The Biotica Journals is an electronic double-blind peer-reviewed journal upholding the highest standards. Articles not in accordance with publication ethics and malpractices will be removed from publication if detected at any time. Plagiarism and research fabrication such as making up of data, manipulation of existing data, tables, etc. and ethical clearance on the use of humans or animals for the study will also be checked. The journal reserves the right to use plagiarism detecting software to screen submitted papers at any time and suspected plagiarism or duplicate publishing will be reported immediately. Articles should be submitted using online procedures. Simultaneous publication in more than one publication is a breach of publication ethics. Manuscripts submitted to these journals are evaluated entirely on the basis of their scientific content. All possible measures are taken to uphold the highest standards of publication ethics and to prevent malpractices.

Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) during the 2^nd World Conference on Research Integrity in Singapore in 2010 has developed the below-mentioned guidelines. Informatics Journals, as a publisher follows COPE, WAME and has adopted COPE’s best practice guidelines for dealing with ethical issues in a journal. The Journal Members (Advisory Board, editors and the journal manager) have consented to adopt the COPE as it meets the purpose and objective of the Journal.

Responsibility of Authors

They must ensure that:

• Their work is original.
• Must not have been published or not under consideration for publication
• Other authors, contributors or sources should be appropriately credited.
• They are responsible for language editing before submission.
• Their work has not been copied or plagiarised in whole or part from any other work.
• If the authors have used the works of others, the same has been appropriately cited or quoted.
• The financial support and conflict of interest for the project/research work, if any, should be disclosed.
• Applicable copyright laws and conventions are required to be followed. Copyright materials should be reproduced only with permission and due acknowledgement.
• Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the paper which is submitted for publication. All those who have made significant contributions should be listed as co-authors. Others who have participated in certain substantive aspects in the development of the paper should also be acknowledged.
• The corresponding author is required to ensure that all co-authors are included in the paper, and that the co-authors have seen and approved the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.
• They are obliged to notify the editor if any error or inaccuracy is discovered and co-operate with the editor to correct the same.

Responsibility of Editors

They must ensure that:

• The submitted manuscript undergoes Double-blind peer review before publishing.
• They will strive to prevent any conflict of interest between the author and editorial and review personnel.
• The Editorial Team may confer/deliberate with other reviewers/editors in arriving at its decisions.
• The evaluation of manuscripts is made on the basis of the scholarly and intellectual content without any biasness on the nature of the authors or the institution, including gender, race, religious belief, ethnic origin, citizenship, or political philosophy of the authors.
• The journal follows a policy of fair play in its editorial evaluation.
• The editors are expected to exercise caution and ensure that they have found no conflict of interest in respect to the articles they accept/reject.
• The editors and the editorial staff should follow strict confidentiality and should not disclose any information about the submitted manuscript to anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers and the publisher. Authors are encouraged to comply with the comments made while preserving the anonymity of the reviewers.

Responsibility of Reviewers

They must ensure that:

• Reviews of the manuscript and provides suitable comments for improvement.
• Promptness in notifying the editor about his inability to review the manuscript.
• Maintains confidentiality about the manuscript obtained for review, by not discussing with others.
• Standards of objectivity preserved by reviewing the manuscripts objectively with clear views and supporting arguments and without any personal criticism.
• Acknowledgement of Sources.
• All references not cited by the author should be removed. All citations should be accompanied with any previously reported observation, derivation or argument.
• The editors should be intimated of any overlap of the reviewed manuscript with any other published paper.
• Disclosures and Conflict of Interest - manuscripts having conflict of interest resulting from competitive, collaborative or any other relationships or connections with institutions connected to the paper will not be considered.

In case, plagiarism is detected during review/editorial process, such manuscript(s) will be rejected immediately and we can also consider other steps depending upon the seriousness of the case. If the plagiarism is proven after publication, such manuscript(s) will be removed from our website and an appropriate announcement will be placed in this regard.

Further, Biotica Journals can bring such instants in notice of author's funding agencies, author's institutes (where they works) and to the original authors whose work has been plagiarized. Please report the plagiarism to [email protected].

Submission Policy

There is no Charge/ Fee for submitting manuscripts to Biotica Journals. It is completely FREE.

Article Publishing Fee/ Article Processing Charge (APC)

The Journal being an Open Access journal supports its publishing activities by charging a nominal Article Processing Charge (APC) from Authors.

Waiver Policy

Biotica Journals is an open-access journal and requires Article Processing Charges (APCs) to be paid after acceptance. To support the researchers who are unable to meet some or all of the costs associated with publishing the journal adopted a transparent waiver policy.

• Our fee support system ensures that all articles that pass peer review can benefit from open access, regardless of author’s field or funding situation.
• Publishing fees or waiver status will not influence editorial decision making.
• Authors and institutions with insufficient funding will be eligible for discounts to their APC.
• Waiver is applicable for one article per year for each submitting author.
• All the editors and reviewers who have handled at least three manuscripts in a calendar year can apply for a partial 25% discount to the APC.
• 50% Fee Waiver for Society life members - is applicable only if the first author of the accepted manuscript is a life member. Changing the order of Author Names and also any affiliations once the galley proof is prepared will not be permitted.

Please request your waiver or discount at the point of submission and the requests made during the review process or after acceptance will not be considered.

Please send your waiver requests to [email protected].

Misconduct and Sanctions

Suspected breaches of our publication ethics policies, either before or after publication, as well as concerns about research ethics, should be reported to the journal. Claimants will be kept anonymous if requested.

As soon as we get information about the misconduct, our editors will start a thorough investigation. The authors may be asked to provide the underlying data, images, and other supplementary materials. The journal will consult editors, and contact institutions or employers to ask for an investigation.

If an article is found to violate the ethical publishing guidelines of the journal such as duplicate submission, fraudulent data, plagiarism, citation manipulation, false claim of authorship, etc. the article will be rejected by the journal.

In case the article is accepted and under the ‘Online first’ stage the journal will remove the article from the website and an appropriate note for article withdrawal will be posted. No response from the authors to journal communication after review and provisional acceptance is also considered as withdrawal of the article. If it is a published article the same will be retracted immediately.

In addition to that we may take the following actions based on the severity of misconduct;

• Not allowing submission for 1-3 years.
• A prohibition from acting as an editor or reviewer.
• Reporting the misconduct to the author's institutions, employers and, their funding agencies.

However, the minor unintentional errors by the authors may be corrected by a corrigendum and errors by the publisher by an erratum.

Conflicts of Interest

A conflict of interest is anything that interferes with, or could reasonably be perceived as interfering with, the full and objective presentation, commissioning, peer review, editorial decision-making, or publication of research or non-research articles submitted to Biotica Journals.

A conflict of interest exists if a person or institution has a relationship, personal or otherwise, which has the potential to compromise or in any way interfere with professional objectivity or judgment in issues related to the relationship.

A conflict of interest is actual if a relationship exists, or apparent if the possibility for a relationship could be inferred. In either case, it is the responsibility of journal Editors, Associate Editors, Editorial Board members, authors and reviewers to declare Conflicts of Interest, actual or apparent, in order that appropriate mitigating action is taken.

You can declare the conflict of interest in your cover letter or on the manuscript submission form in the journal’s peer-review system.

Conflict of interests can be financial or non-financial in nature. To maintain transparency, any associations which can be perceived by others as a conflict of interest must also be declared.

Financial conflicts of interests include:

• Employment or voluntary involvement.
• Collaborations with advocacy groups relating to the content of the article.
• Grants from an entity, paid to the author or organization.
• Personal fees received by the authors as honoraria, royalties, consulting fees, lecture fees, or testimonies.
• Patents held or pending by the authors, their institutions, funding organizations, or licensed to an entity, whether earning royalties or not.
• Royalties being received by the authors or their institutions.
• Stock or share ownership.
• Benefits related to the development of products as an outcome of the work.

Non-financial conflicts of interests:

• Receipt of drugs, specialist equipment, tools, computer programs, or digital applications.
• Access to data repositories, archival resources, museum collections, by an entity that might benefit, or be at a disadvantage financially or reputationally from the published findings.
• Holding a position on the boards of industry bodies or private companies that might benefit, or be at a disadvantage financially or reputationally from the published findings.
• Writing assistance or administrative support from a person or organization that might benefit, or be at a disadvantage from the published findings.
• Personal, political, religious, ideological, academic and intellectual competing interests which are perceived to be relevant to the published content.
• Involvement in legal action related to the work.

Important: if there are no competing interests to declare, authors should include a statement to the article to confirm that there are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.

Licensing Policy

The journal uses creative commons' Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

To fully realise the potential of open access to research literature, barriers to reuse need to be removed. The Creative Commons (CC) licenses have emerged as an effective legal instrument to achieve this. Instead of transferring rights exclusively to publishers (the approach usually followed in subscription publishing), authors grant a non-exclusive license to the publisher to distribute the work, and all users and readers are granted rights to reuse the work.

CC-BY allows for unrestricted reuse of content, subject only to the requirement that the source work is appropriately attributed. The CC-BY license thereby requires that authors are given appropriate credit for their work, as explained in a recent post from Creative Commons.

Copyright Policy

As all the articles published in Biotica Journals are distributed under a creative commons license, so, the authors retain the copyright of their work and the authors do not need to transfer the copyright of their work to the journal. However, the authors grant a license to the journal to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher. For BIOTICA to publish and disseminate research articles, we only require the Publishing Rights.

Archiving Policy and Author Self-Archiving

This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

The Journal allows the authors to self-archive pre-print, post-print, and publishers' versions of the article in any OAI-compliant repository.

Advertisement Policy

At present there is no policy to accept advertisements and the journal does not accept commercial advertisements.

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

Citing the sources used in a paper is essential as it allows one to provide an opportunity for interested readers to check and gain a more in-depth understanding of the original works, as well as to give credit to the original authors of the cited works, thereby staying away from plagiarism. When an author refers to one’s own ideas or data featured in one’s earlier publication, it is a self-citation.

But too many citations to previous works by the same authors are also inappropriate, considered to be a potential attempt to manipulate an author’s own h-index and artificially increase a researcher’s or a journal’s citation count, or, in the case of a journal, its impact factor as well. Engaging in such a practice means the violation of publication ethics: the given party can risk one’s removal from a journal and the journal can lose its existing membership indexing agencies or citation index. In this context by referring COPE citation manipulation documents the publisher finalized the following criteria:

• Editors may have to judge this issue on a case by case basis. If an author lists many references to their own work, this may be an indication of inappropriate citing. Editors may need to systematically check that there are not excessive citations to certain authors or journals. Editor can ask authors to reduce the citation level if they feel there are excessive citations.
• Self-citations being added at the revision stage is an issue that has arisen. Instructions to authors should make it clear that authors cannot add references at the proof stage. Editors need to pay more attention to the revised paper.
• If an article is published, and the editor did not notice there were excessive self-citations, particularly if they were added after original peer review, editors should be willing to publish an erratum to say there were inappropriately added references.
• The publisher encourages authors not to cite self references more than 5 years old and it should exceed 20%.

Article Withdrawal

Either the Publisher or the author of the article can withdraw the same. An article can be withdrawn at any point in time before it is formally published online in its final form with complete information about volume, issue, page numbers, DOI and article ID. If the article withdrawal request has been initiated by an author, they need to submit a signed letter to the Editorial Office prior to article withdrawal. Publisher can withdraw an article if it is found to violate the ethical publishing guidelines, like Duplicate publication, Plagiarism, Fraudulent usage of data, Multiple submissions, Bogus claims of authorship. In both cases, the article PDF will be removed and a note that the article has been withdrawn will be displayed.

Corrections to an Article

If an error is discovered in an already published article, Erratum, Corrigendum or Addendum will be published in an issue once the proposed changes are in agreement with Publisher and Author. Only significant corrections will be published, such as, inaccurately published information, etc. Minor corrections like spelling mistakes or grammatical errors which do not alter the understanding of the paper will not be corrected. When a correction is published, the original article reference will be given in the corrected PDF and vice-versa. Only the corrections will be mentioned. Charges will be decided while corrections are made depending on the number of corrections etc.

Original article will not be modified, but correction link will be available on the article page. This will help readers to download both the PDFs.

An Errata will be published only when mistakes are recognized in the published article which went unnoticed during Editing and Layout setting in Figures, Tables, etc.

Corrigenda is published when authors realise that errors in the published article could affect the validity of the scientific content, or its accuracy. If a reader detects an error in a published article, they can submit the same as a letter to the editor. The author, editor and a reviewer would then assess the validity of the error pointed out. Corrigenda will then be published with reference to the letter and the answers provided by the author.

Addenda is published if authors have omitted a significant information inadvertently during manuscript submission and would like to add this content to the article after publication. The information provided for addendum will undergo peer-review prior to editorial acceptance.

Addendum publication is very rare and will be allowed by Editorial team only if the information is very much essential to understand a significant portion of the published article.

Article Retractions

Retractions are published in circumstances like, if the conclusion of a paper is found to be based on faulty logic or computation by new information made available after the paper has been published; if the paper is based on falsified or fabricated data, if plagiarized data has been published or if duplicate publications exist. The retractions are decided on a case by case basis by the editor in consultation with the authors and the reviewers of the article. A signed statement from the authors will be required to be submitted to the Editorial Office before an article can be retracted. Agreement of all authors of a paper is required before a retraction can be published. If some co-authors do not agree to the retraction of the article, the retraction will be published as decided by the editor, clearly identifying the dissenting co-authors. When a retraction is published it will be linked to the article being corrected and a link to the retractions page will also be placed on the article published earlier. On the webpages of the retracted article the bibliographic information will be retained on all the pages, however, the article text will be replaced by a note stating that the article has been retracted from the journal. The PDF version of the article will be retained to preserve the integrity of record, but will be marked to show that the article has been retracted. In cases of partial retractions, the retraction notice will be labeled as 'Partial Retraction' or 'Retraction in Part'.

Article Removal

In exceptional circumstances an article may be removed from the journal. This may happen if any legal issues arise or are expected to arise in context of the article, the distribution of the article is stopped by an court order, the contents of the article may pose a serious health risk if acted upon by others, the article violates copyright of others, or if the article is found to be defamatory or infringing on other's legal rights. When an article is removed from the journal the bibliographic information and the PDF file will also be removed. The article text will be replaced by a note stating that the article has been removed from the journal and the reason for removal.

Article Replacement

If an article is found to contain false or inaccurate data which may pose a serious health risk if acted upon by others, the authors of the original article may wish to retract the article and replace it with a corrected version. In this case, the article will be retracted, following the procedure of retraction of an article, with the difference that a link to the corrected re-published article will be placed on the HTML and PDF versions of the paper and on the page with the retraction notice.

For every Journal, the peer review process is at the heart of the success of publishing. As part of our commitment to the protection and enhancement of the peer review process, The Biotica Journals would like to ensure that all published articles are within the accepted level of plagiarism. The Journal uses the very well and widely accepted Plagiarism Detection tool, TURNITIN. All the submitted manuscripts are first subjected to Plagiarism check and then the Publishing cycle begins.

In case, plagiarism is detected during review/ editorial process, such manuscript(s) will be rejected immediately and we can also consider other steps depending upon the seriousness of the case. If the plagiarism is proven after publication, such manuscript(s) will be removed from our website and an appropriate announcement will be placed in this regard. We can also consider appropriate action against authors depending upon the seriousness of the case. It includes;

1. Debarring the authors from publication in the future.
2. We can bring such instants to the notice of the author's funding agencies, the author's institutes (where they work), and to the original authors whose work has been plagiarized.

COPE flow charts (please follow the below link) shall also be considered while dealing with plagiarism complaints.

• Suspected plagiarism in a submitted manuscript.
• Suspected plagiarism in a published manuscript.

Please report the plagiarism if any to [email protected].

CrossMark is a multi-publisher initiative by the CrossRef Organization to provide a standard way for readers to locate the authoritative version of a document. By applying the CrossMark logo, Biotica is committed to maintaining the content it publishes and to alerting readers to changes if and when they occur. Clicking on the CrossMark logo will provide the current status of a document and may also provide additional publication record information about the document.

Biotica Journals content, which will display CrossMark, is restricted to current and future journal content and is also limited to specific publication types.

There are 12 defined types of accepted "updates" within Crossmark are as follows:

• Addendum
• Clarification
• Correction
• Corrigendum
• Erratum
• Expression_of_concern
• New_edition
• New_version
• Partial_retraction
• Removal
• Retraction
• Withdrawal

All the manuscripts submitted to Biotica Journals will be subjected to a double-blinded peer-review process. In this model, reviewers and the authors both do not know the identities of each other. We believe this process is the best way to ensure the fairest reviews and opinions on papers.

Initial Evaluation/ Technical Review

After successful submission of manuscript by author, the manuscript is first sent to the English editor. The English editor checks the journal format, typographical mistakes. The editor is very much concerned with the data processing format and relevant details. This time taken by initial reviewing process depends on the level of accuracy followed by author in compliance with the journal format. Manuscripts are rejected at this stage if have poor grammars or English language, or are outside the aims and scope of the journal, or not written in accordance with the journal's guidelines. We strongly suggest author to go through carefully on the Instruction of Authors and Pre-Submission Checklist for each journal and download the published articles for reference. The article with comments (if any) by English editor is sent to author for further revision. After fulfilling comments by the English editor, author resend (upload) the manuscript to journal administrator.

The Editor(s) evaluates all the manuscripts. Manuscripts rejected at this stage if insufficiently original, have serious scientific flaws, or are outside the aims and scope of the journal, or not written in accordance with the journal's guidelines. Those that meet the minimum criteria are forwarded to at least 2 experts for review.

Peer-Review

Generally, all the manuscripts are reviewed by a minimum of two suitable external experts in the respective subject area. The reports of all the reviewers will be considered while deciding on acceptance/ revision or rejection of a manuscript, but the ultimate responsibility for acceptance or rejection lies with the Editorial Board. Editor-in-Chief makes the final decision.

Author's Suggestion for the Reviewer

The authors can suggest five peer-reviewers (any two will be selected by the board) as per the following criteria;

• The suggested reviewers should have higher academic standing in the subject area of the submitted article and the same should be reflected in terms of their publications.
• The suggested reviewers should not be from the authors' own institute or from past affiliations.
• Authors must provide the institutional/ academic email addresses of the suggested reviewers.
• Authors must provide the academic profile pages of the suggested reviewers.
• The journal reserves the right NOT to choose any reviewer from the suggested list.

In case, authors challenge the editor's negative decision with suitable arguments, the manuscript can be sent to one more reviewer and the final decision will be made based upon his/her recommendations.

Time taken from submission to publication depends on the time taken by author and reviewing team. With the high inflow of articles for journals, the reviewing process may be delayed little than normal time. You can read article history to understand the average processing time.

For any query, you can reach us via email, [email protected]

All the articles published in Biotica Journals are freely available without any registration, subscription, or payment. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author, as long as the original authors are properly cited.

Furthermore, the journal also allows the authors to self-archive the final accepted version of the articles on any Open Archives Initiative-compliant institutional/subject-based repository.

This is in accordance with the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition, which states;

"By 'open access to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself." [For Details Read: The Budapest Open Access Initiative]

Biotica Journals adopted a unique open-access model, which means that the published articles are funded by article processing charges paid at the time of acceptance. Author(s) retain the copyright of their work, with articles licensed to Biotica Journals.

All the published articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), full details of which can be found here.