Competing Interests

Ubiquity Press is committed to transparent and bias-free research. To ensure that all publications are as open as possible, authors, reviewers and editors are required to declare any interests that could appear to compromise, conflict or influence the validity of the publication. This process is designed to reinforce the readers' trust in the research data.

A conflict of interest must be declared if there is any reason why the information or the interpretation of information being produced may be influenced by a personal or financial relationship with other organisations or individuals, or if these relationships could be reasonably perceived from other people as having influencing objective data, decision-making or the presentation and conclusions of content within a publication. Everyone involved in the submission, editorial processing, peer review and publication should declare any competing interests that they may have as early as possible.

Competing interests can take the form of both financial and non-financial relationships. The declaration of such relationships helps to ensure that academic rigour is maintained and that publications cannot be accused of undue bias or misinformation.

Examples of competing interests:

• receipt of payment, in any form, from an organisation or individual related to the subject matter
• ownership of stocks or shares in organisations directly related to the subject matter
• receipt of grants or funding
• membership of relevant boards
• related patents/applied for patents
• gifts
• known relationships that will hinder impartiality (e.g. colleagues, family, mentor, previous supervisor/student).
• political, religious, ideological interests
• commercial

Competing interests should generally be declared to cover at least the previous 5 years - e.g., if a reviewer supervised the author's PhD then (and if they feel comfortable reviewing the work) their professional relationship should have ended over 5 years ago. This is a minimum requirement, and individuals must declare if they have had a previous relationship with someone/an organisation relevant to the submission that could be deemed to influence decision making.

For authors/book editors

For journals, please place the competing interests section at the end of the manuscript, immediately before the reference list.

For books, please add a competing interests section to the submission details when submitting a book proposal and full manuscript.

The authors’ initials should be used to denote differing competing interests. For example:

“TW completed paid consultancy work from [company name] as part of the data acquisition for this study. BH has minority shares in [company name], which part funded the research grant for this project. SM is a member of the editorial committee for the book series in which this is being published, which is on a voluntary basis. All other authors have no competing interests."

If there are no competing interests, please add the below statement:

“The authors declare that they have no competing interests.”

For reviewers

We ask that reviewers complete a competing interests section as part of the workflow for submitting their review comments.

For example:

"I was previously employed by the laboratory that collected this data."

 If you do not have competing interests, please add the below statement:

"I have no competing interests to declare."