Policies
Publishing Ethics, Roles & Responsibilities
Published article represents a fundamental unit which contributes to the comprehensive knowledge network in the specific field. ProBiologists considers the integrity of research, standard communication of the research outcomes and merit of scientific documentation with utmost importance. In order to achieve this excellence, we follow the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines. Standard guidelines and ethics were laid out for all relevant stakeholders in publishing namely the publisher, authors, editors and reviewers.
Publisher & Editor
The central role of the publisher is to support and coordinate the efforts by the authors, editors and reviewers in order to attain best standards and quality of the publication as well as the integrity of the published content.
- Providing the basic infrastructure, resources and facilitate streamlined article processing
- Web development, web management, social media management for journals and articles
- Identifying and associating with professional bodies /societies through membership
- Providing technical (like cross ref similarity check reports of the submissions) and procedural support to the editors
- Maintaining the confidentiality of author, safeguarding the unique contributions of the authors, manuscript submissions and reviewer anonymity
- Ensuring transparency of the work in the manuscript, upholding the credibility of the funding resources, originality of the submissions and author contributions
- Ensuring that the work has not been published before
- Maintaining the research integrity in the article by ensuring the ethical information such as informed consent, ethical committee approval and registration of clinical trials
- Protecting the intellectual property rights
- Address the issues of change in authorship, author contributions, inclusion of new data, identification of fabricated data, plagiarism, ethical issues and conflict of interests
- Identification and addressing of any copyright infringements or other intellectual property rights, suspected plagiarism or disputed authorship
- Identify, select, invite and assign manuscripts to the pertinent reviewers
- Maintaining the confidentiality, standards and streamlines peer review process and ensure fair and timely review process
- Publisher may also offer continuing medical education credits for completed reviews as well as reviewer appreciation certificates
- Arriving at the final decision on the manuscript if disparate or contracting review reports
- Ensuring that commercial revenue generation factors such as advertising and reprint does not influence the integrity of the publication academic record
- Ensuring compliance with Best Practice Guidelines, The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). COPE’s flowcharts for the Editors
- Upon infringement of the stipulated guidelines, the journal reserves the right to reject or retract the article.
Authors
Authors are the original contributors of the research communications. The authors are expected to accurately represent their research results with high degree of professionalism.
- Same manuscript should not be submitted to more than one journal simultaneously
- Must avoid text recycling in case of continuation or expansion of the previous research work.
- Authors need to ensure the originality of the data and images presented. Sourced information need to be adequately cited and acknowledged.
- Data and text sourced from previous publications cannot be reproduced as such (Plagiarism).
- Contributions to the research outcomes need to be acknowledged
- The authors need to ensure that they have contributed substantially to the research work and manuscript preparation with clear individual roles, collective responsibility and accountability.
- Authors are expected to make sufficient preparations to provide relevant raw data, supplementary information to verify the validity of the results.
- Compliance with ethical standards and disclosure of the potential conflict of interest is essential which can be included in a section of the manuscript prior to references
- Institutional ethical committee approvals need to be obtained for reporting the research involving animal study models or human subject. Additionally, in case of studies with human subjects, informed consent need to be obtained.
Reviewers
Peer review estimates the quality of the manuscript. Peer reviewers provide a valuable service to the publishers and authors in improving the literature in the specific discipline by volunteering their time, expert analysis and interpretations.
- Analyzing the scientific merit of the article and providing unbiased assessment of the manuscript in a timely manner
- Reviewers should not ask the authors to cite their own papers or associate’s papers to increase the visibility or citations.
- Give their opinion on clarity, conciseness, relevance and significance of the manuscript
- Expected to provide constructive and informative critique of the manuscript
- Suggest the ways of improving the content presentation, originality and scope
- Ensuring that the methods are described with sufficient details with appropriate study design
- Ensuring that the manuscript includes the citations of the relevant previous work
- Need to uphold confidentiality, impartiality, integrity and timeliness while reviewing the manuscript
- Should avoid personal comments or criticism
- Estimating the manuscript rating and determining whether to accept or to reject or suggest major revision or minor revision or to conclude with no recommendation
- If it is not possible to meet the deadline for the review, then the reviewer should promptly decline to perform the review or should inquire whether some accommodation can be made to resolve the problem.
- Has to notify and cease review when there is the possibility of conflict.
Publishing Policies
- We follow Gold Open Access model where the accepted articles will be subjected for standard article processing charges which will be either paid by the authors or by their institutions.
- All works published by ProBiologists are under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC). This license allows readers to reuse, download, distribution of the article in whole or part (for non-commercial purposes) by mentioning proper credits to the authors and ProBiologists. The author retains copyright in the work but authorizes ProBiologists to exclusively use the published paper for commercial purposes. Any commercial or other reuse of the published article must be directed to ProBiologists.
- We provide Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for all published articles for permanent identification and location on the web.
Article Withdrawal Policy
In case of scientific misconduct by authors, the Editor reserves the right to withdraw the article from the journal. The possible cases of misconduct includes duplicate submissions, article published in another journal, bogus claims of authorship, data fabrication, article plagiarism.
Article Replacement Policy
In case of an article with incorrect data published online, the editor allows the author to replace the first version of the published article with the corrected version.
Manuscript Withdrawal Charges
Withdrawal charges are applicable, if authors wish to withdraw their papers at any stage during the review and publication process. The publisher collects the withdrawal charges to cover the costs incurred for software and tools used for peer-reviewing, editing, publishing, maintaining & archiving. Authors must submit a letter (duly signed by all the authors) stating the reason for withdrawal/retraction along with Manuscript Withdrawal Charges.
Article Refund Policy
Article processing charges will not be refunded to authors in case of article withdrawal/retraction/removal, as publish incur lot of cost during publication process. Refunds will be issued only when there is a double payment made by the authors.