- Editorial ethic principles
- Mode and formats for submission
- Access to raw data
- Prohibitions
- Peer reviewing, revisions, and revised submission; appeals
- Preparation to publication
- Preprinting
- Plagiarism, self-plagiarism
- Authorship
- Ethics policy and copyright
- Structure
- Peer Reviewer Instructions
- Ethical principles of peer reviewing
- Сonflict of interest
The Agricultural Biology is guided by the principles of the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) and the Declaration of the Russian Association of Science Editors and Publishers (ANRI) on ethical principles of scientific publications.
Mode and formats for submission
A manuscript may be submitted directly, contributed by a member of the Russian Academy of Science or other national academy of science, or a member of the Editorial Board (subject to its matter is within the member's area of expertise), or written at the invitation of the Editorial Board.
Manuscripts must be sent with a cover letter and the authors’ guarantee (both signed and scanned to pdf files) to felami@mail.ru as Microsoft World *.doc or *.rtf files (A4 format, 14 Times New Roman, double line spacing, 2 cm top edge, 2 cm bottom edge, 3 cm right edge, 1.5 cm left edge, hyphenation is allowed) for texts, tables, figure legends, simple black-and-white diagrams, schemes and graphics, and as *.tiff (CMYC only), *.jpg (CMYC only) or *.cdr files (CMYC only) for color pictures and photographs (1200 dpi is needed for all line art, 600 dpi for images that combine line art with photographs/halftones, and 300 dpi for color or grayscale photographic images). A format of manuscript must meet the AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY standards which are the same as general standards for academic world publications; otherwise the manuscripts are declined without additional review. Manuscripts rejected by one member of the Editorial Board can not be resubmitted through another member or as a direct submission.
The editors reserve the right to request original (raw) research data from the Authors, including for providing reviewers and editors. Authors should be ready to keep this information for an adequate period of time and to provide it to the editorial staff (according to the ALPSP-STM Statement on Data and Databases).
Double publishing and submission of the manuscript published earlier in the AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY or any other scientific journal are prohibited. Related manuscripts that are in press or submitted elsewhere must be included with an AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY submission. The authors must guarantee that in their manuscript the original data make at least 90-95 %. The Editorial Board has the right to control this parameter and to reject the manuscripts if they do not meet the features of original publication. The authors must also guarantee that the AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY has a non-exclusive right to use this article; if a paper is declined for publication, the guarantee will be terminated
Peer reviewing, revisions, and revised submission; appeals
All manuscripts not declined on receiving and met formal standards undergo a single-blindinternal reviewing by the members and chairmen of the Editorial Boards, as well as reviewing by the independent invited experts, qualified to handle the paper, each from a different scientific institutions in the profile and not from the authors' institutions. A single negative review, with which the editor agrees, is sufficient to recommend rejection. If the manuscript is subject to rejection, a notification will be sent to the author (an anonymous copy of the review attached). In case the review is positive and the manuscript accepted, an anonymous copy of the review may be sent at the author’s request.
In case the revisions are necessary prior to final decision, the reviewers’ comments are sent to the author. Revised papers must be received within 2 months or they will be treated as new submissions. In case a revised manuscript is not received,it will be rejected. Timely received revised manuscripts, with the author's responses for each round of review, should be sent for re-evaluation to the same reviewers to ensure that their concerns have been adequately considered. If after all revisions (three ones at most, each to be accomplished within 2 months) the reviewers’ and the Editorial Board’s remarks are not taken into account and the manuscript is not finalized, it will be rejected. In total, from 30 to 40 % of the manuscripts are declined at different steps of receiving, reviewing and revision, so we do ask the authors to be wise and pay enough attention to standards of the AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY and the reviewers’ comments. The date when the last revised and positively reviewed version of a manuscript was received is considered to be the date when the manuscript was accepted.
Please consider the following when preparing revised submissions. Revised manuscripts must be sent to felami@mail.ru (see above in detail). The cover letter should include a point-by-point response to the remarks of the reviewers and editor. A detailed description of all changes made is required to allow the editorial officer to process the revision. Once a revision is submitted to the editorial office, all files are considered as final ones.
Appeals of decisions on rejected papers will be considered if made in written and contain the motivated objections. If appeal is rejected, further appeals of the decision will not be considered and the paper may not be resubmitted. If appeal is accepted, the manuscript will be treated as a new submission and sent to other independent peer-reviewers.
Throughout the review process, all correspondence must be handled by the AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY officer; authors are not permitted to contact reviewers directly. The name of a reviewer is to remain anonymous to the author until a reviewer confirms the willingness to be disclosed to the author or to contact him directly.
In case an article falls into an area without broad representation, or for research that may be considered counter to a prevailing view or too far ahead of its time to receive a fair evaluation, an author may ask a member of the Russian Academy of Science or other national academies to oversee the review process (subject to the confirmation of the member’s willingness to comment on the importance of the work). Nevertheless, the Editorial Board cannot guarantee that member to be sent the manuscript for reviewing. If the Editorial Board decides to reject the paper without review or selects another member to handle the manuscript, the member designated by the author will be notified.
A member of the Russian Academy of Science or other national academies may contribute manuscripts, including the own ones, for publication. For an article contributed, the subject matter must be within the member's area of expertise, the member must affirm a direct role in the design and execution of all or a significant fraction of the work, and the manuscript must be accompanied with the member's brief statement endorsing publication in the AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY. The Editorial Board has the right to reject these manuscripts if they not meet the standards of the journal.
All accepted manuscripts undergo the professional editing by the Agricultural Biology experts and editors before publication to bring the article benefit due to more wide comprehensibility and accuracy, and to prepare for production purposes. The procedure includes adjustments concerning structure and formatting requirements, terminology verification, improving the tables and figure arrangement, corrections of inscriptions and explications to the figures, adding information necessary to secure a scientific convincingness and comprehensibility of the article to a broad scientific audience, as well as necessary lexical and grammatical corrections, etc. Prepared versions will be sent to the authors, who must check the corrections, make necessary changes, answer the editor’s questions and return proofs to the editor. If necessary, the procedure can be repeated until the manuscript will meet the AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY standards. To allow the editor to process the proofs, a detailed color marking and notices for all changes made in the text and illustrations are required. Authors who return proofs quickly and keep changes to a minimum necessary to omit the misunderstanding or errors in essence get maximum publication speed.
According to the AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY editorial policy, a goal to provide for a free scientific exchange is prevailing.
A preprint may be used by an author to discuss his or her results within an expert community or to popularize the accomplishments, methods, and motivations of science. It is not considered a publication if it has not yet been formally validated by review, attributed to any periodical (in print or online), appeared in sufficient detail and with a fixed content, publicly accessible and replicable. An oral or poster presentation of work at a conference or/and printing in the proceedings of the conference or meeting summaries are analogous to a preprint.
Please note, that because a preprint is not a publication, it does not guarantee a priority, and a prior publication should be followed by an ultimate publication in a journal.
Plagiarism in science and scientific publications is unethical behavior of taking someone else's work or ideas without proper references to the source or the rightholder and passing them off as own and original.
Based on the algorithms developed by COPE, the types of plagiarism are
– using other people's hypotheses, data, ideas, conclusions without proper citation,
– publication of other author paper under own name (in the original language or in translation)
– literal copying of significant fragments of other people's works, including those proper cited,
– self-plagiarism.
Self-plagiarism cases are
– use of text fragments and/or illustrations from other own publications without proper citation,
– high percent of re-used data and literal copying of significant fragments of own publications, including those included in references of the paper,
– use of text fragments and/or illustrations from own publications without proper citation and consent of co-authors,
– use of illustrations and photos without proper citation,
– proper cited but excessive references to own works, including those published with co-authors,
– cloned (duplicate) publications and/or scattering, when the work is published repeatedly or simultaneously sent to different journals,
– segmented (slice) salami publication, when the data are artificially divided between papers, reducing scientific level and/or leading to significant percent of duplications.
Plagiarism can lead to retraction of published article. For this purpose, the retracion is reported in print and the paper is subject to publicly marking as revoked, invalid and therefore not sutable for indexing and citing.
The authors of the publication can be only those persons who have made a significant contribution to the concept of work, the development, implementation and/or interpretation of the results of the research, as well as the writing of the manuscript including scientific and stylistic editing in accordance with the requirements of the journal).
All work should be free of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. Figures or tables that have been published elsewhere must be identified, and permission of the copyright holder for both the print and the online editions of the journals must be provided. Cases of deliberate misrepresentation of data will result in rejection of the paper.
Authorship must be limited to those who have contributed substantially to the work. The author(s) are allowed to hold the copyright without restrictions. After publishing in the Agricultural Biology, the article citation is only possible with reference to the Agricultural Biology. Placing the article or fragments thereof in other publications is possible but only by agreement with and referring to the journal Agricultural Biology.
The corresponding author must have obtained permission from all authors for the submission of each version of the paper and for any change in authorship. Authors must indicate their specific contributions to the published work (for example, who designed research, performed research, contributed new reagents or analytic tools, analyzed data, wrote the paper, etc.). Authors must acknowledge all funding sources supporting the work and recent collaborators.
Authors and reviewers must notify the editor if a manuscript reports potential dual use research of concern, and the editor, if necessary, will consult additional reviewers.
All experiments with animals must be conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki.
Authors must guarantee that research using recombinant DNA and GMO are in concordance with the national legislation of the country in which the research was executed.
To allow others to replicate the work published in the AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY, authors must make materials, data, and associated protocols available to readers. Authors are encouraged to deposit as much of their data as possible in publicly accessible databases. Authors must make unique materials (i.e. cloned DNAs; antibodies; bacterial, animal, or plant cells; viruses) promptly available on request by qualified researchers for their own use.
Authors are encouraged to deposit plasmid constructs in a public repository. Authors must deposit large datasets (including microarray data, genomic, proteomic, or other high-throughput data, protein or nucleic acid sequences, and atomic coordinates for macromolecular structures) in an approved database (NCBI, etc.) and provide an accession number for inclusion in the published paper.
No specific feature within an image may be enhanced, obscured, moved, removed, or introduced. Adjustments of brightness, contrast, or color balance are acceptable if they are applied to the whole image and if they do not obscure, eliminate, or misrepresent any information present in the original, including backgrounds. The print version of the paper must stand on its own illustrations. Some additional data after reviewing may be posted on the AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY Web site along with print publication and cannot be altered by authors after acceptance. A part of the submitted data could be more suitably presented online only to save journal space and to focus the article.
Corrections for errors, made by the journal or authors, of a scientific nature that do not alter the overall basic results and/or conclusions may be printed as notices at the discretion of the editors.
For all research manuscripts sent to the AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY, the following order of sections is required: title; authors affiliations (with a corresponding author indicated); abstract with a significance statement (250-300 words comprising all section of the article); keywords; preamble summarizing modern state of the problem investigated; a goal of the work; materials and methods; a mode of applied statistical treatment; results and discussion; conclusion, acknowledgments (dedications are rarely allowed); references; figure legends. In non-experimental articles variations to this format are allowed, provided the authors present information clearly and concisely. All manuscript pages must be numerated starting with the title page as page 1.
The title should be comprehensible to a broad scientific audience and correspond with the goal of the work and the conclusions made in. Statements of novelty and priority are discouraged. Author affiliation includes department/institution complete address, with the ZIP/postal code, and e-mail for each author. Use superscripts to match authors with institutions. Also the name of the author to whom correspondence and proofs should be sent, as well as his or her complete address, phone number and e-mail must be included. Mailing and e-mail addresses will appear in print and online.
Abstract should explain the significance of the work and major contributions of the article. It must include a brief description of the experiments executed and data obtained, as well as the background of the study.
In text, statements of novelty and priority are not permitted. Please describe procedures in sufficient detail so that the work can be repeated. Avoid laboratory jargon. For field experiments, pot trails, farm trails, time and place when and where the examinations were conducted must be identified. Use international standards on nomenclature. Prior to submission, consult Genecards, or MGI Nomenclature page, or HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee, or equivalent resources to ensure standardized nomenclature is used for species-specific gene and protein names. For proposed gene names that are not already approved, please submit the gene symbols to the appropriate nomenclature committee as they must be deposited and approved before publication of the article. Use Le Système International d’Unités for physical units and symbols whenever possible. Correct chemical names should be given (International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, IUPAC), taxonomic positions of plants, animals, strains of microorganisms and viruses (International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants; Saint-Louis Code (2000); Vienna Code (2006); International Code of the Zoological Nomenclature (2012); International Code of Nomenclature of Bacteria (1990); The International Code of Virus Classification and Nomenclature (2016); International code of nomenclature for cultivated plants in: Scripta Horticulturae, International Society for Horticultural Science (ISHS), 2009, Vol. 151; Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (2009) An update of the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group classification for the orders and families of flowering plants: APG III // Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society. — London, 2009. — Vol. 161. — № 2. — С. 105—121. — DOI:10.1111/j.1095-8339.2009.00996.x), correct variety and breed names should be specified. Devices and instruments (models specified), and reagents should be identified by trade mark, if any, and the manufacturing company (an initial capital letter with the remainder of the name lowercase) with a headquarters residence indicated. All abbreviations used must be explained.
References must be in the AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY style. Only published or in-press papers and books may be cited in the reference list. Unpublished abstracts of papers presented at meetings or references to «data not shown» are not permitted. References should be cited in numerical order as they appear in text. The full title and all authors should be named for each cited article. Please provide inclusive page ranges for journal articles and book chapters. Database may be cited in the text or as a reference. Please note that only links to Web sites that are permanent public repositories, such as self-perpetuating online resources funded by government, academia, and industry, are permitted. Links to an author's personal Web page are not acceptable.
Journal articles are cited as follows (for journal titles, use abbreviations approved by MEDLINE/PubMed/WoS and/or specified by journals as "cite as", or give the full journal titles):
1. Bourgeois L.A., Rinderer T.E., Beaman L.D., Danka R.G. Genetic detection and quantification of Nosema apis and N. ceranae in the honey bee. Appl. Environ. Microbiol., 2005, 71(1): 436-441.
2. Hammer I., Harper D.A.T., Ryan P.D. PAST: Paleontological statistics software package for education and data analysis. Palaeontologia Electronica, 2001, 4(1): 9 (http://palaeoelectronica.org/2001_1/past/issue1_01.htm).
Articles or chapters in books are cited as follows:
3. Shivaprasad H.L. Hepatitis splenomegaly syndrome. In: Diseases of poultry /Y.M. Saif, H.J. Barnes, J.R. Glisson, A.M. Fadly, L.R. McDougald, D.E. Swayne (eds.). Ames, Iowa State Press, 2003: 1186-1188.
Proceedings are cited as follows:
4.Bar-Hen A., Charcosset A. Relationship between molecular and morphological distances in a maize inbred lines collection: Application for breeders’ right protection. Proc. 9th Meeting of the Eucarpia Section Biometrics in Plant Breeding «Biometrics in Plant Breeding: Application of Molecular Markers» /J.W. Van Oijen, J. Jansen (eds.). Berlin, Springer-Verlag, 1994: 57-66.
To cite our title please use:
Sel'skokhozyaistvennaya biologiya (in Russian)
Agricultural Biology (in English)
For figures with multiple panels, the first sentence of the legend should be a brief overview of the entire figure. Graphs should include clearly labeled error bars described in the figure legend. Authors must state whether a number that follows the «±» sign is a standard error (SEM) or a standard deviation (SD). The number of independent data points (N) represented in a graph must be indicated in the legend. Numerical axes on graphs should go to 0 (except for log axes) and be designated. Statistical analyses should be done on all available data and not just on data from «a representative experiment». Statistics and error bars should only be shown for independent experiments and not for replicates within a single experiment. Each table should have a brief title above the table, in which a number that follows the «±» sign should be stated as a standard error (SEM) or a standard deviation (SD). All abbreviation and other designations, including gaps, or «–», or «+»/«-» (plus/minus) signs, must be explained. Please note that each table or figure must contain enough information to be comprehensible separately from the main text of the article.
The AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY relies on volunteer reviewers to maintain high editorial standards of the journal, in particular, to ensure (i) the research is well designed and executed, (ii) presentation of methods will permit replication, (iii) data are unambiguous and properly analyzed, and (iv) conclusions are supported by data.
Please within a month provide written review on the merits and scientific accuracy, value of the work, originality, and interest to readers, together with rationale for your opinion. Ensure that published data meet the AGRICULTURAL BIOLOGY standards, and that research or studies represented are not incorrect or flawed and can not be validated by others. Note any ethical concerns, such as substantial similarity between the reviewed manuscript and any published paper or any manuscript concurrently submitted elsewhere. Be alert to any failure to cite relevant work by other scientists. (The guidelines adapted from the Council of Scientific Editors’ White Paper on Promoting Integrity in Scientific Journal Publications).
Ethical principles of peer reviewing
Reviewer
- declares all possible conflicts of interest;
- preserves the confidentiality of the results or ideas received during reviewing;
- carries out the reviewing in a qualified, objective, correct manner and at the time specified by the editorial office; the reviews should be definite, grounded, constructive and help authors to improve the scientific level of their research and the quality of their manuscript;
- reviews the changes made to the manuscript or a new version of the manuscript prepared on the basis of the review sent to the author(s).
Peer review forms (original article, review)
Conflict of interest includes financial, intellectual and other ties, associations or relationships with regard to the submitted article. Permanent or a freelance editor can only be an employee, for which the possibility of any kind of financial, intellectual and other conflicts of interestas related to the journal, its editors, authors, articles, etc, is completely eliminated.No conflict of interest between the authors/collaborators is confirmed by signing a joint authors’ guarantee; contribution to the co-authorship is recognized equal, unless otherwise specified in the authors’guarantee. No conflict of interest between the authors and the employers with regard to the articleis confirmed by the cover letter.The authors must disclose all the sources offinancial and/or intellectual support (grants, subsidies, assistance, advising, products or services related to the subject matter of the article, used strains, varieties, cited data, etc).Thereviewer, when any financial or intellectual conflict of interest in connection with the manuscript leading to inability to make an impartial scientific judgment or evaluation, mustask for recuse themselves from handling a paper.When a conflict discovered after the article was published, the journal reserves the right to publish an erratum disclosing conflict(s). Deliberate or reckless concealing a conflict of interest by an editor, author or reviewerentails sanctions including banning from publishing in the journal for a period of time or ceased collaboration.
