Other Policies

Submission Policy

There is no Charge/ Fee for submitting manuscripts to Plant Health Archives. It is completely FREE.

Article Publishing Fee/ Article Processing Charge (APC)

The Journal being an Open Access journal supports its publishing activities by charging a nominal Article Processing Charge (APC) from Authors. The details for the same can be found here.

Waiver Policy

Plant Health Archives is an open-access journal and requires Article Processing Charges (APCs) to be paid after acceptance. To support the researchers who are unable to meet some or all of the costs associated with publishing the journal adopted a transparent waiver policy.

• Our fee support system ensures that all articles that pass peer review can benefit from open access, regardless of author’s field or funding situation.
• Publishing fees or waiver status will not influence editorial decision making.
• Authors and institutions with insufficient funding will be eligible for discounts to their APC.
• Waiver is applicable for one article per year for each submitting author.
• All the editors and reviewers who have handled at least three manuscripts in a calendar year can apply for a partial 25% discount to the APC.
• 50% Fee Waiver for Society life members - is applicable only if the first author of the accepted manuscript is a life member. Changing the order of Author Names and also any affiliations once the galley proof is prepared will not be permitted.

Please request your waiver or discount at the point of submission and the requests made during the review process or after acceptance will not be considered.

Please send your waiver requests to editorplanthealth@gmail.com.

Misconduct and Sanctions

Suspected breaches of our publication ethics policies, either before or after publication, as well as concerns about research ethics, should be reported to the journal. Claimants will be kept anonymous if requested.

As soon as we get information about the misconduct, our editors will start a thorough investigation. The authors may be asked to provide the underlying data, images, and other supplementary materials. The journal will consult editors, and contact institutions or employers to ask for an investigation.

If an article is found to violate the ethical publishing guidelines of the journal such as duplicate submission, fraudulent data, plagiarism, citation manipulation, false claim of authorship, etc. the article will be rejected by the journal.

In case the article is accepted and under the ‘Online first’ stage the journal will remove the article from the website and an appropriate note for article withdrawal will be posted. No response from the authors to journal communication after review and provisional acceptance is also considered as withdrawal of the article. If it is a published article the same will be retracted immediately.

In addition to that we may take the following actions based on the severity of misconduct;

• Not allowing submission for 1-3 years.
• A prohibition from acting as an editor or reviewer.
• Reporting the misconduct to the author's institutions, employers and, their funding agencies.

However, the minor unintentional errors by the authors may be corrected by a corrigendum and errors by the publisher by an erratum.

Conflicts of Interest

A conflict of interest is anything that interferes with, or could reasonably be perceived as interfering with, the full and objective presentation, commissioning, peer review, editorial decision-making, or publication of research or non-research articles submitted to Biotica Journals.

A conflict of interest exists if a person or institution has a relationship, personal or otherwise, which has the potential to compromise or in any way interfere with professional objectivity or judgment in issues related to the relationship.

A conflict of interest is actual if a relationship exists, or apparent if the possibility for a relationship could be inferred. In either case, it is the responsibility of journal Editors, Associate Editors, Editorial Board members, authors and reviewers to declare Conflicts of Interest, actual or apparent, in order that appropriate mitigating action is taken.

You can declare the conflict of interest in your cover letter or on the manuscript submission form in the journal’s peer-review system.

Conflict of interests can be financial or non-financial in nature. To maintain transparency, any associations which can be perceived by others as a conflict of interest must also be declared.

Financial conflicts of interests include:

• Employment or voluntary involvement.
• Collaborations with advocacy groups relating to the content of the article.
• Grants from an entity, paid to the author or organization.
• Personal fees received by the authors as honoraria, royalties, consulting fees, lecture fees, or testimonies.
• Patents held or pending by the authors, their institutions, funding organizations, or licensed to an entity, whether earning royalties or not.
• Royalties being received by the authors or their institutions.
• Stock or share ownership.
• Benefits related to the development of products as an outcome of the work.

Non-financial conflicts of interests:

• Receipt of drugs, specialist equipment, tools, computer programs, or digital applications.
• Access to data repositories, archival resources, museum collections, by an entity that might benefit, or be at a disadvantage financially or reputationally from the published findings.
• Holding a position on the boards of industry bodies or private companies that might benefit, or be at a disadvantage financially or reputationally from the published findings.
• Writing assistance or administrative support from a person or organization that might benefit, or be at a disadvantage from the published findings.
• Personal, political, religious, ideological, academic and intellectual competing interests which are perceived to be relevant to the published content.
• Involvement in legal action related to the work.

Important: if there are no competing interests to declare, authors should include a statement to the article to confirm that there are no relevant financial or non-financial competing interests to report.

Licensing Policy

The journal uses creative commons' Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

To fully realise the potential of open access to research literature, barriers to reuse need to be removed. The Creative Commons (CC) licenses have emerged as an effective legal instrument to achieve this. Instead of transferring rights exclusively to publishers (the approach usually followed in subscription publishing), authors grant a non-exclusive license to the publisher to distribute the work, and all users and readers are granted rights to reuse the work.

CC-BY allows for unrestricted reuse of content, subject only to the requirement that the source work is appropriately attributed. The CC-BY license thereby requires that authors are given appropriate credit for their work, as explained in a recent post from Creative Commons.

Copyright Policy

As all the articles published in Plant Health Archives are distributed under a creative commons license, so, the authors retain the copyright of their work and the authors do not need to transfer the copyright of their work to the journal. However, the authors grant a license to the journal to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher. For BIOTICA to publish and disseminate research articles, we only require the Publishing Rights.

Archiving Policy and Author Self-Archiving

This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

The Journal allows the authors to self-archive pre-print, post-print, and publishers' versions of the article in any OAI-compliant repository.

Advertisement Policy

At present there is no policy to accept advertisements and the journal does not accept commercial advertisements.

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.