Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)
Ethical Guidelines
Ethical Guidelines
For Authors
Authors should ensure that all submitted manuscripts in Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (BCAS) are written completely originally, truly, and accurately without any plagiarism or any other misconduct.
Authors should ensure that the submission has not been published previously or on the publishing process elsewhere in the same form, including in Chinese or in other languages.
BCAS operates a double-blind peer review process, while the authors are welcomed to suggest a recommended or avoided reviewers’ list during the submission.
Submissions should follow the required format. The template could be downloaded from the website.
Authors should ensure that all the supporting data and source that cited or analyzed in the manuscripts are required to provide the public access clearly. The temporary web links are suggested to put in the footnote, while the publications, open source, or something permanent are asked to list in the reference part.
The corresponding author(s) should ensure that all the participated person(s) were contained in the author list, and all the co-authors agree to publish it in this journal. Authors should ensure and be in agreement with who completed a certain part of this manuscript.
Authors should ensure that all the listed person(s) have made a substantial contribution to the manuscript with no doubt on the order. All copyright owners should agree to sign a Copyright Transfer Agreement (2023 Version of BCAS Notification on Submission and Publication for Authors—Copyright Transfer Agreement).
Authors should agree that some others who made efforts in a specific aspect of this manuscript are required to put in the acknowledgement.
Any financial support conducting this work should be stated in the manuscript.
BCAS adopts the strict policy against academic misconduct. Manuscripts will be rejected directly if any form of plagiarism or other misconduct is found.
Authors should ensure that any works involving the use of human or animal subjects are required a statement that proves all procedures were performed in compliance with relevant laws and institutional guidelines strictly by the appropriate committees. For example, authors should ensure that the experiments were in accordance with The Code of Ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki, https://www.wma.net) or the ARRIVE guidelines (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments, https://arriveguidelines.org/) for human and animal experiments respectively.
Authors should notify BCAS editors or publisher promptly if there is a significant error in their publications discovered or identified. Authors should also cooperate with the editors to correct the article and publish an erratum, corrigendum, or to retract the paper, where it is deemed necessary. It is the obligation of the authors to cooperate with editors and to provide requested documents.
Reviewing Requirements of Editorial Office
Editorial Office has the right to decide to accept or reject a submission independently, while such decision should not be based upon the private opinion of editors. Unless serious misconducts or mistakes arise, editors should not change the original decision to a manuscript.
Editorial Office should give entire, detailed, and clear revising suggestions for the manuscript to be accepted or to be revised. If the author disagrees with any changes made to the article, editors should give the author response to any complaints, and communicate comprehensively with authors to reach the agreement of changes.
Editorial Office should treat all manuscripts equally, such as a special issue or invited submission. All manuscripts should be considered and accepted solely based on their academic merit, without any other influence.
Editorial Office must protect the confidentiality of all submitted materials before publishing.
Editorial Office must protect the personal information of authors, reviewers, readers, and develop new reviewers on a regular basis.
Editorial Office must protect the confidentiality of all published records and communications of manuscript-related issues.
BCAS does not charge any fees to authors or affiliations for review or for publish, it is forbidden for editors to make any illegal deals.
Peer Review
Editors, editorial board members, and reviewers should ensure that the peer review process is fair, impartial, and timely.
BCAS adopts a double-blind review process, and editors should avoid selecting editorial board members who have a conflict of interest with the author to review the manuscript, and editorial board members should avoid selecting peer reviewers who have a conflict of interest with the author to enter the peer review process. At the same time, full consideration should be given to the author’s request if deemed reasonable, such as to avoid reviewing the manuscript by specific peer reviewers.
Duties of Editors
Editors should deal with the manuscripts through the Editorial System and follow the directions from the Editorial Board member during the whole process of peer review.
Editors should send the submission to the Editorial Board member at first for selecting peer reviewers. Then, send the submission to chosen reviewers for double blind peer review. After receiving the feedbacks from the reviewers, summarize the reviews and send them to the Editorial Board member to evaluate and make a decision (accept, accept with minor revision, rereview after major revision, reject).
The following steps depend on the Editorial Board member’s decision. If it is accepted or rejected, just send the decision to the authors directly through the Editorial System. If it is accepted with minor revision or rereview after major revision, then summarize the revision suggestions from the reviewers, and send back to the authors. When the authors finish the revision, send it to the Editorial Board member to decide whether accept it or send it to the reviewers. In the end, send the manuscript to be accepted to the Executive Editor-in-Chief for final decision.
Editors should preliminarily find the academic misconduct through CNKI and Wanfang sci-tech periodical academic misconduct checking system for the submissions in Chinese. Once the misconduct is confirmed, the handling of the submission should be terminated.
Editors of BCAS cannot submit papers to this journal.
BCAS is an open access journal, all the articles online are freely available to the public. Editors should upload the final version to the official websites timely, and upload the final version to the CNKI and Wanfang Data at the same time, for the convenience of fellow readers.
Duties of Reviewers
Reviewers should give objective, detailed, and clear comments to assist the editors in making a decision of the submissions.
BCAS operates a double-blind review process, reviewers are not supposed to get information about the authors.
Reviewers must not share and disclose the manuscripts with anyone else, except the editors.
Reviewers must keep all reviewed materials confidential and not use for personal advantage.
Reviewers should be aware of any potential conflict of interest, such as financial, institutional, and other relationships. If there is anything that might lead to bias or a conflict of interest, please notify the editors and refuse to review the manuscript.
Reviewers should alter the editors without retaining or copying the manuscripts.
Editorial Board Members’ Responsibilities
The members are obligated to select proper peer reviewers for the manuscript based on their specialty.
The members should follow the recruitment criteria of BCAS to decide should the submission be accepted, accepted with minor revision, reviewed after major revision, or rejected without revision. The decision should be clear and rational.
The Editorial Board takes all necessary steps to maintain the accuracy and quality of the papers published in BCAS.
Sponsor’s or Publisher’s Responsibilities
BCAS is sponsored and published by Chinese Academy of Sciences. The requirements of sponsor and publisher for BCAS are obeying the academic publishing ethics standard, publishing the accurate, timely, fair, and ethical publication of scientific papers, and improving communication in the scientific community. The publishing organization can not intervene in the decision-making power of editors.