Bioenergetics Communications Policies

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Bioenergetics Communications is the Open Science journal on bioenergetics and mitochondrial physiology with Living Communications - ISSN 2791-4690

Bioenergetics Communications Policies

Journal policies on authorship and contributorship

Authorship should be based on the following criteria:

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the study; or acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data
• Drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for important intellectual content
• Final approval of the version to be submitted for publication

Anyone who has contributed to the study or manuscript but does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the 'Acknowledgments'. Permission to include the name and affiliation those mentioned in the Acknowledgments section must be obtained.

If the list of authors changes after publication, a new version of the article and be published with an explanation. Changes in the author list must be confirmed by all authors. In agreement with COPE guidelines, the BEC editorial team cannot take responsibility for any authorship disputes.

How the journal will handle complaints and appeals

Bioenergetics communications follows the COPE guidelines in relation to complaints and appeals. If you wish to make an appeal about an editorial decision or make a complaint, please contact the editorial team ([email protected] ).

Journal policies on conflicts of interest / competing interests

Authors must declare any conflicts of interest. A conflict of interest will not preclude publication, but it provides full transparency for the reviewers and readers. If there are no conflicts to declare, the following standard statement is added: ‘No conflicts of interests were disclosed’.

A conflict of interest may be of non-financial or financial nature. Examples of conflicts of interest include (but are not limited to):

• Individuals receiving funding, salary or other forms of payment from an organization, or holding stocks or shares from a company, whose financial situation might be influenced by the publication of the findings;
• Individuals, their funding organization or employer holding (or applying for) related patents;
• Official affiliations and memberships with interest groups relating to the content of the publication;
• Political, religious, or ideological competing interests.

Journal policies on data sharing and reproducibility

Bioenergetics Communications support the FAIR principles of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR Principles).

All articles in Bioenergetics Communications that report original results should include the raw data underlying the results, together with details of any software used to process the results. It is essential that others can see the raw data to be able to replicate the study and analyze the data, as well as in some circumstances, reuse it. Failure to provide access to the raw data for publication without good justification is likely to result in the article being rejected.

All articles must include a Data Availability statement at the end of the manuscript, even where no data is associated with or has been included in the article.

Where possible, data should be deposited in a stable and recognized open repository under a CC0 license prior to manuscript submission. Please check that the DOI(s) and/or accession number(s) provided are publicly available. Data should be submitted to discipline-specific, community-recognized repositories, or to generalist repositories if no suitable community resource is available. Possible generalist repositories are listed below. These repositories have their own policies and may be subject to file size limits and/or fees.

• Figshare
• Open Science Framework
• Zenodo
• Code Ocean
• BioStudies

We recognize that there may be cases where openly sharing data may not be feasible (due to ethical or security considerations, or data protection issues). If you think that this applies to your article, please let the indicate this at the submission stage.

Exceptions may be made for:

Ethical and security considerations

If data access is restricted for ethical or security reasons, the manuscript must include:

• A description of the restrictions on the data; and
• All necessary information required for a reader or reviewer to apply for access to the data and the conditions under which access will be granted.

Data protection issues

Where human data cannot be effectively de-identified, data must not be shared to protect patient/participant privacy unless the individuals have given explicit written consent that their identifiable data can be made publicly available.

In instances where the data cannot be made available, the manuscript must include:

• an explanation of the data protection concern;
• any intermediary data that can be de-identified without compromising anonymity;
• what, if anything, the relevant Institutional Review Board (IRB) or equivalent said about data sharing; and,
• where applicable, all necessary information required for a reader or reviewer to apply for access to the data and the conditions under which access will be granted.

Large data

It is not always feasible to share large data sets. In these cases, authors should include a description of the data, including the file types and sizes, when submitting their manuscript.

Where data is too large to be feasibly hosted by a repository, the manuscript should include:

• Any intermediary data that can be easily shared; and
• All necessary information required for a reader or reviewer to access the data alongside a description of this process.

Data under license by a third party

In cases where data has been obtained from a third party and restrictions apply to the availability of the data, the manuscript must include:

• All necessary information required for a reader or reviewer to access the data by the same means as the authors;
• Any intermediary data that can be shared legally; and
• Publicly available data that is representative of the analyzed dataset and can be used to apply the methodology described in the manuscript.

Journal's policy on ethical oversight

Bioenergetics Communications follows the COPE guidelines relating to ethical oversight.

Research involving humans

Ethics approval

All studies involving humans (individuals, human data or material) must have been conducted according to the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval must have been obtained for all protocols from the authors’ institutional or other relevant ethics committee (Institutional Review Board, IRB) to ensure that they meet national and international guidelines. Details of this approval must be provided when submitting an article, including the institution, review board name, and permit number(s).

Allegations of research misconduct

Bioenergetics Communications is part of the H2020 NextGen-O2k project

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