Copyright and License Policies
□ Open access agreement
Upon submission of an article, its authors are asked to indicate their agreement to abide by an open access Creative Commons license (CC-BY). Under the terms of this license, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their articles. However, the license permits any user to download, print, extract, reuse, archive, and distribute the article as long as appropriate credit is given to the authors and the source of the work. The license ensures that the authors’ article will be available as widely as possible and that the article can be included in any scientific archive.

□ Copyright
The regulations for acceptance of a manuscript for publication automatically include the consent of the author(s) to transfer the copyright or license to JGM. Authors will complete a Copyright Agreement Form at the time of proofreading. The corresponding author can sign on behalf of the co-authors. The Copyright Agreement Form can be downloaded from the manuscript center (http://www. e-kjgm.org) or obtained from the editorial office. Acceptance of the agreement will ensure full copyright protection and help to disseminate the article to the widest possible readership in both print and electronic formats. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce copyrighted material from other sources. The authors assure that no substantial part of the work has been published or is being considered for publication elsewhere. When any of the results are to appear in another journal, details must be submitted to the Editor-in-Chief, together with a copy of the other paper(s) and the expected date(s) of publication.

□ Disclaimer
The publisher, editors, and reviewers neither assume legal responsibility for errors, omissions, or claims, nor do they provide any warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to information published in JGM.

Ethics of Author Status
Process. All authors will be contacted via email upon submission to ensure that they are aware of and approve the submission of the manuscript, its content, and its authorship.
Professional medical writers. The involvement of any professional medical writer in the publication process must be declared. We encourage authors to consult the European Medical Writers’ Association Guidelines on the role of medical writers.
Authorship criteria. All JGM journals base their criteria for authorship on those outlined in the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals, which are excerpted below. The contributions of all authors must be described. Contributions that fall short of authorship should be mentioned in the Acknowledgments section of the paper.

□ Authorship credit
1) Substantial contributions to conception and design, acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data
2) Drafting the article or critically revising it for important intellectual content
3) Final approval of the version to be published Authors should meet conditions 1, 2, and 3.

□ When a large, multicenter group has conducted the work, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript (3). These individuals should fully meet the criteria defined above for authorship/ contributorship, and editors will ask these individuals to complete journal-specific author and conflict-of-interest disclosure forms. When submitting a manuscript authored by a group, the corresponding author should clearly indicate the preferred citation and identify all individual authors as well as the group name. Journals generally list other members of the group in the Acknowledgments.The NLM indexes the group name and the names of individuals the group has identified as being directly responsible for the manuscript; it also lists the names of collaborators if they are listed in theAcknowledgments.
□ Acquisition of funding, collection of data, or general supervision of the research group alone does not constitute authorship. Such individuals should be listed in the Acknowledgments.
□ All persons designated as authors should qualify for authorship, and all those who qualify should be listed. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content.

Competing Interests
JGM policy on competing interests. JGM is committed to ensuring that research is as free from bias as possible and is seen to be so. It is increasingly recognized that everyone — authors, authors’ employers (e.g., an academic institution, government department, commercial company, or other), sponsors of the work, reviewers, editors, and publishers — has competing interests of some sort. It is difficult for individual readers to objectively assess whether competing interests could have biased the presentation of, peer review of, or decision to publish a given study.Transparency of competing interests allows readers to better evaluate the possibility of such bias. Journals and their editors must take all competing interests into account during the review process and ensure that any relevant conflicts are declared in the published article.The three requirements of JGM on competing interests include:
1. Authors must declare all relevant competing interests for consideration during the review process.
2. Editors (professional or academic, paid or unpaid) and reviewers must declare their own competing interests and if necessary disqualify themselves from involvement in the assessment of a paper.
3. Anyone who comments on or evaluates published papers in JGM must declare their competing interests at the time their comments and/or rating are submitted.

Human and Animal Research
Research involving human participants. All research involving human participants must have been approved by the authors’ institutional review board(s) or equivalent committee(s), and that group must be named in the manuscript. For research involving human participants, informed consent must have been obtained (or the reason for lack of consent explained — for example, that the data were anonymously analyzed) and all clinical investigations must have been conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki. Authors should be able to submit, upon request, a statement from the research ethics committee or institutional review board indicating approval of the research. JGM editors also encourage authors to submit a sample of a patient consent form and might require submission on particular occasions. For studies involving humans categorized by race/ethnicity, age, disease/disabilities, religion, sex/gender, sexual orientation, or other socially constructed groupings, authors should, as much as possible:
□ Make explicit their methods of categorizing human populations;
□ Define categories in as much detail as the study protocol allows;
□ Justify their choices of definitions and categories, including, for example, whether any rules of human categorization were required by their funding agency;
□ Explain whether (and, if so, how) they controlled for confounding variables such as socioeconomic status, nutrition, environmental exposures, etc.
In addition, outmoded terms and potentially stigmatizing labels should be changed to more current, acceptable terminology — for example: ‘Caucasian’ should be changed to ‘white’ or ‘of [Western] European descent’ (as appropriate).

□ Reporting of animal studies and ethical treatment of animals. For studies involving animals, all work must have been conducted according to applicable national and international guidelines. Prior approval must have been obtained for all protocols from the relevant author’ s institutional or other appropriate ethics committee, and the institution name and permit numbers must be provided at submission (see example below). For research involving non-human primates, all studies must be performed in accordance with the recommendations of the Weatherall (2006) report, The use of non-human primates in research . Where unregulated animals are used or ethics approval is not required by a specific committee, the article should include a clear statement of this fact and the reasons why ethical approval is not required. We also strongly encourage all authors to comply with the ‘Animal Research: Reporting In Vivo Experiments ’(ARRIVE) guidelines, developed by NC3Rs to improve standards of reporting to ensure that the data from animal experiments can be fully scrutinized and utilized. Relevant information should be included in the appropriate section of the article (e.g., title, abstract, or method), as outlined in the ARRIVE guidelines. The ARRIVE guidelines can be applied to any area of bioscience research using laboratory animals. Where research could be confused as pertaining to human clinical research, the animal model should also be noted in the article title.

□ Examples of ethics approval statements
Animal study: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health. The protocol was approved by the Committee on the Ethics of Animal Experiments at Cheil General Hospital (Permit Number: CGH-IRB-2008-15). All surgery was performed under sodium pentobarbital anesthesia, and every effort was made to minimize suffering.
Human study: This study was conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki. Appropriate institutional review board approval for this study was obtained from the Ethics Committee at Cheil General Hospital (Permit Number: CGH-IRB-2008-43). Written informed consent was obtained from each participant before blood draws for the collection of samples and subsequent analysis.

Reporting Guidelines for Specific Study Designs
Authors should ensure that any required Supporting Information (checklists, protocols, flowcharts, etc.) be included in the article submission.

□ Clinical trials. JGM follows the WHO definition of a clinical trial: "...any research study that prospectively assigns human participants or groups of humans to one or more health related interventions to evaluate the effects on health outcomes...Interventions include but are not restricted to drugs, cells and other biological products, surgical procedures, radiologic procedures, devices, behavioural treatments, process-of-care changes, preventive care, etc." JGM supports the position of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) on trial registration. All trials initiated after 1 July 2005 must be registered prospectively in a publicly accessible registry (i.e., before patient recruitment has begun) or they will not be considered for publication. For trials initiated before 1 July 2005, all trials must be registered before submission to any JGM journal. The ICMJE FAQ on trial registration has further details, and WHO provides a list of approved registries. JGM editors reserve the right to inform authors’ institutions or ethics committees if they become aware of unregistered trials. Trial authors must adhere to the CONSORT reporting guidelines appropriate for the trial design. Before the paper can enter peer review, authors must: (1) record, in the paper trial registry, the trial registration number and institutional review board, and (2) provide a copy of the trial protocol and a completed CONSORT checklist as supporting information (these documents will also be published alongside the paper, if accepted). Any deviation from the trial protocol must be explained in the paper. Authors must explicitly discuss informed consent in their paper, and JGM reserves the right to ask for a copy of the patient consent form. Information on statistical methods or participants, beyond that indicated in the CONSORT statement, should be reported in the Methods section. JGM supports the public disclosure of all clinical trial results. Prior disclosure of results on a clinical trial registry site will not affect the decision to peer review or accept papers in JGM.

□ Systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Reports of systematic reviews and meta-analyses should use the PRISMA statement as a guide and include a completed PRISMA checklist and flow diagram to accompany the main text. Authors must also state within their Methods section whether a protocol exists for their systematic review and, if so, provide a copy of the protocol as Sup-porting Information.The journal supportstheprospective registration of systematic reviews. Authors whose syste-matic review was prospectively registered (e.g., in a re-gistry such as PROSPERO) should also provide the registry number in their abstract. Registry details and protocols will be made available to editors and reviewers and included for readers alongside the paper if the report is ultimately published.

□ Diagnostic studies. Reports of studies of diagnostic accuracy should conform to the STARD requirements.

□ Microarray experiments. Reports of microarray experiments should conform to the MIAME guidelines published by the Functional Genomics Data Society (FGED), and the data from the experiments must be deposited in a publicly accessible database.

□ Checklists for biological and biomedical research investigations. JGM recommends that authors refer to the MIBBI Portal (Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations; http://www.mibbi.org/index. php/MIBBI_ portal) for prescriptive checklists when reporting biological and biomedical research.

Submission of Related
Manuscripts When submitting an article, all authors are asked to indicate that they do not have a related or duplicate manuscript under consideration (or accepted) for publication elsewhere. If related work has been submitted elsewhere, then a copy must be included with the article submitted to JGM. Reviewers will be asked to comment on the overlap between related submissions.

Confidentiality
Editors and reviewers are required to treat all submitted manuscripts in strict confidence.

Publication Ethics
We will vigorously investigate allegations of publication misconduct in JGM (both before and after publication) and reserve the right to contact authors’ institutions, funders or regulatory bodies if needed. If we find conclusive evidence of misconduct, we will take steps to correct the scientific record, which may include issuing a correction or retraction.The JGM have a Journal Ethics Committee, composed of representatives of all the journals, which sets ethical policies for the JGM journal and also investigates specific issues. The following list outlines some key issues in Publication Ethics, although it is not exhaustive. Authors are expected to be aware of, and comply with, best practice in publication ethics, specifically with regard to authorship (for example, avoidance of ghost or guest authorship), dual submission, plagiarism, manipulation of figures, competing interests and compliance with policies on research ethics. Reviewers and editors are required to treat manuscripts fairly and in confidence and to declare any competing interests.