ME-JAA complies with the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, issued by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE Recommendations), and to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) code of conduct for editors guidelines:

Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals
http://www.icmje.org

COPE Code of Conduct
http://publicationethics.org/files/u2/New_Code.pdf

Details for authors

1. Statements, permissions, and signatures

o Designated authors should meet all four criteria for authorship in the ICMJE Recommendations
o We ask all authors, and all contributors (including medical writers and editors), to specify their individual contributions at the end of the text
o ME-JAA will not publish any articles unless we have the signatures of all authors
o We suggest you use the author statement form (below) and upload or fax the signed copy with your submission
o In addition, please include written consent of any cited individual(s) noted in acknowledgments or personal communications

2. Conflicts of interest
A conflict of interest exists when professional judgement concerning a primary interest (such as patients' welfare or validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain).

Financial relationships are easily identifiable, but conflicts can also occur because of personal relationships or rivalries, academic competition, or intellectual beliefs. A conflict can be actual or potential, and full disclosure to the Editor is the safest course. Failure to disclose conflicts might lead to publication of a statement in our Department of Error or even to retraction. All submissions must include disclosure of all relationships that could be viewed as presenting a potential or actual conflict of interest.

The Editor may use such information as a basis for editorial decisions, and will publish such disclosures if they are believed to be important to readers in judging the manuscript. Agreements between authors and study sponsors that interfere with authors' access to all of a study's data, or that interfere with their ability to analyse and interpret the data and to prepare and publish manuscripts independently, may represent conflicts of interest, and should be avoided.

o At the end of the text, under a subheading "Conflicts of interest", all authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organisations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. Examples of financial conflicts include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patents or patent applications, and travel grants, all within 3 years of beginning the work submitted. If there are no conflicts of interest, authors should state that

o All authors are required to provide a signed statement of their conflicts of interest as part of the author statement form.
o For Comment, Seminars, Reviews, and Series, ME-JAA will not publish if an author, within the past 3 years, and with a relevant company or competitor, has any stocks or shares, equity, a contract of employment, or a named position on a company board; or has been asked by any organisation other than ME-JAA to write, be named on, or to submit the paper.

3. Role of the funding source
o All sources of funding should be declared as an acknowledgment at the end of the text
o At the end of the Methods section, under a subheading "Role of the funding source", authors must describe the role of the study sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the paper for publication
o If there is no Methods section, the role of the funding source should be stated as an acknowledgment. If the funding source had no such involvement, the authors should so state
o The corresponding author should confirm that he or she had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.

4. Role of medical writer or editor
o If a medical writer or editor was involved in the creation of your manuscript, we need a signed statement from the corresponding author to include their name and information about funding of this person
o This information should be added to the Acknowledgments and/or Contributors section
o We require signed statements from any medical writers or editors declaring that they have given permission to be named as an author, as a contributor, or in the Acknowledgments section.

5. Patient and other consents
o Appropriate written consents, permissions, and releases must be obtained where you wish to include any case details, personal information, and/or images of patients or other individuals in ME-JAA in order to comply with all applicable laws and regulations concerning privacy and/or security of personal information. Studies on patients or volunteers need approval from an ethics committee and informed consent from participants. These should be documented in your paper.
o Since the consent form needs to comply with the relevant legal requirements of your particular jurisdiction, we do not provide sample forms; this is your responsibility. Your affiliated institution should be able to provide an appropriate form.
o For the purposes of publishing in ME-JAA, a consent, permission, or release should include, without limitation, publication in all formats (including print, electronic, and websites), in sublicensed and reprinted versions (including translations), and in other works and products.
o To respect your patient's and any other individual's privacy, please do not send signed forms to ME-JAA. Please instead complete the patient consent section of the Author statements while retaining copies of the signed forms in the event they should be needed.
o If consent, permission, or release is made subject to any conditions, ME-JAA must be made aware in writing of all such conditions before publication.
o For more information please visit www.me-jaa.com/submitarticles.htm

6. Author statements
All manuscripts must be accompanied by necessary statements.
Each author must read and sign all statements:
1. Authorship statement on criteria and responsibility.
2. Financial disclosure statement.
3. Copyright transfer statement (or the statement of federal employment, if applicable).
4. Human and animal subject protections.
In addition, the corresponding author must sign:
5. Acknowledgment statement. If necessary, photocopy this document to distribute to co-authors for their signatures. Please send all copies to the Editorial Office at the time you submit your manuscript.
For more information please visit www.me-jaa.com/submitarticles.htm

7. Signatures
At the external peer review stage you will need to send signed copies of the following statements:
o Authors' contributions
o Conflicts of interest statements
o Statements of role, if any, of medical writer or editor
o Acknowledgments-written consent of cited individual
o Personal communications - written consent of cited individual
o Use of copyright-protected material-signed permission statements from author and publisher
These statements can be scanned and submitted electronically. To minimise delays, we strongly
advise that you prepare signed copies of these statements before you submit your manuscript.

8. Types of article and manuscript requirements
Please ensure that anything you submit to ME-JAA follows the guidelines provided for each article type. For instruction on how to format the text of your paper, including tables, figures, panels, and references, please see Author Info section.

Articles
o ME-JAA prioritises reports of original research that are likely to change clinical practice or thinking about a disease.
o We invite submission of all clinical trials, whether phase 1, 2, 3, or 4. For phase 1 trials, we especially encourage those of a novel substance for a novel indication, if there is a strong or unexpected beneficial or adverse response, or a novel mechanism of action
o We encourage researchers to enrol women and ethnic groups into clinical trials of all phases, and to plan to analyse data by gender and by race
o Systematic reviews of randomised trials about diseases that have a major effect on human health also might warrant rapid peer review and publication
o Global public-health and health-policy research are other areas of interest to ME-JAA
o We require the registration of all interventional trials, whether early or late phase, in a primary register that participates in WHO's International Clinical Trial Registry Platform (http://www.who.int/ictrp/network/trds/en/index.html)
We also encourage full public disclosure of the minimum 20-item trial registration dataset at the time of registration and before recruitment of the first participant. The registry must be independent of for-profit interest
o Reports of randomised trials must conform to CONSORT 2010 guidelines (http://www.consort-statement.org/consort-statement/overview0/), and should be submitted with their protocols
o All reports of randomised trials should include a section entitled Randomisation and masking, within the Methods section o Cluster-randomised trials must be reported according to CONSORT extended guidelines (http://www.consort-statement.org/extensions/extensions/).
o Randomised trials that report harms must be described according to extended CONSORT guidelines
o Studies of diagnostic accuracy must be reported according to STARD (www.stard-statement.org/) guidelines
o Observational studies (cohort, case-control, or cross-sectional designs) must be reported according to the STROBE statement, and should be submitted with their protocols
o We encourage the registration of all observational studies on a WHO-compliant registry o Genetic association studies must be reported according to STREGA guidelines (www.medicine.uottawa.ca/public-health-genomics/web/eng/strega.html)
o Systematic reviews and meta-analyses must be reported according to PRISMA guidelines (www.prisma-statement.org/).
o To find reporting guidelines see: www.equator-network.org

All Articles should, as relevant:
o Be up to 3000 words with 30 references (the word count is for the manuscript text only)
o Include an abstract (semistructured summary), with five paragraphs (Background, Methods, Findings, Interpretation, and Funding), not exceeding 300 words.
o For randomised trials, the abstract should adhere to CONSORT extensions: abstracts
o For intervention studies, the abstract should include the primary outcome expressed as the difference between groups with a confidence interval on that difference (absolute differences are more useful than relative ones). Important secondary outcomes can be included as long as they are clearly marked as secondary
o Use the SI system of units and the recommended international non-proprietary name (rINN) for drug names. Ensure that the dose, route, and frequency of administration of any drug you mention are correct.
o Use gene names approved by the Human Gene Organisation (www.genenames.org/). Novel gene sequences should be deposited in a public database (GenBank, EMBL, or DDBJ), and the accession number provided.

Authors of microarray papers should include in their submission the information recommended by the MIAME guidelines (www.mged.org/Workgroups/MIAME/miame_checklist.html). Authors should also submit their experimental details to one of the publicly available databases: ArrayExpress or GEO (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/)
o All accepted Articles should include a link to the full study protocol published on the authors' institutional website

Putting research into context
o The Discussion section should contain a full description and discussion of the context. Authors are also invited to either report their own, up-to-date systematic review or cite a recent systematic review of other trials, putting their trial into context of the review.

Clinical Pictures
o We will consider clear and interesting Clinical Pictures and videos submitted with a descriptive paragraph
o Authors must obtain signed informed consent from the patient if included in visual material (see Patient consent)

Research in context

Systematic review
This section should include a description of how authors searched for all the evidence. Authors should also say how they assessed the quality of that evidence - ie, how they selected and how they combined the evidence.

Interpretation
Authors should state here what their study adds to the totality of
evidence when their study is added to previous work.

Patient consent
o Authors must obtain signed informed consent from the patient (see Patient and other consents)

Ethics Editor
if you have any questions regarding our code of ethics contact:
Lesley Pocock, Ethics Editor, lesleypocock@mediworld.com.au

Following is a summary of the Ethics requirements for ME-JAA - for full detail and implications for your submissions also see Author Info.

1. Publication and authorship:
- list of references, financial support;
- no plagiarism, no fraudulent data;
- forbidden to publish same research in more than one journal.
2. Author's responsibilities:
- authors obliged to participate in peer review process;
- all authors have significantly contributed to the research;
- statement that all data in article are real and authentic;
- all authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes.
3. Peer review / responsibility for the reviewers:
- Judgments should be objective;
- reviewers should have no conflict of interest with respect to the research, the authors and/or the research funders;
- reviewers should point out relevant published work which is not yet cited;
- reviewed articles should be treated confidentially.
4. Editorial responsibilities:
- e.g. editors have complete responsibility and authority to reject/accept an article;
- editors should have no conflict of interest with respect to articles they reject/accept;
- only accept a paper when reasonably certain;
- when errors are found, promote publication of correction or retraction;
- preserve anonymity of reviewers.
5. Publishing ethics issues
- Monitoring/safeguarding publishing ethics by editorial board;
- Guidelines for retracting articles;
- Maintain the integrity of the academic record;
- Preclude business needs from compromising intellectual and ethical standards;
- Always be willing to publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed.
- no plagiarism, no fraudulent data.