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Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

Ethical Guidelines

Reporting Standards

Authors should ensure that all submitted manuscripts are written completely originally, truly, and accurately without any plagiarism.

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.

The journal 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 http://www.bulletin.cas.cn/zgkxyyk/ch/common_item.aspx?parent_id=20171220020752572&menu_id=20180320113019801.

Data & Source Access and Retention

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.

Ethics of Human/Animal Subjects

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 Guidelines, https://arriveguidelines.org/) for human and animal subjects respectively.

Authorship and Competing Interests

Authors should ensure that all the listed person(s) have made a substantial contribution to the manuscript with no doubt on the order.

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, that means the particular definitions of authorships are asked to offer.

Authors should recoinage 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.

The DECLARATION containing author contribution and competing interest, has to filed and uploaded. (http://www.bulletin.cas.cn/zgkxyyk/ch/common_item.aspx?parent_id=20171220020752572&menu_id=20180320113019801)

Copyright

All signed authors should contribute substantially to the research. All copyright owners should agree to sign a Copyright Transfer Agreement (The template could be downloaded at this link).

Fundamental Errors in Published Works

Authors should notify the journal editors or publisher promptly if there is a significant error in their publications is 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.

Retraction Guidelines of Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (BCAS) recognizes the importance of the suggestions and comments on publications from the authors themselves and audience. We believe that post-publication commentary is necessary to advance scientific communication and discourse. If there is any evidence to prove that a certain publication in BCAS has an important error or misconduct, BCAS would consider publishing corrigendum or erratum or taking action of retraction, it would usually lead to the publication of statement on BCAS website and the original article as well. Please contact for these scenarios.

BCAS would consider retracting a publication if:

  1. A plagiarism is identified;
  2. Multiple submissions are confirmed;
  3. Supporting data and source cited in the publications are not authorized for use;
  4. Ethics issues of human/animal subjects are raised;
  5. Authorship and competing interests are not in agreement;
  6. Copyright has been infringed or there is some other serious legal issue;
  7. Fundamental errors in publications are discovered;
  8. A compromised or manipulated peer review process are found, including editorial board members, editors, reviewers, and so on.

Duties of Editors

Handing Manuscripts in Editorial System

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 accept or reject, just send the decision to the authors directly through the Editorial System. If it is accept 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 version, 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.

Peer Review

Editors, Editorial Board Members, and peer reviewers should ensure the process of peer review is fair, unbiased, and timely.

The journal operates a double-blind review process, editors should avoid to select the Editorial Board Members with conflict of interest and Editorial Board Members should avoid to select the peer reviewers with conflict of interest into the peer review process, and consider the author’s request of avoiding specific peer reviewer to review the manuscript if it is deemed reasonable.

Publication Decision

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.

Editors 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.

Fair Play

Editors 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.

Confidentiality

Editors must protect the confidentiality of all submitted materials before publishing.

Editors must protect the personal information of authors, reviewers, readers, and develop new reviewers on a regular basis.

Editors must protect the confidentiality of all published records and communications of manuscript-related issues.

Competing Interests

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences does not charge any fees to authors or affiliations for review or for publish, it forbids editors from making an illegal deal on it.

Editors of Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences cannot submit papers to this journal.

Publishing

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences is an open access journal, all the articles online are freely available to the public.

Editors should upload the final version to the website of Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences 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

Peer Review

Reviewers should give objective, detailed, and clear comments to assist the editors in making a decision of the submissions.

The journal operates a double-blind review process, reviewers are not supposed to get information about the authors.

Confidentiality

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.

Competing Interests

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:

  1. The members are obligated to select proper peer reviewers for the manuscript based on their spec-ialty.
  2. The members should follow the recruitment criteria of Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences 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.
  3. The Editorial Board takes all necessary steps to maintain the accuracy and quality of the papers published in Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Sponsor’s or Publisher’s responsibilities:

  1. Bulletin of Chinese of Academic of Sciences is sponsored and published by Chinese Academy of Sciences. The requirements of sponsor and publisher for the journal 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.
  2. The publishing organization can not intervene in the decision-making power of editors.