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Policies

The journal adheres to the principles outlined by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and follows the GPP3 guidelines concerning authorship. By submitting a manuscript, authors confirm that they have reviewed and approved its content and that the manuscript complies with the journal's policies.

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The journal does not accept advertising from third parties.

Affiliations

Authors and co-authors must provide all relevant affiliations to acknowledge where the research or scholarly work was approved, supported, and/or conducted.

  • For non-research articles, authors must include their current institutional affiliation.
  • If an author has changed institutions before the article is published, they should list the affiliation associated with the work and include a note indicating their current affiliation.
  • Authors without a current relevant institutional affiliation should declare their independent status.

Appeals and complaints

We welcome legitimate appeals to editorial decisions; however, such appeals must be supported by compelling evidence or new data addressing the editor's and reviewers' comments. This is particularly critical given that most articles published in the journal are reviews or original research, which depend on precise and reliable scientific data.

For opinion-based scholarly articles, appeals are less likely to result in a reversal of the editor’s decision. These articles, including viewpoints and opinion pieces, are primarily evaluated based on editorial judgment regarding readability and relevance. Nevertheless, all opinion-driven articles must be evidence-based and fully referenced. Authors should clearly present their evidence and explain how it supports their conclusions.

Editors rarely overturn their original decisions, and appeals are not expected to be frequent. If your manuscript is rejected, we strongly recommend submitting it to another journal. Rejections are often based on the editor's assessment of the manuscript's priority or significance—criteria that are generally not addressable through an appeal. However, if you believe there are valid grounds for an appeal, please follow the instructions outlined below.

Acknowledgment

People who contributed to the development of a manuscript but do not meet the criteria for authorship should be appropriately acknowledged. Organizations providing support through funding and/or resources must also be recognized in the Acknowledgments section.

Authorship

Authors must ensure the accuracy of the author group, the designation of the Corresponding Author, and the order of authors at the time of submission. Once a manuscript has been accepted, changes to authorship—including additions, removals, or alterations to the sequence of authors or Corresponding Author—are not permitted. While changes to the author list during the revision stage are generally discouraged, exceptions may be considered if sufficiently justified. Such requests must include:

  1. a detailed explanation for the proposed change, and
  2. written confirmation (via email or letter) from all authors, including those being added or removed, agreeing to the change.

The Editor-in-Chief will decide whether to approve these changes. If an author's institutional affiliation changes after the research has been conducted or the manuscript has been written but before publication, the current affiliation should be listed, with prior affiliations acknowledged in the Acknowledgments section during the copy-editing stage.

Contribution Details

Contributors should provide a description of contributions made by each of them toward the manuscript. The description should be divided into the following categories, as applicable: concept, design, definition of intellectual content, literature search, clinical studies, experimental studies, data acquisition, data analysis, statistical analysis, manuscript preparation, manuscript editing, and manuscript review. The authors' contributions will be printed along with the article. One or more authors should take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole from inception to published article and should be designated as 'guarantors'.

Authors must provide a detailed account of their contributions to the manuscript. Contributions should be categorized into roles such as conceptualization, design, definition of intellectual content, literature review, clinical or experimental studies, data acquisition, data analysis, statistical analysis, manuscript preparation, editing, and review. These contributions will be published alongside the article.

At least one author should assume responsibility for the integrity of the work in its entirety, from inception to publication, and will be designated as the 'guarantor.'

Citations

All research and non-research articles must cite relevant, current, and reliable literature (preferably peer-reviewed) to substantiate any claims made within the manuscript.

Authors must avoid excessive or inappropriate self-citation or prearranged citation practices among author groups, as these behaviors constitute a form of misconduct known as citation manipulation. For further details, refer to the COPE guidance on citation manipulation.

For non-research articles, such as Reviews or Opinion pieces, references should provide a comprehensive and unbiased overview of the current state of research or scholarship on the topic. Citations should not disproportionately favor a particular research group, organization, or journal.

If you are uncertain about whether a source should be cited, please contact the journal's editorial office for guidance.

Conflicts of Interest/ Competing interests

Authors and co-authors are required to disclose any competing interests that are relevant to, or could be perceived as relevant to, the submitted article.

  • A competing interest may arise when you (or your employer, sponsor, or close associates) have a financial, commercial, legal, or professional relationship with other organizations or individuals that could influence the research or its interpretation.
  • Competing interests can be either financial or non-financial. To promote transparency, you must also disclose any relationships that might be perceived as competing interests by others.

Corrections, expressions of concern, and retractions

In some cases, post-publication amendments to an article may be necessary. These changes will be made following careful evaluation by the Editor and in compliance with the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

Any amendments will be accompanied by a formal post-publication notice, which will remain permanently linked to the original article. These notices may take the form of:

  • Correction notices: to address errors that do not undermine the integrity of the research.
  • Expressions of Concern: to highlight significant issues requiring further investigation.
  • Retractions: to withdraw articles where serious flaws or misconduct are identified.
  • Removals: in rare cases where content must be removed entirely for legal or ethical reasons.

These measures are designed to maintain the integrity and transparency of the scholarly record.

Consent for Publication

When manuscripts include information or images related to an individual, it is essential to obtain written informed consent from the person involved (or from a parent or legal guardian in the case of minors under 18 years old). This consent must explicitly allow for the publication of their details or images under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, ensuring free access to the information online. If the individual is deceased, the consent must be obtained from their next of kin. The manuscript must confirm that this written consent was secured, and a copy of the consent form can be provided to the Editor upon request, ensuring confidentiality.

Ethical Guidelines for Research Involving Living Organisms

For studies involving animals, plants, or other living organisms, it is essential to ensure compliance with ethical standards and legal requirements. This includes securing all necessary permits for research, collection, and the extraction or use of genetic resources from the study location. Documentation of these permissions should be included in the manuscript to demonstrate adherence to local, national, and international regulations.

Research involving animals must follow protocols approved by institutional or regional ethics committees to ensure humane and ethical treatment. Similarly, studies on plants or other living organisms must comply with conservation laws and ethical guidelines, ensuring minimal environmental impact during sample collection and handling. These measures safeguard biodiversity and uphold ethical research practices.

Confidentiality

Manuscripts submitted to Neotropical Biodiversity are treated as confidential materials. The journal ensures that submitted manuscripts are not disclosed to anyone outside of those directly involved in their evaluation, processing, or preparation for publication (if accepted). This includes editorial staff, corresponding authors, potential reviewers, actual reviewers, and editors. In cases where misconduct is suspected, the manuscript may be shared with members of the journal’s ethics committees and relevant institutions or organizations required to address the issue. Neotropical Biodiversity adheres to the appropriate COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) flowcharts whenever applicable to ensure ethical and transparent processes.

Copyright Policy

Who Can Submit?

Original manuscripts may be submitted to Neotropical Biodiversity by anyone who holds the copyright to the work or is authorized by the copyright holder(s) to make the submission. By default, authors retain the copyright to their work prior to publication. Exceptions may occur outside the academic sphere if an author has transferred copyright to their employer as part of an employment agreement.

User Rights

Neotropical Biodiversity is an Open Access journal, ensuring that users are free to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, and link to the full texts of published articles, provided they comply with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). This license allows unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, as long as proper credit is given to the original author(s) and source.

Further details on the license can be found at: CC BY 4.0.

A copyright statement is included in each published article and outlined in this policy.

Open Access Policy

Neotropical Biodiversity publishes all articles under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, which is widely recognized for enabling the broadest dissemination of licensed materials. This license permits users to:

  • Share: Copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format.
  • Adapt: Remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, including commercial use.

The key requirement of the CC BY 4.0 license is that users must provide appropriate credit to the original creator, include a link to the license, and clearly indicate any modifications made. This ensures that authors receive proper recognition while allowing unrestricted access, distribution, and reuse of their work. By removing barriers to the access and use of creative content, the CC BY 4.0 license supports the dissemination of knowledge and fosters innovation.

For more information, please visit: CC BY 4.0.

Author Rights

Authors who publish in Neotropical Biodiversity retain the copyright to their work.

Publisher will be granted publishing and distribution rights.

Data falsification/fabrication

Data falsification or fabrication refers to the intentional manipulation or creation of data with the aim of misleading others, compromising the integrity of the scholarly record, and causing long-term harm to the scientific community. This constitutes a severe form of academic misconduct.

When submitting a manuscript to Neotropical Biodiversity, authors must guarantee that all data included in the manuscript are accurate and faithfully represent their work. Authors are also required to retain the raw data underlying their research to facilitate the evaluation process.

If requested, authors must provide access to the original data. Failure to produce these data may result in the rejection of the manuscript during review or the retraction of a published article.

Data sharing policy

The journal encourages the sharing of research data to promote transparency, reproducibility, and the advancement of knowledge within the academic community. We recognize the importance of making data accessible to other researchers while respecting ethical and legal considerations. To this end, we have established the following guidelines for the inclusion of research data statements in submitted manuscripts:

Data Sharing Expectations:

Authors are encouraged to make their data available to the public whenever possible, except where privacy, confidentiality, or legal constraints apply. Data should be shared in a manner that allows verification of results and the reuse of data for further research.

Data Availability Statements

Authors are required to include a Data Availability Statement in their manuscripts. This statement should clearly outline where the data supporting the findings of the study can be accessed, or explain why the data cannot be shared. Below are examples of acceptable Data Availability Statements:

  1. Data Available in a Public Repository: The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT LINK TO DATASETS].
  2. Data Available on Request: The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
  3. No Data Available: No datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.

Desk rejection policy

  • The topic / scope of the study is not relevant to the field of the Journal.
  • There are publication ethics problems, non-adherence to international standard guidelines, and plagiarism (set at a similarity index of higher than 15 percent).
  • The topic does not have a sufficient impact, nor does it sufficiently contribute new knowledge to the field.
  • There are flaws in the study design.
  • The objective of the study is not clearly stated.
  • The study of the organization is problematic and/or certain components are missing.
  • There are problems in writing or series infelicities of in the style of grammar.
  • The manuscript does not follow the submission guideline of the Journal.

Duplicate submission/publication

Authors are required to declare upon submission that the manuscript is not under consideration elsewhere, and as such the detection of a duplicate submission or publication is typically considered to be a deliberate act. This includes articles previously published in another language. For acceptable forms of secondary submissions or publications (e.g. an article translated into English), in accordance with ICMJE guidance, authors must seek permission from the publisher and copyright holder of the original article and must inform the Editor of the receiving journal about the history of the original article. It must also be made clear to readers that the article is a translated version, with a citation provided to the original article.

Funding

The journal requires that authors declare all the sources of funding including financial support in their manuscript. The authors should describe the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in any of the stages from study design to submission of the manuscript for publication. They should also state if the sponsor(s) had no such involvement. Please ensure that this information is accurate and in accordance with your funder’s requirements.

Images and figures

Photographs, video, or audio recordings which can reveal the identity of patients or study participants can only be included if they (or their next of kin if participants are deceased; parents or guardians if they are underage or considered to be vulnerable) have provided Consent to Publish.

Authors should be aware of any cultural sensitivities or restrictions associated with any images included in their manuscripts. For example, images of human remains or deceased humans is restricted in some cultures, and appropriate ethical guidelines should be adhered to by considering the views and approval processes of the affiliated communities.

Experimental photographic images including microscopy should accurately reflect the original image. Where images have been modified or enhanced in any way this must be stated with a full explanation within the manuscript as well as in the figure legend so as not to mislead readers about what the images show. Authors should be prepared to share the original, uncropped, unannotated, and unprocessed images with the journal editorial office upon request.

Please note that any modifications are only acceptable if these are minor in nature and have been applied to the whole image. Authors are required to include details of image-gathering methods and details of processes for any modifications made to images, including the name of the software (with version number) used. Any modifications which can alter the scientific interpretation of the image are not allowed.

Any images or figures which have been obtained from another published source can only be re-used if the authors have obtained the appropriate permissions for re-use from the copyright owner. A statement to confirm this must be included within the figure legend. The original source of the image must be cited, even in cases where the image or figure is not under copyright, or if re-use is allowed under a license that permits unrestricted re-use.

Misconduct

The journal takes all forms of misconduct seriously and will take all necessary action, in accordance with COPE guidelines, to protect the integrity of the scholarly record.

Examples of misconduct include (but are not limited to):

  • Affiliation misrepresentation
  • Breaches in copyright/use of third-party material without appropriate permissions
  • Citation manipulation
  • Duplicate submission/publication
  • “Ethics dumping”
  • Image or data manipulation/fabrication
  • Peer review manipulation
  • Plagiarism
  • Text-recycling/self-plagiarism
  • Undisclosed competing interests
  • Unethical research

Duplicate Submission

Manuscripts that are found to have been published elsewhere, or to be under review elsewhere, will incur duplicate submission/publication sanctions. If authors have used their own previously published work, or work that is currently under review, as the basis for a submitted manuscript, they are required to cite the previous work and indicate how their submitted manuscript offers novel contributions beyond those of the previous work.

Citation Manipulation

Submitted manuscripts that are found to include citations whose primary purpose is to increase the number of citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal, will incur citation manipulation sanctions.

Data Fabrication and Falsification

Submitted manuscripts that are found to have either fabricated or falsified experimental results, including the manipulation of images, will incur data fabrication and falsification sanctions.

Improper Author Contribution or Attribution

All listed authors must have made a significant scientific contribution to the research in the manuscript and approved all its claims. It is important to list everyone who made a significant scientific contribution, including students and laboratory technicians.

Redundant Publications

Redundant publications involve the inappropriate division of study outcomes into several articles.

Image manipulation

Where deliberate action has been taken to inappropriately manipulate or fabricate an image. This is a serious form of misconduct as it is designed to mislead others and damage the integrity of the scholarly record with wide-reaching and long-term consequences.

The journal expects all images contained within manuscripts to be accurate and free from manipulation. Specific features within an image may not be enhanced, obscured, moved, removed, or introduced without adequate notification of what the alteration is. Adjustments to the brightness, contrast, or color balance of an image are acceptable if they do not obscure, eliminate or misrepresent information present in the original. Grouping images from different parts of gels, western blots or microscope images must be made explicit in the arrangement of the figure or the text of the figure legend.

If the original, unedited images cannot be produced on request, acceptance of a manuscript or paper may be declined or retracted.