Ethics & Responsibilities
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Conflict of interest
Authors: Authors must make clear any personal interest or relationship that could potentially be affected by the publication of their manuscript. All sources of funding should be disclosed in the Acknowledgments section.
Reviewers: Reviewers are expected to provide a bias-free evaluation of the work under consideration. Any personal interest or relationship that could potentially affect the review should be declared before agreeing to review the manuscript.
Publication Ethics
BioResources expects authors, reviewers, editors, and readers to conduct themselves with the highest level of professional ethics and standards.
Authors: Your article should present a clear and concise account of the research performed, as well as an objective discussion of the results and their significance. The article should have sufficient details and/or references to publicly available information such that a reader could reasonably expect to reproduce the experiment.
Authorship should be limited to those who were directly responsible for a significant portion of the research or writing. This includes the conception, design, execution, or interpretation of experiments. All persons who provided such input should be given the opportunity to be listed as an author, and no one who was not involved in these ways should be given credit as an author. Individuals who have contributed in ways other than those given above, e.g., by providing funding, may be mentioned in the Acknowledgments section.
All authors should be given the chance to review the manuscript before submission. BioResources expects the names of all authors and their current email addresses to be provided upon submission of an article to OJS. Failure to do so will delay, and in some cases prevent, publication.
It is the responsibility of all authors to ensure the manuscript is accurate and complete. Any error discovered in a published article should be immediately brought to the attention of the journal.
The work of other researchers should be properly acknowledged. In most cases, this involves citing previous publications. Private correspondence or discussion should not be reported without the express permission of the party involved. Authors must provide proof that permission has been obtained to reuse figures that have been previously published, and proper attribution should be included in the text of the manuscript.
Authors should follow acceptable practices in editing digital images. The use of image editing software should not misrepresent the data (e.g., introduce or delete features of an image). Image enhancement, such as adjusting brightness and contrast, is acceptable when applied to the entire image. No specific feature of an image should be enhanced, deleted, or introduced. For more guidance on image preparation, please see our Author Instructions.
BioResources considers plagiarism, including self-plagiarism, to be unethical scientific behavior. Manuscripts that contain plagiarized text or figures will not be accepted. We use CrossCheck powered by iThenticate software to check the originality of manuscripts. For more information on CrossCheck, visit their website at http://www.crossref.org/crosscheck/index.html.
BioResources also considers the concurrent submission of a manuscript to different journals to be unethical scientific behavior.
For research involving animal or human experimental subjects, authors must follow BioResources guidelines. Click here for author guidelines on animal ethics and welfare
Use of Generative AI
The use of AI tools in the preparation of text, data analysis, and collation of references must be disclosed at the time of Submission. The authors should describe which AI tool was used and how it was used in the Comments to the Editor section. This information should also be listed in the manuscript Acknowledgements. If using AI tools to identify references, the authors are encouraged to use curated databases such as Web of Science or SCOPUS.
Generative AI should not be used to prepare images, figures, graphs, or diagrams.
The use of AI tools to generate text does not disqualify manuscripts from consideration. However, if the editorial staff determines that AI tools have been used excessively, the authors will be asked to submit a revised version of their manuscript before it will proceed to peer review. These guidelines will be implemented at the discretion of the editorial staff and will be updated as needed. Authors are responsible for ensuring that all content produced by AI tools adheres to standards of publication ethics.
Authors are encouraged to see discussions of the ethical use of AI in scientific publishing at Nature Journals, American Society for Microbiology, and the Committee on Publication Ethics.
Reviewers: A peer review is an essential component of the scientific process. It should be an objective evaluation of the facts presented in the manuscript. Any personal criticism is unwarranted and inappropriate. You should be able to support your judgment of the article in such a way that the Editors and authors will be able to incorporate your feedback to improve the article. Any relevant published work that has been omitted should be pointed out.
Reviewers should call the Editor’s attention to any irregularities in the manuscript, including suspected plagiarism of text or figures, or any other type of suspected scientific misconduct.
Reviewers should treat the manuscript as a confidential document. It should not be shown to others or its contents disseminated in any way before publication.