Journal of Biochemicals and Phytomedicine Editors follows "the international standards for editors" recommended by COPE.

Authorship

The ICMJE recommends the authorship to be based on the following 4 criteria:

1. Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data.

2. Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content.

3. Final approval of the version published.

4. Agreement 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 resolved.

In addition to being accountable for the parts of the work he or she has done, an author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work. Besides, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their co-authors. All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. Those who do not meet all four criteria should be listed in the Acknowledgements section. Participation solely in the acquisition of funding, the gathering of data, technical help, writing assistance, and general supervision of the research group does not warrant authorship. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged. Please guarantee that anyone stated in the Acknowledgements section has granted its clearance for permission to be listed.

Authors should meet "the international standards for authors" recommended by COPE.

Changes to Authorship

The editors of this journal generally do not consider changes to authorship after a manuscript has been submitted. It is crucial that authors carefully finalize the authorship list and order of authors before the initial submission.

The journal's policy on authorship changes is as follows:

- All authors must be listed in the manuscript, and their details must be entered into the submission system.

- Any addition, deletion, or rearrangement of author names in the authorship list should only be made before acceptance and must be approved by the journal editor.

- Requests for authorship changes must be submitted by the corresponding author and must include the reason for the request along with written confirmation from all authors, including those being added or removed, indicating their agreement with the change.

- The journal editor will only consider changes to authorship post-acceptance under exceptional circumstances.

- Publication of the manuscript may be delayed while a request for authorship change is under review.

- If the manuscript has already been published, any approved authorship changes will be reflected in a corrigendum.

- Unauthorized changes to authorship may result in the rejection of the manuscript or, if already published, the retraction of the article.

Contributorship Statement

A contributorship statement is required for every manuscript submitted and should state who has contributed what to the planning, conduct, and reporting of the work described in the article.

Funding Sources

Authors must disclose any funding sources that provided financial support for the research and/or preparation of the article. The role of sponsors, if any, should be clearly stated concerning the study's design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, report writing, and the decision to submit the article for publication. If the funding sources had no involvement in these aspects, this should be explicitly mentioned in your submission.

To ensure compliance with funder requirements, please list funding sources in the following standard format:

Funding: This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]; the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle, WA [grant number zzzz]; and the United States Institutes of Peace [grant number aaaa].

It is not necessary to provide detailed descriptions of the programs or types of grants, scholarships, or awards. When funding is derived from a block grant or other institutional resources, simply list the name of the institution or organization that provided the funding.

If no funding was provided for the research, it is recommended to include the following statement:

Funding: This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Acknowledgments

Recognize individuals who assisted with the project. Report all sources of grant and other support for the project or study, including funds received from contributors, institutions, and commercial sources. Consultancies and funds paid directly to investigators must also be listed.

Competing Interests

A competing interest exists when professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients’ welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain - employment, consultancies, stock ownership or options, honoraria, patents, and paid expert- testimony or personal relationship). There is nothing unethical about a competing interest but it should be acknowledged and clearly stated. All authors must declare all competing interests in their cover letter and the “Competing Interests” section at the end of the manuscript file (before the references). Authors with no competing interests to declare should obviously state that.

Ethical Approval of Research/Publication Ethics

Journal of Biochemicals and Phytomedicine follows the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and aims to adhere to its Best Practice Guidelines.

We strongly consider allegations of publication misconduct, both before and after publication, and we reserve the right to contact authors' institutions, funders, or regulatory bodies if needed. If we find conclusive evidence of misconduct, we will take steps to correct the scientific record, which may include supplying a correction or retraction.

Authors are expected to be aware of publication ethics, specifically concerning authorship, dual submission, plagiarism, figure manipulation, competing interests, and compliance with standards of research ethics. In cases of suspected misconduct, we will follow COPE standards and practices and may seek advice from the COPE forum if needed.

Statement of Ethics Approval

Journal of Biochemicals and Phytomedicine require every research article submitted to include a statement that the study obtained ethics approval (or a statement that it was not required and why), including the name of the ethics committee(s) or institutional review board(s), the number/ID of the approval(s), and a statement that participants gave informed consent before taking part. Even when a study has been approved by a research ethics committee or institutional review board, editors may ask authors for more detailed information about the ethics of the work.

Patient Consent and Confidentiality

Any article that contains personal medical information about an identifiable living individual requires the patient’s explicit consent before we can publish it. We would like the patient to sign our consent form, which requires the patient to have read the article.

If consent cannot be obtained because the patient cannot be traced then publication will be possible only if the information can be sufficiently anonymized. Anonymization means that neither the patient nor anyone else could identify the patient with certainty.

If the patient is dead the authors should seek permission from a relative (as a matter of courtesy and medical ethics). If the relatives are not contactable we will balance the worthwhileness of the case, the likelihood of identification, and the likelihood of offense if identified in deciding on whether we should publish without a relative’s consent.

Our policy on obtaining consent for the publication of pictures of patients is a subset of our general policy on patient confidentiality. If there is any chance that a patient may be identified from a photograph or other image or from its legend or accompanying text, we need the patient’s written consent to publication.

Images – such as X-rays, laparoscopic images, ultrasound images, pathology slides, or images of undistinctive parts of the body – may be used without consent so long as they are anonymized by the removal of any identifying marks and are not accompanied by text that could reveal the patient’s identity through clinical or personal detail.

Biosafety and Biosecurity

All necessary statements regarding biosafety and biosecurity concerns such as genetically modified organisms (GMOs), toxins, pathogenic agents, and radioactive materials should be clarified and the regulatory frameworks for biosafety and biosecurity should be addressed. Similar to the regulatory frameworks, such as the Nagoya Protocol, all necessary measures must be included.

Research Reporting Guidelines

Authors are encouraged to use the relevant research reporting guidelines for the study type provided by the EQUATOR Network. This will ensure that you provide enough information for editors, peer reviewers, and readers to understand how the research was performed and to judge whether the findings are likely to be reliable.

The Key Reporting Guidelines

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs): CONSORT guidelines; 

 Systematic reviews and meta-analyses: PRISMA guidelines and MOOSE guidelines

Observational studies in epidemiology: STROBE guidelines and MOOSE guidelines
Diagnostic accuracy studies: STARD guidelines

Quality improvement studies: SQUIRE guidelines

Clinical Trial Registration

Based on ICMJE recommendations, a clinical trial defines as “any research project that prospectively assigns people or a group of people to an intervention, with or without concurrent comparison or control groups, to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a health-related intervention and a health outcome”.

In agreement with the ICMJE, the Journal of Biochemicals and Phytomedicine will not consider reports of clinical trials unless they were registered prospectively before the recruitment of any participants.

Trial Registration

As a condition of consideration for publication, the journal requires registration of all trials in a public trials registry that is acceptable to the ICMJE (any registry that is a primary register of the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform https://www.who.int/clinical-trials-registry-platform or in ClinicalTrials.gov, which is a data provider to the WHO ICTRP).

Plagiarism Detection

Journal of Biochemicals and Phytomedicine is powered by the iThenticate software, which is a plagiarism detector service that verifies the originality of content submitted before publication. If plagiarism is identified, we will follow COPE guidelines.

Plagiarisms (not limited to):

• Directly copying text from other sources
• Copying ideas, images, or data from other sources
• Reusing text from your own previous publications
• Using an idea from another source with slightly modified language

If plagiarism is detected during the peer review process, the manuscript may be rejected. If plagiarism is detected after publication, we reserve the right to issue a correction or retract the paper, as appropriate. We reserve the right to inform authors' institutions about plagiarism detected either before or after publication.

Peer-Review Policy

• Journal of Biochemicals and Phytomedicine journal is committed to conducting a flawless sound peer-review process and providing publications with the highest quality possible.
• Journal of Biochemicals and Phytomedicine reviews all submitted manuscripts internally and externally.
• Journal of Biochemicals and Phytomedicine follows a double-blind peer-review process for all the submitted manuscripts.
• All the submitted manuscripts are subjected to an anonymous handling process.
• Editorials, obituaries, news, letters, comments, or highlights written by the journal’s editor(s) do not undergo an external peer-review process and are reviewed internally by the members of the Editorial Office of the journal.
• In the case of submission of manuscripts by any member of the editorial board, editorial office, or editors (i.e., editor-in-chief, editor, or associate editor), the policy of the journal strictly is the same. Accordingly, these submissions are independently peer-reviewed, and no editor will have any input/influence on the peer-review process or the publication decision for their own article. Finally, an independent editor makes a decision on the acceptance/rejection of the submitted manuscript. Journal of Biochemicals and Phytomedicine strictly imposes a limit on the number of these types of publications.

Peer-Review Procedures

All manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Biochemicals and Phytomedicine are subject to rigorous review. This review consists of the following steps:
1. Initial submissions are reviewed by internal staff to ensure adherence to the policies based on international guidelines, including ethical requirements for human and animal experimentation.
2. Submissions are then assigned to an Editor for evaluation.
3. The handling Editor decides whether reviews from additional experts are needed to evaluate the manuscript. The majority of submissions are evaluated by at least two external reviewers, but it is up to the Editor to determine the number of reviews required based on the subject and reviewers' expertise.
4. After evaluation, the handling editor chooses one of the following decisions:

• Accept
• Minor Revision
• Major Revision
• Reject
• Transfer to another journal

5. If the decision is Minor Revision or Major Revision, the authors have 30 days to resubmit the revised manuscript. Authors may contact email addresses if they require an extension.
6. Upon the resubmission, the Editor may choose to send the manuscript back to external reviewers or may render a decision based on personal expertise.

Permissions
It is the author’s responsibility to secure all permissions before publication.

Material from Other Sources

Any written or illustrative material that has been or will be published elsewhere must be duly acknowledged and accompanied by the written consent of the copyright holder (this may be the publisher rather than the author). This includes your own previously published material if you are not the copyright holder.

Reproducing Materials Published by Journal of Biochemicals and Phytomedicine

Materials published by the Journal of Biochemicals and Phytomedicine may be reproduced in full or part in any medium or language only on the condition that the original material is cited properly.

Publication Frequency

The publication frequency and all related information regarding the journals are listed on the related website (please see "About Journal").

Fees, Copyright and Licensing

Publication Fees

• Journal of Biochemicals and Phytomedicine, as an open-access journal, is committed to providing a robust impeccable publication platform for both authors and readers.
• Journal of Biochemicals and Phytomedicine is a publish-free and access-free journal.

Open Access Agreement

Upon submitting an article, authors are asked to indicate their agreement to abide by an open-access Creative Commons license (CC-BY). Under the terms of this license, authors retain ownership of the copyright of their articles. However, the license permits any user to download, print out, extract, reuse, archive, and distribute the article, so long as appropriate credit is given to the authors and the source of the work. The license ensures that the article will be available as widely as possible and that the article can be included in any scientific archive.

Article Sharing Policy

Are authors allowed to archive their submitted articles in an open-access repository?
No. The authors submitting articles to a journal are prohibited from publishing the submitted material in an open repository before peer review and publication in the intended journal.
However, the source data of the submitted work mandatorily made public on a website such as registries required for clinical trials are exempt from this prohibition and present an acceptable form of publicized data from the article before its publication.

Are authors allowed to archive their accepted articles in an open-access repository?

Yes. The authors can deposit their corrected manuscripts in open repositories after acceptance in the journal.

Are authors allowed to archive the final published article (PDF) in an open-access repository?

Yes. The authors are encouraged to archive the final PDF version of their article in open repositories, such as those of their own universities.

Advertising
All queries for the advertisements are meticulously evaluated by the Journal Office, in a case-by-case manner. For advertising in the Journal of Biochemicals and Phytomedicine, please consult the Journal Office at journal@jbcpm.com.