supervised the author's PhD then (and if they feel comfortable reviewing the work) their professional relationship should have ended over 5 years ago. This is a minimum requirement, and individuals must declare if they have had a previous relationship with someone/an organisation relevant to the submission that could be deemed to influence decision making.

Guidelines for authors

Read the above examples of competing interests to determine whether these apply to you. Note that all editors and board members associated with the journal must declare their relationship with the journal as a competing interest when listed as an author.

Include a Competing Interests section at the end of your manuscript, immediately before the reference list. If there are multiple authors then the authors’ initials should be used to denote differing competing interests. For example:
“TW completed paid consultancy work from [company name] as part of the data acquisition for this study. BH has minority shares in [company name], which part funded the research grant for this project. SM is a member of the editorial board for [journal name], but had no involvement in any editorial processes related to the handling of this submission. All other authors have no competing interests."

If there are no competing interests, please add the below statement:
"The author has no competing interests to declare" for papers with a single author or "The authors have no competing interests to declare” when multiple authors are contributing.