Code of conduct

Authors, recommenders and reviewers for Peer Community in Computational Statistics (PCI Comp Stat) must agree to comply with the following rules:

  1. Recommenders for PCI Comp Stat and reviewers should have no financial conflict of interest (see a definition below) relating to the articles they evaluate.

  2. Authors should have no financial conflict of interest (see a definition below) relating to the articles they submit to PCI Comp Stat. Submitted preprints must therefore contain a section indicating that "The authors of this article declare that they have no financial conflict of interest with the content of this article."

  3. Authors should have as little non-financial conflict of interest (see a definition below) as possible relating to the articles they submit to PCI Comp Stat, although a complete absence of conflict of interest may be difficult to achieve due to the scientific interest in the subject. Such conflicts of interest must be declared by the authors in the “Conflict of interest” section of their submitted article.

  4. Recommenders for PCI Comp Stat and reviewers should have as little non-financial conflict of interest (see a definition below) as possible relating to the articles they evaluate, although a complete absence of conflict of interest may be difficult to achieve due to the scientific interest in the subject required. For instance, recommenders for PCI Comp Stat and reviewers should not evaluate articles written by close colleagues and coworkers (people belonging to the same laboratory/unit/department in the last four years, people with whom they have published in the last four years, with whom they have received joint funding in the last four years, or with whom they are currently writing a manuscript, or submitting a grant proposal), or written by authors whom they know evaluated - as recommender or reviewer - one or more of their own articles in the last four years, or written by family members, friends, or anyone for whom bias might affect the nature of their recommendation.

  5. Reviews, recommendations, comments and messages should always be respectful to the authors.

  6. Reviews and recommendations should be of high quality. Reviews should be sufficiently deep and detailed for the PCI Comp Stat recommender handling the recommendation process to gain a full appreciation of the qualities, defects and limitations of the article. Texts (reviews, recommendations, comments, messages to authors) will be returned to PCI Comp Stat recommenders and reviewers if they do not respect these rules.

  7. Authors, recommenders for PCI Comp Stat and reviewers must ensure that the data for recommended articles are available to readers, through deposition in an open data repository, such as Zenodo, Dryad or institutional repositories, for example. Deposited data must have a digital object identifier (DOI). Authors, recommenders and reviewers must also check that details of the quantitative analyses (e.g. data treatment and statistical scripts in R, bioinformatic pipelines scripts, etc.) in the recommended articles are available to the readers, as appendices or supplementary online materials (in this case, the supplementary material must have a digital object identifier (DOI)), for example.  

 

What is a conflict of interest?

A financial interest occurs when the authors, recommenders or reviewers:
-Receive (or have received in the past four years) salaries, reimbursements, fees, fellowship, grants, or funding from an entity with financial interests that may be affected by the results of the research presented in the article,
-have shares or stocks in an entity with economic interests that may be affected by the results of the research presented in the article or
-hold patents linked to the research presented in the article

Non-financial conflicts of interests include political, personal, religious, ideological, academic, and intellectual interests of the authors, recommenders or reviewers that may be affected by the results of the research presented in the article.

 

The Managing Board of PCI Comp Stat has the right to exclude recommenders from PCI Comp Stat if they do not respect these rules.