All authors are expected to disclose, in the manuscript submittal letter, any commercial affiliations as well as consultancies, stock or equity interests, and patent-licensing arrangements that could be considered to pose a conflict of interest regarding the submitted manuscript. Examples of potentially conflicting interests include relationships, financial or otherwise, that might detract from an author’s objectivity in presentation of study results and interests whose value would be enhanced by the results presented. Details of the disclosure to the editor will remain confidential. It is important to note that inclusion of a company name in the author address lines of the manuscript does not constitute disclosure.

It is the responsibility of authors to provide, in the Acknowledgments section, a general statement disclosing conflicting interests relevant to the study. All funding sources for the project, institutional and corporate, should be credited in the Acknowledgments section. In addition, if a manuscript concerns a commercial product, the manufacturer’s name must be indicated in the Materials and Methods section or elsewhere in the text, as appropriate, in an obvious manner.