Authors, recommenders and reviewers for PCI Neuroscience must agree to comply with the following rules:

1. Recommenders for PCI Neuroscience and reviewers should have no financial conflict of interest (see a definition below) relating to the articles they evaluate.
   
   
2. Authors should have no financial conflict of interest (see a definition below) relating to the articles they submit to PCI Neuroscience. Submitted preprints must therefore contain a section indicating that "The authors of this article declare that they have no financial conflict of interest with the content of this article." If authors are unsure whether their article may be associated with financial conflicts of interest, they can send an Email to contact@peercommunityin.org to ask for clarification.
   
   
3. Authors should have as little non-financial conflict of interest (see a definition below) as possible relating to the articles they submit to PCI Neuroscience, although a complete absence of conflict of interest may be difficult to achieve due to the scientific interest in the subject. Such conflicts of interest must be declared by the authors in the “Conflict of interest” section of their submitted article.
   
   
4. Recommenders for PCI Neuroscience and reviewers should have as little non-financial conflict of interest (see a definition below) as possible relating to the articles they evaluate, although a complete absence of conflict of interest may be difficult to achieve due to the scientific interest in the subject required. For instance, recommenders for PCI Neuroscience and reviewers should not evaluate articles written by close colleagues and coworkers (in general, are considered “close colleagues and coworkers” people belonging to the same team in the last four years, people with whom they have had recurrent contacts to co-publish articles in the last four years, to receive joint funding in the last four years), written by authors with whom they are in scientific competition or with whom they have conflicting relationships, or written by authors known to have evaluated their work as a recommender in the last two years or as a reviewer in the last year, or written by family members, friends, or anyone for whom bias might affect the nature of their recommendation.
   
   
5. Reviews, recommendations, comments and messages should always be respectful to the authors.
   
   
6. Reviews and recommendations should be of high quality. Reviews should be sufficiently deep and detailed for the PCI Neuroscience recommender handling the recommendation process to gain a full appreciation of the qualities, defects and limitations of the article. Texts (reviews, recommendations, comments, messages to authors) will be returned to PCI Neuroscience recommenders and reviewers if they do not respect these rules.
   
   
7. Authors, recommenders for PCI Neuroscience and reviewers must ensure that the data for recommended articles are available to readers, through deposition in an open data repository, such as Zenodo, Dryad or institutional repositories, for example. Deposited data must have a digital object identifier (DOI). Authors, recommenders and reviewers must also check that details of the quantitative analyses (e.g. data treatment and statistical scripts in R, bioinformatic pipelines scripts, etc.) in the recommended articles are available to the readers, as appendices or supplementary online materials (in this case, the supplementary material must have a digital object identifier (DOI)), for example.   
   
   
8. Use of artificial intelligence (AI)
   AI tools and their use evolve rapidly, and Large Language Models (LLMs) pose new challenges in scientific writing. The following text will thus be continuously and frequently updated.
   -Use of AI
   Scientists sometimes use artificial intelligence, including LLMs, to translate, correct or improve text or software code. This is similar to using traditional language correction services and poses no problem. This use is not problematic as soon as the authors review/approve/check the production. 
   Scientists sometimes also use AI to analyse their bibliography or their data. Data analysis using AI is not intrinsically different from other analytical methods and thus poses no problem as soon as these methods have been published and are properly cited or are original and sufficiently detailed.
   Generating text, illustrations and code using AI can be problematic, because of plagiarism, AI hallucination (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination_(artificial_intelligence)) (false information that is fabricated by AI) and lack of human verification.
   -Authorship and artificial intelligence
   Artificial intelligence cannot be considered an author of an article submitted to PCI because  "All people listed as authors of the MS must meet the authorship criteria, i.e. they contributed substantially to study planning, data collection or the interpretation of results and wrote or critically revised the MS and approved its final submitted version and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work (ICMJE 2017)."
   -Artificial intelligence and intellectual property
   Plagiarism issues can arise when using artificial intelligence because AI tools may generate texts or illustrations identical or very similar to those found in existing sources used to train the AI models. Authors, reviewers and recommenders must ensure that no part of the manuscript has been published except for passages that are properly cited.
   -Using AI to generate text, code and illustrations
   When AI is used to generate text and code, authors of submitted articles must
     - carefully check that there is no plagiarism, hallucinations or other errors.
     - disclose how they used AI in the section describing methods or in the acknowledgements. 
   Authors must not generate illustrations using AI because of plagiarism issues.
   If authors do not comply with the above-mentioned rules, their submission will be rejected.
   -Using AI to write reviews and editorial decisions
   Reviewers and recommenders must absolutely not use AI to generate their reviews and decisions. If they do so, they risk having their text rejected by the managing board of the thematic PCI and being banned from PCI. They can, however, use AI to translate, correct and improve their texts.

What is a conflict of interest?

• receive (or have received in the past four years) salaries, reimbursements, fees, fellowship, grants, or funding from an entity with financial interests that may be affected by the results of the research presented in the article,
• have shares or stocks in an entity with economic interests that may be affected by the results of the research presented in the article or
• hold patents linked to the research presented in the article