By submitting your manuscript to this journal it is understood that the manuscript is an unpublished work and is not under consideration elsewhere. Authors should follow the standards with respect to publication ethics as described by the Commission on Publication Ethics (COPE). Plagiarism, falsification or fabrication of data including duplicate publication of the authors’ own work without proper citation, are unacceptable practices. Any cases of ethical misconduct are treated very seriously and will be dealt with in accordance with the COPE guidelines.

For studies involving human participants or animals, authors are expected to provide approval of regional/ national/ institutional or independent Ethics Committee or Review Board. Obtaining informed consent from adult research participants and obtaining parental assent for children is mandatory. When reporting experiments on animals, indicate what institutional or national or international guide on the care and use of laboratory animals was followed. When reporting studies on human beings authors should follow the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 (available at http://www.wma.net/e/policy/17-c_e.html). 

All clinical trials submitted to this journal should have been registered in a public trials registry at or before the time of first patient enrollment as a condition of consideration for publication.
It is the author's responsibility to ensure that a patient's anonymity is carefully protected and avoid mentioning participants’ names, initials or hospital numbers, especially in illustrative material. For photographs or videos, the author must obtain written and signed permission from the patient if the patient could be recognizable.
Each person listed as an author is expected to have participated in the study to a significant extent. JOOS abides by the Authorship Criteria as set by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Please visit http://www.icmje.org/index.html to review the criteria and to determine whether contributors should be listed as authors or be listed in the acknowledgments.
Authors must submit written permission from the copyright owner (usually the publisher) to use direct quotations, tables, or illustrations that have appeared in copyrighted form elsewhere, along with complete details about the source. Any permission fees that might be required by the copyright owner are the responsibility of the authors requesting use of the borrowed material.