Journal's Ethics and Policies
The IJBI follows COPE's guidelines in general:
Section A: Publication and Authorship
- All submitted papers/articles are subject to strict peer-review process by at least two well reputed reviewers that are experts in the area specified. Reviewers are being selected by Editors and Editor in Chief. Author also can propose reviewers for his/her article/paper.
- The factors that are taken into account in review are relevance, originality, readability, statistical validity, language and so on.
- The possible decisions include acceptance, minor revisions, major revision or rejection.
- If author (s) is encouraged to revise and resubmit a submission, there is no guarantee that the revised submission will be accepted.
- Rejected articles will not be re-reviewed and re-examined at any circumstances.
Section B: Author's Responsibilities
- Authors must certify and satisfy that their manuscript is their original work.
- Authors must satisfy that the manuscript has not previously been published elsewhere, or even submitted and been in reviewed in another journal.
- Authors must participate in the peer review process and follow the comments.
- Authors are obliged to provide retractions or corrections of mistakes.
- All Authors mentioned in the paper must have significantly contributed to the research. Level of their contribution however varies.
- Authors must state that all data in the paper are real and authentic.
- Authors must identify all sources used in the creation of their manuscript.
- Authors must not use irrelevant sources that may help other researches/journals.
- Authors cannot withdraw their articles within the review process or after submission, or they must pay the penalty defined by the publisher.
- Funding source and conflict of interest must be mentioned in manuscript.
- Copyright is vested in author (s). The author (s) is fully responsible for copyright or plagiarism related matter, if any.
- Submission of an article/paper means the author (s) is agreed to obey all the points mentioned above. All articles are under the CC BY license.
Section C: Reviewer's Responsibilities
- Reviewers should maintain the paper's confidentiality and treat them as privileged information.
- Reviews should be conducted objectively, with no personal criticism of the author.
- Self-knowledge of the Author (s) must not be affected by Reviewer's comments and decision.
- Reviewers should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.
- Reviewers may identify relevant published work that has not been cited by the authors.
- Reviewers should inform the Editor regarding any substantial similarity or overlap between the manuscript under consideration and any other published paper of which they have personal knowledge.
- Reviewers should not review manuscripts in which they have conflicts of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative, or other relationships or connections with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.
Section D: Editorial Responsibilities
- Editors (Editors or Editor in Chief) have complete responsibility and authority to reject/accept an article.
- Editors are responsible for overall quality of the publication.
- Editors should always consider the needs of the authors and the readers when attempting to improve the publication.
- Editors should publish errata pages or make corrections when needed.
- Editors should have a clear picture of a research's funding sources.
- Editors should base their decisions solely on the paper's importance, originality, clarity and relevance to publication's scope.
- Editors should not allow any conflicts of interest between staff, authors, reviewers and board members.
Section E: Publishing Ethical Issues
- All editorial members, reviewers and authors must confirm and obey rules defined by COPE.
- Corresponding author is the main owner of the article so she/he can withdraw the article when it is incomplete (before entering the review process or when a revision is asked for).
- Authors cannot make major changes in the article after acceptance without a serious reason.
- Any notes of plagiarism, fraudulent data or any other kinds of fraud should be reported to COPE.
- All editorial members and authors are expected to publish the corrections.