Bioscience Biotechnology Research Communications has adopted publication policies to ensure that ethical and responsible original research,  demonstrating academic quality and scientific rigor  is published  in it, and that all necessary consents and approvals as peer standard norms  have been obtained from its authors from respective authorities to publish their research work. These publication policies  follow the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and follow COPE workflows for investigating allegations of research misconduct in case of any issue.

Contacting The Journal With Concerns About Published Material

Bioscience Biotechnology Research Communications  is dedicated to correcting errors in the scientific literature –be they errors in data, statistical analysis or of an ethical nature– and to do so within a reasonable timeframe, in line with COPE guidelines. As such, please send concerns with all necessary details  about Bioscience Biotechnology Research Communications  published material directly to the editor@bbrc.in

Ethical Considerations Regarding Article Submission

Submission of a manuscript  by the authors to  Bioscience Biotechnology Research Communications  will be taken to indicate that

• The content of the manuscript is original and that it has not been published or accepted for publication elsewhere, either in whole or in part, other than as short abstracts, communications or conference proceedings, (we have an ethical statement and author certificate / form in this regard)
• No part of the manuscript is currently under consideration for publication elsewhere;
• All authors have seen and have approved the final version of the submitted  manuscript, and have signed the ethical statement form.
• Authors have, if necessary, obtained permission to publish from their employers or institutions and have appended the statement in the MS.
• Permission has been obtained to use any copyrighted material, such as reproducing a figure from another article, in print and electronic forms, and that the source of the material has been acknowledged; and all images have not been manipulated outside the CLIP princip

Allegations that these principles have not been adhered to will be investigated according to COPE flowchart.

Conflicts of Interest:

Authors

Bioscience Biotechnology Research Communications  requires that all  its authors disclose any potential sources of conflict of interest. Any interest or relationship, financial or otherwise that might be perceived as influencing an author’s objectivity is considered a potential source of conflict of interest. These must be disclosed when directly relevant or directly related to the work that the authors describe in their manuscript.

If the authors have no conflict of interest to declare, they must also state this  in their  submission. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to review this policy with all authors and collectively to disclose with the submission as per guidelines of COPE and ICMJE.

Conflicts of Interest:

Editorial Team of  Bioscience Biotechnology Research Communications 

The  editorial team  members  of  Bioscience Biotechnology Research Communications  are expected to adhere to a conflict of interest code of conduct, as follows:

Editors and Senior Editors will refrain from involvement in editorial activities for work they have been involved in as an author, or for work from an organization of which they are an employee, advisor, shareholder or have some other close relationship with.

Editors and Senior Editors will always declare their conflicts of interest when acting as an author of editorials or other pieces in the journal as is required for other authors.

Editors and Senior Editors will declare a conflict of interest if invited to oversee or otherwise contribute to the review of a submitted paper.

Conflicts of interest statement, is  published on the journals Website

Bioscience  Biotechnology Research Communications  Instructions to Authors

For individual articles undergoing peer review, where a conflict of interest exists within the editorial team, the Editor will excuse themselves from handling the manuscript.

Funding

Authors should list all funding sources in the Acknowledgements section  with Grant No date and awardee. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of their funder designation. For papers where no conflicts of interest or funding are declared, a default statement is added to that paper, as “ This work research did not receive any funding”.

Authorship

The list of authors should accurately illustrate who contributed to the work and how. All those listed as authors should qualify for authorship according to the following criteria:

1. Have made substantial contributions to conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data;
2. Been involved in drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
3. Given final approval of the version to be published. Each author should have participated sufficiently in the work to take public responsibility for appropriate portions of the content; and
4. Agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resol

Contributions from anyone who does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed, with permission from the contributor, in an Acknowledgments section (for example, to recognize contributions from people who provided technical help, collation of data, writing assistance, acquisition of funding, or a department chairperson who provided general support). Prior to submitting the article all authors should agree on the order in which their names will be listed in the manuscript.

Additional authorship options: Joint first or senior authorship: In the case of joint first authorship, a footnote should be added to the author listing, e.g. ‘X and Y should be considered joint first author’ or ‘X and Y should be considered joint senior author.’Authorship disputes are investigated using COPE flowcharts.

ORCID

As part of  Bioscience  Biotechnology Research Communication’s  commitment to supporting authors at every step of the publishing process, the journal requires the submitting  corresponding author (only) to provide an ORCID iD   of all its authors, when submitting a manuscript. Find more information here.

Dual Publication and Plagiarism

Bioscience  Biotechnology Research Communication’s  Senior Editors, Editors and peer reviewers play an important role in identifying misconduct and regularly updated on  identifing possible data fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, image manipulation, unethical research, biased reporting, authorship abuse, redundant or duplicate publication, and undeclared conflicts of interest.

Bioscience  Biotechnology Research Communications  uses  iThenticate’s CrossCheck software to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts, MS with more than 15 % similarity levels or accidental plagiarism are returned  to the authors for rectification at the initial stages of pre submission  checks.  All MS must be checked for similarity levels using iThenticate’s CrossCheck software and submit a certificate thereof (Ethical Statement Plagiarism level check report.

Plagiarism allegations –in both submitted and published articles– are investigated using the relevant COPE flowcharts. See more here.

Data  Retention, storage and Sharing Policies

Bioscience Biotechnology Research Communications expects authors to keep the data used in their publications for a considerable period of time,   and it reserves the right to ask authors for all of their data in cases of allegations research or publication misconduct. A statement in this regard has to be appended  by the authors submitting their MS to Bioscience Biotechnology Research Communications  after  the sections of Acknowledgements  before References.

Data Sharing and Availability Policy

Bioscience Biotechnology Research Communications is committed to a more open research landscape, facilitating faster and more effective research discovery by enabling reproducibility and verification of data, methodology and reporting standards.

We encourage authors of articles published in our journal to share their research data including, but not limited to: raw data, processed data, software, algorithms, protocols, methods, materials. These can be submitted as supplementary data or can be shared as per submission guidelines of Bioscience Biotechnology Research Communications.

Authors will have to certify that the database generated and/or analysed during  their current study  incorporated in their manuscripts are not publicly available due to privacy and confidentiality agreements as well as other restrictions, but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request, as per standard guidelines of ethical publication.

Retractions, Corrections and Expressions of Concern

Corrections, retractions and expressions of concern are published because the journal has an obligation to ensure the accuracy of the research it publishes. Please see  COPE guidelines here for  policy on retractions, and expressions of concern.Corrections, retractions and expressions of concern are published in a timely fashion, after a thorough, timely, and fair investigation following COPE flowcharts.

Withdrawing Articles

Submission of an article to Biosc. Biotech. Res.Comm implies that the work has NOT been published or submitted elsewhere, therefore, the journal is strongly against unethical withdrawal of an article from the publication process after submission.

Once the article is submitted, it is the absolute right of the editorial board to decide on article withdrawals. For genuine withdrawal, the corresponding author should submit a request which must be signed by all co-authors explaining the explicit reasons of withdrawing the manuscript.

Accepted articles in final stages of publication if are withdrawn, will entail withdrawal fees. The request will be processed by the editorial board and only serious genuine reasons will be considered if possible. The decision of the editorial board will be final and not negotiable. Unethical withdrawal or no response from the authors to editorial board communication will be subjected to sanction a ban to all authors, and their institute will also be notified.

It is a general principle of scholarly communications that the editor of a journal is solely and independently responsible for deciding which articles submitted to the journal shall be published. In making this decision the editor is guided by policies of the journal’s editorial board and constrained by such legal requirements in force regarding libel, copyright infringement and plagiarism. An outcome of this principle is the importance of the scholarly archive as a permanent, historic record of the transactions of scholarship.

Articles that have been published shall remain extant, exact and unaltered as far as is possible. However, very occasionally circumstances may arise where an article is published that must later be retracted or even removed. Such actions must not be undertaken lightly and can only occur under exceptional circumstances. In all cases, official archives of our journal will retain all article versions, including retracted or otherwise removed articles.

This policy has been designed to address these concerns and to take into account current best practice in the scholarly and library communities. As standards evolve and change, we will revisit this issue and welcome the input of scholarly and library communities. See also the National Library of Medicine’s policy on retractions and the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) concerning corrections and retractions.

Article Withdrawal

Only used for Articles in Press which represent early versions of articles and sometimes contain errors, or may have been accidentally submitted twice. Occasionally, but less frequently, the articles may represent infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like. Articles in Press (articles that have been accepted for publication but which have not been formally published and will not yet have the complete volume/issue/page information) that include errors, or are discovered to be accidental duplicates of other published article(s), or are determined to violate our journal publishing ethics guidelines in the view of the editors (such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like), may be withdrawn. Withdrawn means that the article content (HTML and PDF) is removed and replaced with a HTML page and PDF simply stating that the article has been withdrawn according to the Policies on Article in Press Withdrawal with a link to the current policy document.

Article Retraction

Infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like. Occasionally a retraction will be used to correct errors in submission or publication. The retraction of an article by its authors or the editor under the advice of members of the scholarly community has long been an occasional feature of the learned world. Standards for dealing with retractions have been developed by a number of library and scholarly bodies, and this best practice is adopted for article retraction by us.

A retraction note titled “Retraction: [article title]” signed by the authors and/or the editor is published in the paginated part of a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in the contents list. In the electronic version, a link is made to the original article. The online article is preceded by a screen containing the retraction note. It is to this screen that the link resolves; the reader can then proceed to the article itself. The original article is retained unchanged save for a watermark on the .pdf indicating on each page that it is “retracted.”The HTML version of the document is removed.

Article Removal: Legal Limitations

In an extremely limited number of cases, it may be necessary to remove an article from the online database. This will only occur where the article is clearly defamatory, or infringes others’ legal rights, or where the article is, or we have good reason to expect it will be, the subject of a court order, or where the article, if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk. In these circumstances, while the metadata (Title and Authors) will be retained, the text will be replaced with a screen indicating the article has been removed for legal reasons.

Article Replacement

In cases where the article, if acted upon, might pose a serious health risk, the authors of the original article may wish to retract the flawed original and replace it with a corrected version. In these circumstances the procedures for retraction will be followed with the difference that the database retraction notice will publish a link to the corrected re-published article and a history of the document.

Ethical Standards During Peer Review

The journal adheres to  COPE’s guidelines  for  peer  reviewers , and authors can expect all parties involved in peer review to

• Respect the confidentiality of peer review, and not discuss the manuscript or contact the authors or any other people about the manuscrip
• Declare any conflicts of int
• Provide an objective and constructive explanation for their recommendation.
• Not allow their decision on a manuscript to be influenced by its origin or authorship.
• Avoid requesting that the author cites the peer reviewer’s own papers, unless there is a strong scholarly rationale for th
• Not reproduce information or any part of the manuscript under review in any of their own work prior to publication by the autho
• Only agree to peer review manuscripts within their expertise and within a reasonable timefram
• Not delay publication.
• Not use insulting, hostile, or defamatory languag

Destroy submitted manuscripts and all related material after they have reviewed them.

Peer Review Process

Unbiased, independent, critical assessment is an intrinsic part of all scholarly work, including the scientific process. Peer review is the critical assessment of manuscripts submitted to journals by experts who are not part of the editorial staff, and is, therefore, an important extension of the scientific process.

Each article submitted to Biosc. Biotech. Res. Comm for publication is reviewed by at least two specialist reviewers of the concerned area. The dual review process is strictly followed and in certain controversial cases, the opinion of a 3^rd reviewer can also be sought.

Manuscript Processing

Upon on-line submission of the manuscript, the author will be acknowledged with a MS number, via e-mail. Initially an article will be reviewed by the Editorial team to judge the academic quality, scientific rigor  and format of the manuscript,  in particular its relevance to the scope of the journal, compliance with instructions to authors check list and levels of similarity / accidental plagiarism.

Article submissions must consist of  academic material that is unique and original, meaning that articles must engage cited material through critical thought. Articles must follow conventions of the English language in regard to proper grammar, punctuation, and typical writing practices. All factual statements must be supported by cited sources or research evidence. Authors must ensure the accuracy of citations, quotations, diagrams, tables, and maps.

Articles written in poor English language with confusing or illogical statements, or not conforming to instructions to authors of Biosc.Biotech.Res.Comm will either be rejected or returned to the authors for reformatting. Manuscripts deemed proper only will be forwarded to at least two subject experts to work as anonymized reviewers in a time bound frame of 4 to 5 weeks,  to provide their unbiased input on the overall quality of the reviewed manuscript as per standard international norms.

Acceptable manuscripts will be checked for data analysis and verification of references before the author is notified about the status of the paper with any suggestions for modifications strictly as reviewers comments and revisions asked. Editors will check at every step for full compliance and revision of all such articles in press. Finally accepted articles will then be forwarded for typesetting and formatting, and the galley proof will be sent to the authors for proof reading, before final publication in a time bound period. For detailed process of manuscript, please see the flow chart of  MS processing in Biosc.Biotech.Res.Comm.

Guidelines for Reviewers

An unpublished manuscript is a privileged document. Please protect it from any form of exploitation. Don’t cite a manuscript or refer to the work it describes before it has been published and don’t use the information that it contains for the advancement of your own research or in discussions with colleagues. Adopt a positive, impartial attitude toward the manuscript under review, with the aim of promoting effective and constructive scientific communication.

If you believe that you cannot judge a given article impartially, please return it immediately to the editor. Reviews must be completed within 4 to 6  weeks. If you know that you cannot finish the review within that time, immediately return the manuscript to the editor.
In your review, consider the following aspects of the manuscript: –Adherence to style of the MS as set forth in Instructions to Authors of Biosc Biotech Res Comm.

• Adequacy of title, abstract and its contents. Explicit language and clear expression of findings in the manuscript.
• Significance of objectives, questions or subjects studied, with a clear justification or rationale.
• Originality of work: It should be checked through standard plagiarism software only.
• Appropriateness of approach or methodology and adequacy of experimental techniques with citations, so that the work can be easily replicated.
• Appropriateness of clear images, figures and or tables and length of article, word count etc..
• Experimental data its lucid presentation and critical interpretation.
• Soundness of conclusion based on data, and interpretation and relevance of discussion of the manuscript.
• Appropriate literature citations as per Harvard Style of References with updated references.

All sources must be cited in the reference list and in the main text. References with non-English titles must include a translation. All in-text citations must be cited in the reference list and all sources in the reference list must be cited within the article. Sources accessed online must include a DOI or URL.

If you wish to mark the text of the manuscript, use a pencil or make a photocopy, mark it, and return it together with the original. You can be particularly helpful in pointing out unnecessary illustrations and data that are presented in both tabular (and graphic) form and in detail in the text. Such redundancies are a waste of space and readers time.

A significant number of authors have not learnt how to organize data and will be benefit from your guidance. Do not discuss the paper with its authors. In your comments intended for transmission to the author, do not make any specific statement about the acceptability of a paper. Suggested revision should be stated as such and not expressed as conditions of acceptance. Present criticism dispassionately and avoid offensive remarks.

Organize your review so that an introductory paragraph summarizes the major findings of the article, gives your overall impression of the paper and highlights the major shortcomings. This paragraph should be followed by specific numbered comments which if appropriate may be subdivided into major and minor points. Confidential remarks directed to the editor should be typed (or handwritten) on a separate sheet, not on the review form. You might want to distinguish between revisions considered essential and those judged merely desirable.

Your criticisms, arguments and suggestions concerning the paper will be most useful to the editor and to the author if they are carefully documented. Do not make dogmatic, dismissive statements, particularly about the novelty of work. Substantiate your statements.

Reviewer’s recommendations are gratefully received by the editor. However, since editorial decisions are usually based on evaluations derived from several sources, reviewers should not expect the editor to honor every recommendation.

Animal and Human Studies

Please review journals policies surrounding human studies, animal studies, clinical trial registration, biosecurity, and research reporting guidelines – for further details, please check the Biosc.Biotech.Res.Comm  Instruction to Authors.

Animal Studies

Please see in the Author Guidelines detailed requirements for publication when using animals . Authors should state whether experiments were performed in accordance with relevant institutional and national guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals:

• Authors should cite compliance with the US National Research Council’s Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, the US Public Health Service’s Policy on Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, and Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals.
• UK authors should conform to UK legislation under the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986 Amendment Regulations (SI 2012/3039).
• For research in India, please see the ICMR Guidelines or CPCSEA Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Committee For the Purpose of Control & Supervision of Experimentation on Animals (CPCSEA)
• European authors outside the UK should conform to Directive 2010/63/EU.

Human Studies and Subjects

For manuscripts reporting medical studies that involve human participants, a statement identifying the ethics committee that approved the study and confirmation that the study conforms to recognized standards is required, for example: Declaration of Helsinki; US Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects; MHRA Good Clinical Practice for Clinical Trials; or European Medicines Agency Guidelines for Good Clinical Practice.

Images and information from individual participants will only be published where the authors have obtained the individual’s free prior informed consent. Authors do not need to provide a copy of the consent form to the publisher; however, in signing the author license to publish, authors are required to confirm that consent has been obtained, see   Check List  of MS Submission,  Biosc. Biotech. Res.Comm / Instructions  to Authors

Research Reporting Guidelines:

Accurate and complete reporting enables readers to fully appraise research, replicate it, and use it. Authors are encouraged to adhere to the CONSORT.