Editorial Policy

Purpose and editorial standards

The EuroBiotech Journal (EBTJ) is committed to the integrity, transparency, independence, and reliability of scholarly publishing. Editorial policies are informed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) Core Practices, the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing developed by COPE, DOAJ, OASPA, and WAME, and internationally recognized research-ethics guidance relevant to the manuscript under consideration.

Editorial independence

Editorial decisions are based on scholarly merit, relevance to the journal's scope, methodological and reporting quality, ethical compliance, and the outcome of peer review. Decisions are not influenced by the nationality, ethnicity, race, sex, gender, religion, political beliefs, institutional affiliation, commercial relationships, personal status, or other irrelevant characteristics of authors. Advertising, sponsorship, special-issue arrangements, reprint activity, institutional relationships, or other revenue considerations must not influence editorial decisions.

Editorial decision-making

The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for the final editorial decision. For peer-reviewed manuscripts, the decision is based on the recommendations and scientific concerns raised by independent reviewers together with the journal's editorial and ethical requirements. The Editor-in-Chief follows the substantive outcome of peer review. When reviewer recommendations materially conflict, additional independent review is obtained before the final decision is issued. Editors may reject a manuscript without external review when it clearly falls outside scope or fails minimum scientific, reporting, or ethical requirements.

Authorship and contributorship

Authorship must reflect genuine intellectual contribution and accountability. For biomedical and life-science manuscripts, the journal uses the ICMJE authorship criteria as its principal reference: authors should have made a substantial contribution to the conception or design of the work, or to acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; participated in drafting or critical intellectual revision; approved the final version; and agreed to be accountable for the integrity of the work. Individuals who contribute but do not meet authorship criteria should be acknowledged with their contribution described. Gift, guest, honorary, and ghost authorship are not acceptable. The journal may request a contributorship statement, including use of the CRediT taxonomy where appropriate.

Changes to authorship

Requests to add, remove, or reorder authors after submission must be explained and must be supported by the written agreement of all affected authors. The journal may request institutional clarification when an authorship dispute cannot be resolved by the authors. Editors do not arbitrate disputes that require factual investigation by an institution. Post-publication authorship changes, when justified, are made transparently through a correction or other appropriate notice.

Originality, plagiarism, and overlapping publication

Submitted work must be original and must not be under simultaneous consideration by another journal. Authors must cite and clearly identify material derived from other sources. Plagiarism, self-plagiarism that results in misleading redundant publication, duplicate submission, inappropriate text recycling, citation manipulation, and undisclosed substantial overlap are not acceptable. Manuscripts may be screened using text-similarity tools, but automated similarity results are interpreted by Editors and are not used as the sole basis for an allegation or decision.

Allegations of research and publication misconduct

The journal takes allegations of fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, image or data manipulation, peer-review manipulation, authorship manipulation, citation manipulation, undisclosed conflicts, unethical research, or other serious misconduct seriously whether concerns arise before or after publication. The journal follows COPE guidance or an equivalent recognized process. Depending on the circumstances, the Editors may request explanations, original data or documentation, suspend editorial processing, reject the submission, contact the authors' institution or funder, publish a correction or expression of concern, or retract an article. The journal will not make unsupported public accusations and will preserve confidentiality as far as is compatible with a fair investigation and the protection of the scholarly record.

Conflicts of interest and competing interests

Authors must declare all financial and non-financial relationships or activities that could reasonably be perceived to influence the work. A competing-interest statement must be included whether a conflict exists or not. Reviewers must disclose conflicts before accepting a review and should decline when impartiality may be compromised. Editors must recuse themselves from manuscripts in which they have a competing interest. If a conflict is discovered after publication, the journal will assess whether a correction, disclosure, expression of concern, or other action is required.

Ethical oversight - research involving human participants

Research involving human participants, identifiable human material, or identifiable human data must have been conducted in accordance with applicable laws and ethical standards. Manuscripts must identify the approving research ethics committee/Institutional Review Board, provide the approval or reference number where available, and state how informed consent was obtained or why a lawful waiver applied. Medical research involving human participants should be consistent with the current World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki. Editors may request ethics documentation when necessary.

Consent to publication and privacy

Case reports, images, pedigrees, genomic information, or other material that could identify an individual require appropriate consent for publication unless there is a clear lawful and ethical basis for publication without consent. Direct identifiers should be removed unless scientifically necessary and explicitly consented to. Authors must take particular care with vulnerable populations and sensitive health or genetic data. Consent for participation in research does not automatically constitute consent to publish identifiable information.

Animal research

Research involving animals must have received approval from the appropriate institutional or national ethics/animal-care body where required and must comply with applicable welfare legislation and accepted standards for humane research. The manuscript should identify the approving body and relevant approval number where available. Authors should follow the ARRIVE 2.0 reporting guidelines for in vivo animal research where applicable.

Clinical trials and reporting standards

Clinical trials should be registered in an appropriate publicly accessible trial registry in accordance with recognized international standards. The registration identifier should be reported in the manuscript. Authors are expected to use appropriate reporting guidelines for the study design, such as CONSORT, PRISMA, STROBE, CARE, ARRIVE, or other discipline-specific guidance where applicable, so that the research can be assessed and reproduced.

Data sharing and reproducibility

Original research manuscripts should include a Data Availability Statement describing where the data supporting the findings can be found. When ethical, legal, privacy, confidentiality, contractual, or participant-consent restrictions prevent public sharing, the statement must explain the restriction and, where possible, describe how qualified researchers may request access. Authors are encouraged to deposit data, code, protocols, and other research materials in trusted repositories and to provide persistent identifiers or accession numbers. Editors and reviewers may request underlying data or documentation when needed to evaluate the integrity of the work.

Intellectual property and preprints

Copyright and licensing are governed by the journal's Copyright, Open Access and Licensing Policy. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission for third-party copyrighted material. Posting a manuscript on a recognized preprint server before journal submission does not, by itself, constitute prior publication and does not preclude consideration by EBTJ, provided the preprint is disclosed during submission and any later Version of Record is linked appropriately. A manuscript that has already been formally published as a journal article, or that substantially duplicates a previously published article without transparent justification, will not be considered as an original publication.

Complaints

Complaints about journal procedures, editorial conduct, peer review, ethical handling, or other matters should be submitted with sufficient detail to contact@eurobiotech.eu. The editorial office may also be contacted at editorialoffice@eurobiotechjournal.org. Complaints are handled fairly, confidentially where appropriate, and by a person who is not directly implicated in the matter whenever reasonably possible. Where a complaint concerns the Editor-in-Chief, it should be referred to an independent senior editor or an appropriate representative of the journal owner/publisher.

Appeals against editorial decisions

An author may submit one reasoned appeal within 30 days of the editorial decision when the author believes that a material factual, scientific, ethical, or procedural error affected the outcome. The appeal must identify the manuscript, the decision being challenged, and the specific grounds for reconsideration. Disagreement with reviewer judgment alone is not normally sufficient. The appeal will be assessed by an editor who was not the sole decision-maker in the disputed matter, where practicable. An appeal may be declined, the original decision may be upheld, or additional editorial or peer review may be arranged. The outcome of the appeal is final within the journal's internal process unless new evidence raises a separate integrity concern.

Post-publication discussion, corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions

Readers and authors may raise post-publication scientific or ethical concerns by writing to contact@eurobiotech.eu or editorialoffice@eurobiotechjournal.org. Substantive scholarly comments may be considered for publication as correspondence or may be addressed through an author response or editorial notice. Errors that materially affect the record but do not invalidate the main conclusions may be corrected. Serious unresolved concerns may require an Expression of Concern. Articles may be retracted when findings are unreliable because of major error or misconduct, when publication is redundant without justification, when unethical research is established, or in other circumstances consistent with COPE guidance. Retraction and correction notices must be linked clearly to the affected article, state the reason as transparently as legally and ethically possible, and preserve the integrity of the publication record. Articles are not silently altered after publication.

Use of generative AI and automated tools

Authors must disclose substantive use of generative AI or other automated content-generation tools in the preparation of a manuscript beyond routine spelling, grammar, language correction, or formatting assistance. AI tools cannot be listed as authors because they cannot take responsibility for the work, approve the final version, manage conflicts of interest, or be accountable for research integrity. Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality, citations, data interpretation, images, and all other content produced with AI assistance. Generative AI should not be cited as an authoritative source. Reviewers and Editors must not upload confidential manuscripts or related files to public or third-party generative AI systems and must not use generative AI to generate substantive peer-review reports or editorial decisions. Any automated integrity or similarity tools used by the journal are subject to human oversight; automated output is not treated as conclusive evidence of misconduct.

Special issues, supplements, and conference-related content

Special-issue research articles are subject to the same peer-review and ethical standards as regular articles. Guest Editors must disclose conflicts of interest, recuse themselves when necessary, and operate under the journal's editorial oversight. The Editor-in-Chief retains responsibility for final editorial standards. Conference abstracts, programs, and other congress materials may follow a scientific-selection process different from full journal peer review; when published, these items must be clearly identified as conference material and must not be described as fully peer-reviewed research articles unless the complete journal peer-review process was applied.

Editorial confidentiality

Editors and journal staff must keep submitted manuscripts and associated correspondence confidential and may disclose information only to persons who need it for legitimate editorial, peer-review, production, ethics, or legal purposes. Unpublished information must not be used for personal research or advantage without the author's explicit permission.

Fees and commercial independence

The EuroBiotech Journal does not currently charge article processing charges (APCs) or submission fees, and no author fee is charged for peer review. The existence or absence of any commercial relationship, sponsorship, society relationship, or other funding source has no role in the acceptance or rejection of a manuscript.

Recommended cross-reference at the end of the Editorial Policy page: "For detailed responsibilities of Editors, Reviewers, Authors, and the Publisher, and for the journal's publication-malpractice procedures, see the Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement."

Referenced standards and direct links

- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - Guide to Applying: https://doaj.org/apply/guide/

- COPE/DOAJ/OASPA/WAME - Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing: https://doaj.org/apply/transparency/

- DOAJ - Licensing and Copyright: https://doaj.org/apply/copyright-and-licensing/

- Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) - Core Practices: https://publicationethics.org/core-practices

- World Medical Association - Declaration of Helsinki: https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/

- ICMJE - Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals: https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/

- ARRIVE Guidelines 2.0: https://arriveguidelines.org/arrive-guidelines

- Creative Commons - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement

For all parties involved in publishing with The EuroBiotech Journal - authors, reviewers, Editors, Editorial Board members, and the publisher - integrity, transparency, fairness, accountability, and respect for the scholarly record are essential. This statement is informed by the COPE Core Practices and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing developed by COPE, DOAJ, OASPA, and WAME. Research involving human participants should also follow applicable law and the current World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki; animal research should follow applicable welfare requirements and relevant reporting standards such as ARRIVE 2.0.

Responsibilities of Editors

- Accountability: Editors are responsible for the integrity of editorial decisions and for maintaining a reliable scholarly record. Decisions should be based on scientific merit, relevance, ethical compliance, and peer review.

- Fairness and non-discrimination: Manuscripts are evaluated without regard to irrelevant personal or institutional characteristics of authors.

- Confidentiality: Editors and staff must not disclose confidential manuscript information except to persons involved in legitimate editorial, peer-review, ethics, production, or legal processes.

- Conflicts of interest: Editors must recuse themselves when a personal, financial, professional, institutional, competitive, or collaborative relationship could compromise impartiality. Another qualified editor should handle the manuscript.

- Editorial independence: Commercial income, sponsorship, advertising, reprint considerations, society relationships, or other business interests must not influence editorial decisions.

- Peer-review integrity: Editors select independent reviewers, protect reviewer confidentiality under the double-anonymized model, assess reviewer conflicts, and seek additional review when reports materially conflict.

- Corrections and investigations: Editors must respond appropriately to credible allegations and correct the literature through corrections, expressions of concern, or retractions when warranted.

- Editor-authored submissions: An Editor who is an author of a submission must be fully excluded from reviewer selection and decision-making for that manuscript.

Responsibilities of Reviewers

- Contribution to editorial decisions: Reviews should provide an expert, evidence-based assessment that helps the Editor evaluate the manuscript and helps authors improve their work.

- Promptness: A reviewer who cannot provide a competent and timely review should decline promptly so another expert can be invited.

- Confidentiality: Manuscripts and related files are confidential and may not be shared, copied, or used for personal advantage.

- Objectivity and professional conduct: Reviews must be constructive, specific, respectful, and supported by scientific reasoning. Personal criticism is unacceptable.

- Acknowledgement of sources: Reviewers should identify important relevant work that may have been omitted and should alert Editors to substantial overlap, plagiarism, or other integrity concerns of which they become aware.

- Conflicts of interest: Reviewers must disclose relevant conflicts and decline the review when impartiality may be compromised.

- AI confidentiality: Reviewers must not upload manuscript content to public or third-party generative AI systems and must not delegate the substantive review to AI.

Responsibilities of Authors

- Accurate reporting: Authors must present methods, data, analyses, limitations, and conclusions honestly and in sufficient detail to permit appropriate evaluation and, where feasible, reproducibility.

- Originality and plagiarism: Authors must submit original work, quote or cite sources appropriately, and avoid plagiarism, misleading text recycling, citation manipulation, or unattributed reuse.

- Multiple or concurrent publication: The same manuscript must not be submitted simultaneously to more than one journal. Redundant or overlapping publication must be disclosed and scientifically justified where legitimate.

- Authorship and contributorship: Authorship must be limited to individuals who meet accepted contribution and accountability criteria. Gift, guest, honorary, and ghost authorship are prohibited. All authors must approve the final manuscript and its submission.

- Competing interests: Authors must disclose financial and non-financial competing interests and all relevant sources of research support.

- Ethical approval and consent: Authors must provide appropriate ethics approval, informed-consent, consent-to-publication, and animal-welfare information when applicable.

- Data integrity and availability: Authors must preserve research records, avoid fabrication or falsification, provide a Data Availability Statement for original research, and cooperate with reasonable requests for underlying data or documentation.

- Fundamental errors: Authors who discover a significant error after publication must inform the journal promptly and cooperate with correction, retraction, or other necessary action.

- AI use: Authors must disclose substantive generative-AI assistance, must not list AI as an author, and remain fully accountable for all submitted content.

Research misconduct and integrity concerns

- The journal treats fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, manipulated or misrepresented images/data, peer-review manipulation, citation manipulation, duplicate submission, authorship manipulation, undisclosed conflicts, unethical research, and other serious breaches as potential misconduct.

- Concerns may be raised by reviewers, readers, whistleblowers, Editors, institutions, publishers, or automated screening systems. Automated alerts are reviewed by a human Editor and are not treated as conclusive evidence by themselves.

- The journal follows COPE guidance or an equivalent recognized process. Authors may be asked for explanations, ethics documentation, raw data, original images, protocols, or other records relevant to the concern.

- Where institutional investigation is required, the journal may contact the relevant institution, employer, ethics body, or funder. The journal's role is to protect the integrity of the published record; it does not replace formal institutional investigation.

- Possible outcomes include continuation of review, request for correction, rejection, withdrawal, correction after publication, Expression of Concern, retraction, or other action proportionate to the evidence and consistent with recognized guidance.

Ethical oversight

- Human research: Manuscripts must identify ethics committee/IRB approval and informed consent or a legitimate waiver. Relevant human research should follow the current Declaration of Helsinki and applicable law.

- Privacy and consent to publication: Identifiable personal information, case details, photographs, pedigrees, or genomic information require appropriate publication consent unless a clearly justified lawful exception applies. Identifiers should be minimized.

- Vulnerable participants: Authors and Editors must take additional care when research involves vulnerable populations or sensitive health/genetic information.

- Animal research: Authors must report the approving animal-care/ethics body and comply with applicable welfare requirements. ARRIVE 2.0 should be used for in vivo animal reporting where applicable.

- Hazardous procedures and biosafety: Authors must describe significant hazards and confirm compliance with relevant institutional and legal biosafety requirements where applicable.

Data sharing and reproducibility

- Original research should contain sufficient methodological detail to allow readers to understand and assess how the study was conducted.

- A Data Availability Statement should identify where supporting data are available. Trusted repositories and persistent identifiers are encouraged.

- When data cannot be publicly shared because of privacy, consent, ethical, legal, security, contractual, or other legitimate restrictions, the restriction and any lawful access route should be stated.

- Where relevant, authors are encouraged to share code, protocols, analysis scripts, and other research materials necessary to evaluate or reproduce the work.

- Editors or reviewers may request supporting records during evaluation or in response to a post-publication concern.

Intellectual property, originality, and prior publication

- Copyright and reuse are governed by the journal's Copyright, Open Access and Licensing Policy.

- Authors are responsible for securing permissions for third-party content and for clearly identifying material not covered by the article licence.

- Plagiarism and unjustified duplicate or redundant publication are prohibited.

- A disclosed preprint on a recognized preprint server is not treated as formal prior journal publication and does not, by itself, prevent consideration by EBTJ.

- The applicable Creative Commons licence and copyright holder must be displayed clearly for published articles. Historical articles remain subject to the licence applied to the individual article at the time of publication.

Complaints and appeals

- Complaints about editorial conduct, journal procedure, ethical handling, or peer review should be sent to contact@eurobiotech.eu. The editorial office may also be reached at editorialoffice@eurobiotechjournal.org.

- Complaints should identify the relevant manuscript/article and describe the concern and supporting evidence as clearly as possible.

- Where a complaint concerns a person who would normally handle it, an independent senior editor or appropriate representative of the journal owner/publisher should take responsibility for the review.

- Authors may submit one reasoned appeal against an editorial decision within 30 days when they believe a material factual, scientific, ethical, or procedural error affected the decision.

- An appeal must explain the specific grounds for reconsideration. The journal may uphold the decision, seek an additional editorial or peer-review opinion, or revise the decision when justified. A rejected appeal does not prevent the journal from acting on genuinely new evidence of research-integrity concern.

Post-publication discussion and record correction

- Readers are encouraged to report substantive scientific or ethical concerns to the journal. Appropriate scholarly comments may be considered as correspondence or addressed through an author response or editorial notice.

- Corrections are issued when an error affects the accuracy or interpretation of the record but does not invalidate the article as a whole.

- An Expression of Concern may be issued while a serious unresolved concern is being investigated or when available evidence is inconclusive but readers should be alerted.

- Retraction is considered when findings are unreliable because of major error or misconduct, when serious ethical violations are established, when the publication is redundant without justification, or when other circumstances recognized by COPE warrant retraction.

- Correction, Expression of Concern, and retraction notices should be freely accessible, linked to the affected article, and explain the reason as transparently as law, privacy, fairness, and due process allow. Published articles are not silently altered.

Artificial intelligence and automated tools

- AI systems and automated tools cannot be authors or co-authors.

- Authors must disclose substantive generative-AI use in manuscript preparation beyond routine spelling, grammar, language correction, or formatting assistance, and must explain how the tool was used in an appropriate section of the submission.

- Authors remain responsible for verifying factual accuracy, citations, originality, analyses, images, and all other content produced with AI assistance. Generative AI is not an authoritative scholarly source and should not be cited as such.

- Reviewers and Editors must not upload confidential submissions to public or third-party generative-AI services and must not use generative AI to create substantive reviews or editorial decisions.

- Automated similarity, image-integrity, or other screening tools used by the journal are subject to human oversight. Their results are indicators for editorial evaluation, not automatic findings of misconduct.

Publisher and journal-owner responsibilities

- The publisher and journal owner support the Editors in maintaining editorial independence and publication integrity.

- In cases of alleged or proven scientific or publication misconduct, the publisher/journal owner cooperates with the Editors to clarify the record and to publish appropriate corrections, Expressions of Concern, or retractions.

- Commercial considerations must not override editorial or ethical standards.

- The publisher should maintain clear, accessible, and internally consistent journal information concerning peer review, copyright, licensing, fees, editorial policies, and publication ethics.

- The publisher should preserve the Version of Record and ensure that corrections and retractions remain linked clearly to the affected publication.

Referenced standards and direct links

- Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - Guide to Applying: https://doaj.org/apply/guide/

- COPE/DOAJ/OASPA/WAME - Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing: https://doaj.org/apply/transparency/

- DOAJ - Licensing and Copyright: https://doaj.org/apply/copyright-and-licensing/

- Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) - Core Practices: https://publicationethics.org/core-practices

- World Medical Association - Declaration of Helsinki: https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/

- ICMJE - Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals: https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/

- ARRIVE Guidelines 2.0: https://arriveguidelines.org/arrive-guidelines

- Creative Commons - CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

The EuroBiotech Journal

EBTJ

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Volume 10 (2026)

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