Ethical statement regarding the publication misconduct

An ethical statement regarding misconduct in publication is provided below.
Publishers and editors shall take responsibility to implement adequate measures to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication, among other forms of malpractice. It is imperative that journals and their editors do not disregard such unethical behaviour, nor should they be complicit in its occurrence. In the event that a journal’s publisher or editors are made aware of any allegation of research misconduct relating to a published article in their journal, the publisher or editor shall follow COPE’s guidelines (or equivalent) in dealing with allegations.