Ethical publishing practice

Ethical Guidelines

ScienceBank requires Authors, Editors, and Reviewers to follow an ethical code of conduct as described below.

Authorship of the paper: Transparency about the contributions of Authors is required (see Authorship policy).

Animal and Human testing: All submissions involving animals, and human participants will be checked by ScienceBank to ensure that the requirements outlined in the Animal Research Policy and the Human Subject policy are fulfilled. ScienceBank reserves the right to reject work that is not conducted or reported to the appropriate standards (see Animal Research policy and the Human Subject policy).

Confidentiality: The peer-review process is confidential to all parties. Editors and Reviewers are prohibited from making use of any material or taking advantage of any information they gain through the peer-review process (see Editor and Reviewer Guidelines).

Declaring competing interests and sources of funding: All Authors must include with their submissions a disclosure that outlines any competing interests. The submission must also create transparency in how the research is funded (see Disclosure of Funding Sources policy and Competing Interests policy).

Originality and plagiarism: Submissions must represent the Author(s) entirely original works as plagiarised works will not be published on ScienceBank. Appropriate citations and quotes must be used to ensure the work of others is identified (see Authorship guidelines).

Data and Material availability access: Authors must make data, materials, and samples transparent and available for results and conclusions to be validated by readers as part of the open science principles. Prohibiting access to data and materials without a valid reason or providing insufficient levels of appropriate description will result in ScienceBank rejecting manuscripts for publication (see Data and Material Availability policy).

Fundamental errors in published works: Authors are obligated to contact ScienceBank immediately if they discover significant inaccuracies or errors in their published work. ScienceBank will support the Author in retracting or correcting the published works.

Fabricated research and ‘paper mills’: ScienceBank will not accept manuscripts that have been ‘manufactured’ on behalf of the Author for a fee as an ‘Authorship for sale’ engagement. In addition, fabricated research is prohibited for publication in ScienceBank. This includes but is not limited to plagiarism, faked, or manipulated data/images, the use of stock images passed off as authentic ones, and substantial Authorship changes. ScienceBank will reserve the right to request more information from Authors or to withdraw publications if there is tangible evidence that the manuscript is fabricated or part of a ‘paper mill’ process.

Redundant or concurrent publication: An Author should publish original research and avoid describing essentially the same research in more than one journal or primary publication.

Rigour and Reproducibility Research: ScienceBank will consider manuscripts that are focused on the ‘rigour’ and ‘reproducibility’ of previously published work where the objective of the Author is to review previous claims and analyse them using different methods.

Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology: ScienceBank is an advocate for the responsible use of technologies including AI to advance scientific discovery. Authors are required to disclose the use of AI technology in their role within the Methods sections. Authors can also use the Acknowledgements section if a Method section is not available in the manuscript. ScienceBank urges responsible use of AI if Authors use it to write their manuscripts. Firstly, ScienceBank will not recognize AI as a Co-Author (See Authorship guidelines). However, Authors are permitted to use AI-powered translation software to support them in delivering English language publications, as long as they maintain accountability for the manuscript’s accuracy. The use of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT can be a useful tool to help research during the process of research if the researcher has the expertise to determine the accuracy of the outputs of Large Language Models. However, this technology has not proved to be accurate in its outputs, and therefore ScienceBank discourages Authors from making discoveries based on its outputs, especially if Authors cannot verify them. Certainly, ScienceBank does not condone the copying and pasting of information garnered from software such as ChatGPT as it may be deemed plagiarism, fabricated research, inaccurate, and lack an original contribution from the Author. Furthermore, ScienceBank does not condone Editors and Reviewers uploading articles to software such as ChatGPT to verify data or draft their reviews. This policy is rooted in our commitment to maintaining confidentiality, upholding the integrity of Authors' intellectual property, and ensuring scientific accuracy.

ScienceBank Accountability

ScienceBank reserves the right to reject work not conducted according to the appropriate ethical standards outlined within its policies. In some cases, this may include rejecting work even if formal approvals have been obtained. In all cases, a clear explanation will be given to the Authors. If the concerns can be resolved through a reply by the Authors, ScienceBank will reconsider the manuscript for publications that have passed the peer-review stage.

ScienceBank also reserves the right to withdraw a published manuscript from its platform if significant concerns are raised about the ethics of the research. ScienceBank will reserve the right to investigate including by contacting the Authors’ institution, ethics committee, or other appropriate body with these concerns.

Any post-publications issues and concerns can be directed to our team at help@sciencebank.com. Policies and procedures on post-publication issues are detailed in the section “Post-publications procedures”.

References

(1) Arrive Guidelines, https://arriveguidelines.org/about

(2) The use of non-human primates in research, https://acmedsci.ac.uk/file-download/34785-nhpdownl.pdf

(3)  The CONSORT statement, National Library of Medicine, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6398298/

(4) The TREND Statement, Centre of Disease Control and Prevention  http://www.cdc.gov/trendstatement/

(5) Disclosure of Interest, International Committee of Medical Journal Editors  http://www.icmje.org/

(6) Primary registries in the WHO registry network, World Health Organization,

https://www.who.int/clinical-trials-registry-platform/network/primary-registries

(7) OSI Approved Licenses, Open Source Initiative, https://opensource.org/licenses/

(8) CC BY 4.0 Deed, Creative Commons, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

(9) How the contributor role Taxonomy, (CRediT) is helping shift Authorship to contribution, Lz Allen, Allison O’Connel, Veronique Kiermer, 2019   https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/leap.1210

(10 ) ORCID,  https://orcid.org/

(11) PLOS ONE, https://journals.plos.org/plosone/

(12) Science, https://www.science.org/

(13) Elsevier, https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies-and-standards

(14) Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), https://publicationethics.org/

(15) Nature,  https://www.nature.com/srep/Author-instructions

(16) Figshare, https://figshare.com/

(17) OSF, https://osf.io/

(18) Dryad, https://datadryad.org/stash

(19) GitHub, https://github.com/

(20) GitLab, https://about.gitlab.com/

(21) DOI, https://www.doi.org/

(22) ATCC, https://www.atcc.org/

(23) Center for Open Science, https://www.cos.io/