EDITORIAL POLICY AND ETHICAL GUIDELINES
Ethics
Please refer to ASM Journals' Ethics Resources and Policies page (https://journals.asm.org/content/ethics-and-policies) for the ethical standards expected of manuscript submissions, as well as for specific recommendations on the proper use of microbiological information, the use of human subjects or animals in research, publishing ethics (including authorship, plagiarism, and image manipulation), conflicts of interest, and availability of data and materials. Please also see our page on permissions (https://journals.asm.org/content/permissions).
Copyright
Copyright of all material published in mSphere remains with the authors. The authors grant the American Society for Microbiology a nonexclusive license to publish their work if it is accepted. Upon publication, the work becomes available to the public to copy, distribute, or display under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). The corresponding author must sign the mSphere Warranty and Provisional License to Publish on behalf of all coauthors.
Authors can sign the license electronically during submission. Supplemental material is also covered by the mSphere License to Publish (see “Supplemental Material”).
Warranties and Exclusions
Articles published in this journal represent the opinions of the authors and do not necessarily represent the opinions of ASM. ASM does not warrant the fitness or suitability, for any purpose, of any methodology, kit, product, or device described or identified in an article. The use of trade names is for identification purposes only and does not constitute endorsement by ASM.
Clinical Trials
mSphere requires the prospective registration (i.e., before the first patient is enrolled) of a clinical trial in a public trials registry in accordance with guidelines established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) (http://www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorial-issues/clinical-trial-registration.html). The ICMJE defines a clinical trial as “any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention or concurrent comparison or control groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome.” Such intervention may include drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioral treatments, process-of-care changes, etc.
mSphere does not require registration in a particular registry, but the registry chosen must meet the following criteria, in agreement with ICMJE recommendations. It must be (i) accessible to the public free of charge, (ii) open to all registrants, (iii) managed by a not-for-profit organization, (iv) monitored by a mechanism to ensure validity of registration data, and (v) searchable electronically. A registration with missing fields or uninformative terminology will be deemed inadequate.
The registry and the trial registration number must be included at the end of the abstract. If a registration number is available, state this number the first time a trial acronym is used to refer to the trial being reported or to other trials mentioned in the manuscript.