Image Integrity & Manipulation Policy

Global Virology Reports (GVR) upholds the highest standards of scientific image presentation. Digital images must be a faithful and accurate representation of the original data. Any form of manipulation that obscures, misrepresents, or fabricates information is considered scientific misconduct.

Acceptable Technical Adjustments
Minor, global adjustments that are applied uniformly across the entire image are generally acceptable, provided they do not alter the interpretation of the data. These include:

·       Brightness and Contrast adjustments.

·       Color Balance corrections.

·       Cropping to remove irrelevant peripheral areas.

·       Sharpening if applied minimally and globally.

Unacceptable Practices and Image Manipulation
The following practices are strictly prohibited, as they can mislead readers and undermine scientific integrity:

·       Selective Enhancement: Applying adjustments to only a specific region of an image to emphasize or suppress a result.

·       Duplication: Reusing an image (or parts of an image) to represent different experiments, conditions, or time points without clear and explicit disclosure.

·       Fabrication/Occlusion: Adding, removing, moving, or obscuring specific elements (e.g., bands on a gel, cells in a micrograph, outliers in a graph).

·       Splicing/Compositing: Combining fragments of different images (e.g., from different gels, fields, or exposures) to create a composite figure without clearly indicating the boundaries between the original source images (e.g., with dividing lines).

Specific Guidelines by Image Type

·       Gels and Blots: The presentation of full, uncropped gel and blot images is encouraged. Splicing of lanes from different parts of the same gel must be clearly demarcated with a dividing line or space, and the original, uncropped images must be available for review.

·       Microscopy: All micrographs in a panel that are compared to one another must be acquired and processed under identical conditions. Any processing must be disclosed in the figure legend.

·       Graphs and Charts: The source data for all graphs must be available. The axes must not be manipulated to exaggerate or minimize the appearance of effects.

Author Responsibilities and Data Submission

·       Authors must retain the original, unprocessed data for all images presented in the manuscript.

·       Upon request, authors must be prepared to provide the original source data to the Editorial Office during the peer review process or post-publication.

·       Figure legends must accurately describe the image and any processing that was applied.

Consequences for Violations
Manuscripts found to have inappropriately manipulated images will be rejected. For published articles, the outcome may include a correction or full retraction, and the authors' institution may be notified. Serious or deliberate misconduct may result in a ban on future submissions.