A combination of pre-screening and open access is the best possible defence against plagiarism. All articles submitted to BIOJ are automatically screened for plagiarism by the SimilarityCheck system from CrossRef. This system compares incoming articles to a large database of academic content, and alerts editors to any possible issues.
The BIOJ ensures that all research output is thoroughly peer reviewed by external reviewers in a double-blind process. Content of a commentary or opinion nature may not be sent for external peer review but will include extensive editorial review and revisions. This journal adheres to the COPE guidelines for best practice.
All content in the BIOJ is published under Creative Commons Licences, which ensure that copyright remains with authors and editors. If you publish with us you retain ownership of your work, and how your work can be shared, used and reused depends on the Creative Commons Licence applied. Full attribution is required to accompany all reuse and dissemination.
We strongly encourage authors to make the research objects associated with their publications openly available. This includes research data, software, bioresources and methodologies. This means that peer reviewers are able to better assess the foundations of claims made, and the research community and wider public are able to similarly validate authors’ work, and are more easily able to extend and build upon it.
All our content is assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which is a permanent access point for the content. This means that all citations can be tracked by the publishing and academic communities. We actively engage in the indexing process. Currently this journal is indexed by the following services:
All of our article metadata is openly available for harvesting by these indexing services and other aggregators via OAI-PMH.
As members of CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) our content is regularly archived with many of the world's leading research libraries. The CLOCKSS archive ensures that the BIOJ content will always be made available as open access, in any eventuality.
We fully support and encourage author self-archiving of all content (sometimes termed 'green' open access).
The BIOJ publishes with White Rose University Press who use open, non-proprietary standards for all their content, meaning that it can be easily transferred to archives and other publishers. All of our article XML is compliant with the Journal Archiving Tag Suite (JATS) schema.