The protection of a patient's right to privacy is essential. Please collect and keep copies of patients' consent forms on which patients or other subjects of your experiments clearly grant permission for the publication of photographs or other material that might identify them. If the consent form for your research did not specifically include this, please obtain it or remove the identifying material.

A statement to the effect that such consent had been obtained must be included in the “Methods” section of your paper. If necessary, the individual journal Editor(s) may request a copy of any consent forms.