Editorial Policy and Ethical Guidelines
Ethics Resources and Polices
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
See https://journals.asm.org/content/asm-copyright-and-crown-copyright-agreements for ASM’s copyright agreements.
For authors who do not opt to publish their papers as open access, ASM requires the corresponding author to sign a copyright transfer agreement (https://journals.asm.org/content/copyright-transfer-and-supplemental-material-license-agreement-2017) on behalf of all the authors.
In the copyright transfer agreement signed by an author, ASM grants to that author (and coauthors) the right to republish discrete portions of his/her (their) article in any other publication (print, CD-ROM, and other electronic forms) of which he/she is (they are) the author(s) or editor(s), on the condition that appropriate credit is given to the original ASM publication. This republication right also extends to posting on a host computer to which there is access via the Internet. Except as indicated below, significant portions of the article may not be reprinted/posted without ASM’s prior written permission, however, as this would constitute duplicate publication.
Authors may post their own published articles on their personal or university-hosted (but not corporate, government, or similar) websites without ASM’s prior written permission provided that appropriate credit is given (i.e., the copyright lines shown at the bottom of the first page).
Works authored solely by U.S. Government employees are not subject to copyright protection, so there is no copyright to be transferred. However, the other provisions of the copyright transfer agreement, such as author representations of originality and authority to enter into the agreement, apply to U.S. Government employee authors as well as to other authors.
If an article is to be published under the immediate open-access option (for example, it is subject to the open-access policies of the Wellcome Trust, Research Councils UK, or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funding agencies), at the time of submission, the corresponding author must sign the Author Warranty and Provisional License to Publish on behalf of all coauthors, rather than the standard copyright transfer agreement. 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).
Copyright for supplemental material (see “Supplemental Material”) remains with the author, but a license permitting its posting by ASM is included in the article copyright transfer agreement. If the author of the article is not also the copyright owner of the supplemental material, the corresponding author must send to ASM signed permission from the owner that allows posting of the material, as a supplement to the article, by ASM. The corresponding author is also responsible for incorporating into the supplemental material any copyright notices required by the owner.
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.