Conflict of Interest

A conflict of interest exists when financial, institutional, or personal interests could influence, or appear to influence, the objectivity of research, review, or editorial decisions. Fon requires all parties to disclose such interests openly.

Authors

• Disclose any potential conflict of interest in the Conflict of Interest Statement of the manuscript. If there is none, write: The authors declare no conflict of interest regarding the research, authorship, and publication of this article.
• List all sources of research funding in the Acknowledgments.

Reviewers

• Decline an invitation if they have a personal, professional, or financial relationship with the authors that could cause bias.
• Do not use information from manuscripts under review for personal advantage.

Editors

• Do not handle manuscripts in which they have a conflict of interest; such manuscripts are reassigned to another editor.
• Manuscripts written by members of the editorial team are handled by another, uninvolved editor and go through the same peer review as all other manuscripts.

Undisclosed conflicts of interest discovered later are handled under the Procedure for Allegations of Research Misconduct.