Policies & Guidelines

BioScientific Review follows guidelines and policies of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) in letter and spirit and operates according to HEC guidelines and policies .

Ethical Policy
Peer Review Policy
Publication Charge Policy
Publication Malpractice Statement
Publishing Policy
Accessibility Policy and Open Access Statement
Authorship Policy
Corrections and Retraction Policy
Digital Archiving Policy
Confidentiality Policy
Conflict of Interests Policy
Privacy Policy
Anti-plagiarism and Anti-predatory Procedures
Informed Consent Policy
Advertisement Policy
Copyright Policy
AI Policy

1. Ethical Policy

Editors and Referees

Our editors and referees are required to declare any conflicts of interest related to the manuscript they are requested to evaluate. To ensure transparent double-blind peer-review, the identities of authors are not disclosed to referees, and vice versa. Manuscript submission by the editor/associate editor or by any member of the editorial board is not allowed as per HEC policy guidelines for the research journals.

Authors

Authors are expected to adopt the general ethical standards in their research and writing, ensuring that:

The submitted work or any of its essential content has not been previously published in a refereed journal and is not being considered for publication elsewhere. To ensure this, the editors screen out the submissions using the anti-plagiarism software, i.e. Turnitin.com.
Published relevant material/work referred by the authors in their research must be properly cited as per AMA Manual of style formatting guidelines.
Mentioning and acknowledging the sources of funding and significant help is the ethical obligation of the authors. It must be explicitly mentioned under the heading of ‘Compliance with the Ethical Standards’ at the end of the manuscript.
Obtaining consent from the parties with vested interests is the ethical responsibility of the authors.

If a published paper or its essential content is found to have been published before or if any other unethical conduct by the authors is verified, the journal will take one or more of the following actions:

Publishing a notice
Retracting the paper
Preventing the corresponding author from publishing in UMT Journals

Reporting the impropriety to the corresponding authors, co-authors, employer, head of the department (HOD), funding body, and HEC.

Experimental Ethics

For studies involving human or animal subjects, the authors must attach Biosafety and Bioethical approval from relevant statutory bodies. Moreover, the author(s) must include a statement declaring adherence to animal research reporting standards where applicable. The authors must ensure informed consent of human participants/subjects where applicable.

Complaints

BSR publishes corrections only when significant errors arise from author errors (Corrigenda) or editorial mistakes (Errata). If there is a serious complaint about a journal’s own procedures, the Editor-in-Chief will confer with the corresponding author and any relevant members of the editorial board in order to resolve the problem. The advisory board of BSR will be consulted if further guidance is required, and if the above procedures prove unacceptable, the matter will be referred for outside adjudication as per COPE guidelines.

2. Peer Review Policy

All submitted manuscripts are reviewed through a 'double-blind' peer review process that means the identities of the authors are kept confidential from the reviewers, and vice versa.

To make this possible, anonymized versions of the manuscript are sent to referees. Submitted papers are first considered by the editor after submission. Papers that do not fall within the scope of the journal are 'desk-rejected'. In addition, papers that fail to meet a minimum threshold for quality and originality are also rejected without being sent out to the reviewers.

Papers passing through this initial editorial scrutiny are then typically sent out to minimum of two referees (one national and one international). ". If one or more of these turn down the invitation to provide a review, other referees will subsequently be appointed. Normally, at least two authoritative reviews are needed before the respective editor can make a decision as to whether to accept, reject, or ask for a 'revise and resubmit' of the submitted paper.

3. Publication Charge Policy

Articles published in BSR are Open Access. Authors pay APC (PKR 15000) to cover the costs of peer-review, language editing, production of articles in PDF, and dissemination of published papers in various venues, in addition to other publishing functions.

All the expenses are borne by its publisher, the University of Management and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan. There are no charges for rejected articles, no submission charges, and no surcharges based on the length of an article, figures, or supplementary data. All the items (Manuscripts, Editorials, Teaching Modules, Corrections, Addendums, Retractions, Comments, etc.) are published free of charge.

4. Publishing Policy

BSR takes issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism, or other breaches of ethical practices in publication very seriously. The rights of the authors are protected while investigating claims of plagiarism or any misuse of the published articles. In case an article is found to have plagiarized work or having third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgment, or where the authorship of the article is contested, the journal reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article; taking up the matter with the concern bodies or taking appropriate legal action.

The author(s) are required to disclose conflict of interest if any, and that they must ensure attribution/acknowledgment/permission of the prior work.

5. Publication Malpractice Statement

BSR follows the ethical guidelines for publication outlined by the COPE as well as the Higher Education Commission (HEC)of Pakistan. The authors, reviewers, and editors are expected to adhere strictly to the publication ethics set forth by International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)

6. Accessibility Policy and Open Access Statement

We are committed to continuously enhancing the accessibility of our published database to maximize readability without any interruption. We process all our articles through the Open Journal System (OJS) that automatically generates the files in ‘html’ and converts those that are not in the desired format, making our files easily accessible on the web to all kinds of users.
Open Access Statement
This is an open-access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author.
All articles are available on the internet to all users immediately upon publication. Non-commercial and commercial use and distribution in any medium are permitted, provided the author and the journal are properly credited.

7. Authorship Policy

a. Authorship Credit
Authorship credits may only be given to those who have made a substantial contribution in constructing the article.
The corresponding author of the article holds the responsibility to give credits to the co-authors that are significantly involved in the work. Also, the corresponding author should make sure that all the co-authors have approved the final submission and ready-to-publish version of the article. Others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the research should be acknowledged for their contribution in an "Acknowledgement" section.
b. Changes in Authorship
The authors are fully responsible to provide the names of the authors upon submitting the article to the journal. Once the article is accepted for publication, any addition, deletion, or rearrangement of the authors’ names will not be entertained unless approved by the journal’s editor. To request such a change, the corresponding author must provide the journal’s editor with (a) the reason for the change in the author list and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal, or rearrangement, along with the confirmation from the author being added or removed. Only in exceptional circumstances and with considerable reason/s will the editor may consider the addition, deletion, or rearrangement of authors after the manuscript has been accepted. While the editor considers the request, the processing of the manuscript for publication will be put on hold. If the manuscript has already been published in an online issue, any requests may not be entertained by the editor.
c. Order of Authors
It is the responsibility of the authors to have a mutual agreement on the order of the authors before submitting the article to the journal. Any such disagreements must be ruled out before the submission.
d. Guest Authorship
The “guest” author makes no significant contributions to the study, hence, does not qualify for authorship. The UMT journals do not allow the appearance of guest authorship on the articles.
e. Anonymous Authorship
Because authorship should be transparent and requires public accountability, it is not appropriate to use pseudonyms or to publish scientific reports anonymously. In extremely rare cases, when the author can make a credible claim that attaching his or her name to the document could cause serious hardship (e.g., a threat to personal safety or loss of employment), a journal editor may decide to publish anonymous content.
f. Acknowledgment
In the Acknowledgments section, authors may wish to include the names and contributions of those whose involvement in a study did not qualify them for authorship (because of the journal policy) but have contributed to the article in some way.
g. Contributors
"Ghost" and/or "Guest" author phenomenon has been common in the traditional listing of research papers. This has been raising inappropriate authorship practice in which some individuals did not have an actual input in the experiment. For this, the journal highly recommends that only authors who have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript shall be listed individually in the submitted manuscript (including students and lab technicians).
h. Duplicate Submission
Articles that are found to have been published elsewhere, or are under consideration for publishing elsewhere, will be considered as "duplicated" material. In case the author(s) have used their own previously published work (or work that is currently under review), they are asked to cite the previous work and indicate how their submitted manuscript offers novel contributions and adds value differently (from the previous work).
i. Citation Manipulation
Submitted manuscripts that are found to include citations in order to increase the number of citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal, will be considered as a "citation manipulation"-containing material.

8. Corrections and Retraction Policy

Authors who discover errors in articles they have published should have the corresponding author contact the journal’s editorial office with a detailed description of the correction that is needed. Corrigenda (corrections of author’s errors) and errata (corrections of publisher’s errors) will be published at no charge to the authors. Requests for corrections that affect the interpretation or conclusions of a published article will be reviewed by the editors.
An article may be retracted when the integrity of the published work is substantially undermined owing to errors in the conduct, analysis, and/or reporting of the study. Violation of publication or research ethics may also result in a study’s retraction. The original article is marked as retracted but a PDF version remains available to readers, and the retraction statement is bi-directionally linked to the original published paper. Retraction statements will typically include a statement of assent or dissent from the authors.
In exceptional circumstances, the editorial office reserves the right to remove an article from the journal’s online platforms. Such action may be taken when (i) the editorial office has been advised that content is defamatory, infringes a third party’s intellectual property right, right to privacy, or other legal rights, or is otherwise unlawful; (ii) a court or government order has been issued, or is likely to be issued, requiring removal of such content; (iii) content, if acted upon, would pose an immediate and serious risk to health. Removal may be temporary or permanent. Bibliographic metadata (e.g. title and authors) will be retained and will be accompanied by a statement explaining why the content has been removed.

9. Digital Archiving Policy

The journal is fully committed to storing the published material on digital archives to ensure that the articles will always be available to readers, even in the event of a publication being lost or discontinued. The best way to ensure that journal articles will always be accessible to readers is to deposit all published articles into a long-term digital preservation service or archive.

All UMT journals are digitally archived on PN Preservation Networks (LOCKSS) and Internet Archives on regular basis. The journal has further ensured that the metadata of all of its open access journals is compatible with all the well-known repository services and their digital crawlers may regularly collect it for record and preservation. Besides, the journal also assigns Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) to all its issues and the contents to facilitate reaching their permanent links on the internet. Moreover, the journal management system automatically self-archives the data on UMT servers regularly.

10. Confidentiality Policy

The editors and the publication handling/managing staff keep all information about a submitted manuscript confidential and share it only with those involved in the evaluation, review, and publication processes as per the journal’s publication policy. The journal is operating through an automated journal management system to ensure a transparent double-blind peer review process as well as the confidentiality of the information. The Editors should consider adding a confidentiality notice to all correspondence, including reviewer forms, to serve as a reminder to authors, editors, and reviewers.

11. Conflict of Interests Policy

A Declaration of Conflicting Interests policy is meant to deliver a formal policy which a journal might be required to have. It is important for a journal to obtain a conflict of interest statement or conflict of interest disclosure from the concerned submitting or publishing author. The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) expresses in its Guidelines on Good Publication Practice (2003) that: “Conflicts of interest tend to occur when authors, reviewers, or editors have interests which are not completely manifested which might have an effect on their discernment/judgement regarding the publication. These conflicts of interests have been outlined as those, “that when they are disclosed afterwards, they could mislead the concerned reader or even make him/her feel being deceived”.
The research work of many scholars, researchers, and professionals could get affected if they have possible conflicts of interest. Therefore, the journals need to have a formal declaration of conflict of interests which would enable a statement to be continued within the paginated published article. Such a possible conflict of interest could occur through the relationships, faithfulness, or rivalries towards particular groups, organizations or interests. All these reasons might affect an individual’s judgements or actions to a great extent. Such matters become sensitive when these conflicts of interests are personal or may result in selfish actions. Therefore, when any competing interests are proclaimed, all the manuscripts adhered to the journal are assessed fairly and are not automatically declined. Instances of conflicts of interests may include the following, however, it is not an exhaustive list:

Having received fees for consulting.
Having received research funding.
Having been hired by a related company.
Holding stocks or shares in a company that might be affected by the publication of your paper.
Having received funds reimbursing you for attending related symposia, or talk.

If there are any conflicts of interests that the reader feels could affect your research you may also wish to declare them. (Please note that it is not expected that details of financial arrangements be disclosed when a competing interest is declared.)

11.1. Conflict of Interests

If any conflict of interest occurs or is identified, the editors might need more information from the author that may include the following points:

Acceptance of financial support/sponsorship in their contribution.
Any commercial or financial indulgence which may provide the presence of a conflict of interest related to the contribution is disclosed in a covering letter accompanying the contribution. All such potential conflicts of interest will be discussed with the editor as to whether the revelation of such an information with the published contribution is to be made in the journal.
If they have signed an agreement with any sponsor of the research reported in the contribution that refrains you from publishing both positive and negative results or which forbids you from publishing this research without prior approval of the sponsor.
If they have checked the manuscript submission guidelines to make sure whether the journal requires a Declaration of Conflicting Interests and have complied with the requirements specified where such a policy exists. The Authors are required to fill and sign the Copyright and Author Consent Form upon submitting the manuscript.

11.2. Editor Obligations Regarding Conflict of Interests

The editors or guest editors are bound to observe the same obligations who write an editorial for the BSR. When you submit or publish your article in a journal which requires you to declare Conflicting Interests, please include such a declaration at the end of your manuscript after any Acknowledgements and prior to the Funding Acknowledgement, Notes (if relevant) and References, under the heading 'Declaration of Conflicting Interest'. If no conflict exists, please state that 'The Author(s) declare(s) that there is no conflict of interest'.

*Please note, a Conflict of Interest Statement will not appear in journals that do not require a declaration of conflicting interests. Where a declaration is required, the disclosure information should be specific and include any financial relationship that all authors of the article have with any sponsoring organization and the for-profit interests the organization represents, and with any for-profit product discussed or implied in the text of the article.

12. Privacy Policy

The journal respects the privacy and ensures that the personal information of the author(s) is protected in line with the intellectual property and copyrights Ordinance 1962 and is applicable to all personal information of users who are using services through the website. This privacy policy excludes information provided to the staff of UMT journals and public information. Our journal highly encourages research ethics, including confidentiality, consent, transparency, and integrity (e.g. reporting standards, conflicts of interest, research funding, appeals, and complaints. The journal’s privacy policy aligns with the Committee on Public Ethics (COPE) code of conduct.
We collect personal information to communicate with you, to collect feedback about services, to inform you about the latest news and events related to the journal. We collect personal information such as name, email addresses, academic qualifications, professional affiliations, address, contact number, city, state, and country of residence, and information that user voluntarily provide through various forms given on the website. For browsing, viewing, and downloading articles on this website user is not required to provide any personal information.
The journal’s website users may opt for not sharing personal information i.e. quit using the Website. Some services compulsorily require submitting personal information. For example, an author's name is required when submitting a manuscript. The journal never shares personal information of site users collected on this website and retains personal information as long as it is relevant to our purpose or until you request to remove your information from your database. If any user wants to remove his/her personal information, he/she may contact at “Contact Us” page. The UMT journals may require no personal information which might include your gender, zip code, date of birth, education, occupation, financial information, and interests. The journal uses your information to improve the quality of products and services, to keep our users up-to-date. We may combine personal information with other information when required.
You agree to the terms and conditions of the privacy policy by using the website. We may make changes in the privacy policy in the case of exceptional circumstances. We recommend that to check the privacy statement regularly to keep you updated about such changes. You have to exit the site immediately if you don’t agree to any terms and conditions of the privacy statement.

13. Anti-plagiarism and Anti-predatory Procedures

It is the journal’s editorial policy to welcome the original work that is not under consideration for any other publication at the same time. All authors are obliged to be aware of the importance of presenting content that is based on their own research and expressed in their own words. Plagiarism is considered to be bad practice and unethical. As per the part of the journal’s Copyrights Policy, originality guidelines are designed to assist authors in understanding acceptable and unacceptable practices. Our approach is specifically aimed at promoting and protecting authors' work. The Peer Review Process ensures quality and is in accordance with the policy of the Higher Education Commission (HEC).

The following types of plagiarism should be avoided:

Verbatim copying - Verbatim copying of more than 10% or 15% (or a significant passage or section of text) of another person's work without acknowledgment, references, or the use of quotation marks.

Paraphrasing - Improper paraphrasing of another person's work is where more than one sentence within a paragraph or section of text has been changed or sentences have been rearranged without appropriate attribution. Significant improper paraphrasing (more than 10% of work) without appropriate attribution is treated as seriously as verbatim copying.

Re-using parts of a work without attribution - Re-use of elements of other person's work, for example, a figure, a table, or a paragraph without acknowledgment, references, or the use of quotation marks. It is incumbent on the author to obtain the necessary permission to reuse elements of another person's work from the copyright holder.

Self-plagiarism – It is required that all authors sign a copyright form that clearly states that their submitted work has not been published previously. If elements of a work have been previously published in another publication, including any UMT publication, the author is required to acknowledge the earlier work and indicate how the subsequent work differs and builds upon the research and conclusions contained in the previous work. Verbatim copying of the author's own work and paraphrasing is not acceptable and we recommend that research should only be reused to support new conclusions.

We recommend that authors cite all previous stages of publication and presentation of their ideas that have culminated in the final work, including conference papers, workshop presentations, and listserv communications. This will ensure that a complete record of all communication relating to the work is documented.

Republication of original work – Only original and innovative work is published in the journal with a small number of exceptions only. These exceptions include conference papers, archival papers that are republished in special issues and at the discretion of the editor. The original work is fully and correctly attributed and permission from the appropriate copyright holder is obtained. Besides, it is the author’s obligation to mention any facts in this regard in compliance with an ethical standard statement at the end of the manuscript.

Attribution - References to other publications must be in the AMA manual of style. All references should be carefully checked for completeness, accuracy, and consistency. You should include all author names and initials and give any journal title in full.

Handling allegations of plagiarism – The journal seeks to uphold academic integrity and to protect authors' rights and to ensure this, the editors take all cases of plagiarism very seriously. The editors are also aware of the potential impact of an allegation of plagiarism that can ruin a researcher's career. Therefore, they have procedures in place to deal with alleged cases of plagiarism. In order to take an unbiased approach, they investigate each case thoroughly, seeking clarification from all affected parties.

This journal is an academic publication and uses software such as Turnitin.com to get help when an alleged case of plagiarism is brought to the attention. If the editors are approached by a third party with

an allegation of plagiarism, they would always seek a response from the author(s)/contributors or copyright holder(s) before deciding on a course of action. Their decisions will be unbiased and objective as well not influenced by other parties.

The journal is not obliged to discuss individual cases of alleged plagiarism with third parties. We reserve the right not to proceed further with a case if the complainant presents a false name or affiliation or acts in an inappropriate or threatening manner towards the journal editors and staff.

Prior Publication

If the submitted manuscript or its significant part has been previously published, it is not generally acceptable for publication in the journal. However, for abstracts and posters presented at conferences, the authors are responsible to inform the editor and acknowledge the first source of publication. Articles that have been presented at a conference but not published by the conference organizers may also be considered. The author should confirm that they have not granted the conference organizers a license to the work; if the author retains all the rights in the work, the journal editor may consider the article for publication based on the fact that articles presented at a conference are unlikely to be the same or substantially the same version as that being accepted by the journal.

In all cases, the author should disclose any prior publication or distribution to the editor and ensure appropriate attribution to the prior distribution and/or publication of the material.

14. Informed Consent Policy

Authors are responsible to make the subjects aware of data protection regarding any personal data and confidentiality.
The authors need to check the specific biobank/biorepository policies or any other type of data provider policies to ensure non-bio research.
Authors must obtain consent regarding the already available data and/or biological material, if applicable.
For all research involving human subjects, the author(s) must obtain freely-given informed consent to participate in the study from participants (or their parents or legal guardian in the case of children under 16) and a statement to this effect should appear in the manuscript.
For studies involving vulnerable groups where there is the potential for coercion or where consent may not have been fully informed, extra care may be taken by the editor and may be referred to the Advisory/Editorial board.
Authors should make sure to also seek consent from individuals to publish their data prior to submitting their paper to a journal. This is in particular applicable to case studies.
A structured ‘Declaration’ (funding, conflict of interest/competing interests, Ethical approval, consent, data and/or code availability, and authors’ contribution statements) should be included in the manuscript before the ‘Reference’ section.

15. Advertisement Policy

The journal does not accept or publish any advertisements.

16. Copyright Policy

BSR follows an open-access publishing policy and full text of all articles is available free, immediately upon acceptance. Articles are published and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Thus, work submitted to the journal implies that it is original, unpublished work of the authors; neither published previously nor accepted/under consideration for publication elsewhere. On acceptance of a manuscript for publication, a corresponding author on the behalf of all co-authors of the manuscript will sign and submit a completed Copyright Form. The journal clearly mentions the copyright of the authors on the metadata of the article.
Authors will be responsible for any information written/informed/reported in the submitted manuscript. Although we do not require authors to submit the data collection documents and coded sheets used to do quantitative or qualitative analysis, we may request it at any time during the publication process, including after the article has been published. It is the author's responsibility to obtain signed permission from the copyright holder to use and reproduce text, illustrations, tables, etc., published previously in other journals, electronic or print media.
Conflict of interest statements will be published at the end of the article. Authors are required to disclose any sponsorship or funding received from any institution relating to their research. The editor(s) will determine what disclosures, if any, should be available to the readers.
Authors are not permitted to post the work on any website/blog/forum/board or at any other place, by any means, from the time such work is submitted to BSR until a final decision on the paper has been given to them. In case a paper is accepted for publication, the authors may not post the work in its entirety on any platforms till the paper is formerly published by BSR.
The authors may however post the title, author's names and their affiliations and abstract, with the following statement on the first page of the paper - "The manuscript has been accepted for publication in BioScientific Review. After the publication of the article, it may be posted anywhere with full journal citation included.

Brief Summary of the License Agreement

Under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under CC-by 4.0 you are free to:

Share — In any medium or format copy or redistribute the material
Adapt —transform, remix, and build upon the material for any purpose even commercially.

Under the following terms:

Attribution — Give proper credit, a link to the licensing body, and specify the changes that were made. In a logical way, you can do so, but it does not depict that the licenser endorses you or your use.
No additional restrictions — Avoid using technological measures or legal terms that legally restrains other from doing anything that license allow.

Author E-prints
UMT supports a range of policies to benefit the authors, with respect to providing them with an e-print. E-prints are sent out automatically to the corresponding author of articles published ahead of print and in print issues. A link is provided allowing the author to download the article directly from the UMT website and forward the link to their co-authors.

17. AI Policy

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT or Large Language Models in research publications is expanding rapidly. COPE joins organisations, such as WAME and the JAMA Network among others, to state that AI tools cannot be listed as an author of a paper.

1. AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work.

2. Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in disclosing in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used.

3. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics.

The above mentioned AI policy is adopted from COPE for furtehr details click here.

Please click on the file below to download the policies and guidelines.

Policies and Guidelines