microPublication journals adhere to the highest standards for publication ethics, transparency and data FAIRness. Specifically, microPublication Biology conforms to the Minimum Information Standards for scientific data reporting (MIBBI), follows the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), adheres — as far as possible given the novel publication platform– with recommendations in the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals and follows the FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reproducible) data principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016). microPublication Biology will use the deep curatorial expertise of these organizations to ensure that federal funding mandates for FAIR principles in data management are adhered to, aiding researchers in complying with their funding bodies in a trackable and persistent manner.
Open access license for microPublication Biology
Each microPublication is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.
Conflicts Of Interest
microPublication journals adhere to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines on conflicts of interest. Authors, reviewers and editors are required to declare any conflicts of interests that could be perceived as affecting the objectivity of presenting, reviewing or handling of the work.
Authorship
microPublication journals follow the authorship guidelines of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). All authors share responsibility for the content of the microPublication. Authorship should be limited to those persons that performed the experiment, any analysis, and or write-up. Individuals who do not satisfy authorship guidelines but participated materially in the work, should be included in the acknowledgement section. Submitting authors are required to assign authorship contributions using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CRediT) to provide transparency to the contributions of researchers to scholarly published work, to enable discoverability, and to improve attribution, credit, and accountability.
Individuals who do not satisfy authorship guidelines but participated materially in the work, should be included in the acknowledgement section.
The Principal Investigator (PI) of the laboratory in which the work was performed may or may not be included at the discretion of the PI; however this PI must approve the submission of the article and provide the details of any funding source.
Authors are required to accept the following conditions when submitting an article:
“I/we declare to the best of my/our knowledge that the experiment is reproducible; that the submission has been approved by all authors; that the submission has been approved by the laboratory’s Principal Investigator, and that the results have not been published elsewhere.* The author(s) declare no conflict of interest.”
*Note: We do not consider publication as an academic thesis, electronic preprint, or abstract as a prior publication.
Scientific misconduct
If microPublication journals receive an allegation of possible research or publication misconduct, affected individuals will be contacted for a response. microPublication journals follow the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) guidelines on scientific misconduct. microPublication journals reserve the right to (a) terminate the review process; (b) take the appropriate steps to correct the scientific record, which may include retraction of the article; and (c) contact employer, institution or funding agency/regulatory body to investigate.
At the time of submission, manuscripts are scanned with iThenticate, an anti-plagiarism software tool. If this software identifies plagiarized passages, the article will be declined and will not be considered further.
microPublication journals do not consider unintentional mistakes (e.g., incorrect author list, incorrect strain name, etc.) to be misconduct. In these cases, the change will be fixed and published as a Corrigendum.
Please address any concerns to Paul Sternberg, Editor in chief.
Funding agencies
The funding agency or source must be indicated in the appropriate submission field.
Data and reagents
It is the expectation that published data and reagents will be made freely available, in a timely manner, upon request. In addition, all data will be made available for reuse on public, open-access, community knowledgebases.
In the case of a microPublication providing results that support the scientific validity of a commercial commodity (e.g., engineered strain, apparatus, etc.), the article is indicated as a “Commodity validation”.
