Editorial Policies

Advanced Virology follows the editorial policies of Kenzym Publishers that should be read for further details.

Authorship

Advanced Virology understands that authorship has its own privileges (such as entitlement to moral and legal rights, credit and recognition) and responsibilities (such as accountability for the work). Advanced Virology follows the definitions of authorship as recommended by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). All submitted manuscripts should include an author contributorship statement that specifies the work of each author. Those who contributed to the work but do not qualify for authorship criteria should be listed in acknowledgements. 

It is the collective responsibility of the authors to ensure that everyone who meets the criteria of authorship is appropriately, clearly, and accurately named as an author. Advanced Virology expects that the published author list accurately reflects individual contributions. Advanced Virology reserves the right to request confirmation that all authors meet the authorship conditions.

The corresponding author should act as a point of contact between the editor and the other authors and should keep co-authors informed and involve them in major decisions about the publication.

Consortium/group authorship should be listed in the manuscript with the other author(s). If authorship is retained by the consortium or group, the consortium or group should be listed as an author. However, where work is presented by the author(s) on behalf of a consortium or group, the consortium/group will not retain authorship and a note will describe that work was presented on behalf of the consortium/group.

Changes in authorship

Requests for changes to authorship are dealt with by journal editors and must be directed via the principal contact listed. Editors will handle such requests in accordance with the relevant COPE guidelines. Typically, each case of changes in authorship will be decided on its merit and requesting author(s) have to provide valid reasons. Changes in authorship, including addition, removal, or reordering of authors list must require all authors, including any to be removed, agree to such change(s) in writing. Changes in authorship post-publication may or may not require a published correction. Kenzym Publishers reserves the right to request the evidence of authorship, and post-acceptance authorship changes will be decided at the discretion of Kenzym Publishers.

‘Ghost,’ ‘guest,’ or ‘gift’ authorship

The editors of Advanced Virology, in close working with Kenzym Publishers and other organizations, take a firm stance against the unethical practices of ghost (the practice of using a non-named author to write or prepare an article for publication), guest, or gift authorship (the practice of naming an individual that made little or no contribution to a study as an author on an article). Investigations regarding allegations and/or suspicion of ghost, guest, or gift authorship are conducted in accordance with the COPE guidelines. Identification of such practices, post-investigation, will lead to the removal of the authors in question from the article through a post-publication correction. Furthermore, Advanced Virology may choose to report the authors in question to the institutional or local ethics committee(s).

Editors and journal staff as authors

Editors, editorial board members, or any other staff member of Advanced Virology are not allowed to be involved in editorial decisions or handling submissions when they are authors or have contributed to a manuscript.

Redundant publication (dual submission or publication)

Advanced Virology does not accept previously published manuscripts or process submissions that are simultaneously submitted to another journal. Suspicious or alleged cases of redundant publication are investigated thoroughly by journal editors in accordance with COPE guidelines. Journal managers keep a complete record of all communications among editors, authors, and reviewers as well as store these records safely for a considerable time. Such communication records may be used in investigations of alleged misconduct. Investigations to identify cases of redundant publications and/or outcomes of such investigations may trigger contact and co-operation with other publishers, journals, and parent organizations of the authors.

Plagiarism

Advanced Virology does not accept plagiarism. Processing and evaluation of submitted manuscripts are based on the understanding that they are the original work of the author(s). Plagiarism includes copying text, ideas, images, or data from another source, even from your own publications, without appropriate acknowledgement or permission. All submissions are systematically screened for plagiarism using industry standard plagiarism detection software. Editors will investigate and handle the allegations of plagiarism according to the COPE guidelines for suspected plagiarism in a submitted manuscript or a published article.

Detection of plagiarism during peer review process will most probably lead to rejection whereas detection of plagiarism post publication may result in the publication of a correction or retraction of the article.

Citation policy

Advanced Virology expects its editors, reviewers and authors to not misuse citations, and suggest reading a COPE discussion document on citation manipulation for best practices.

Authors should ensure that where the material is taken from other sources (including their own published writing), the source is clearly cited and that appropriate permission, if applicable, is obtained. Authors should avoid excessive self-citation and ‘honorary’ citations. Similarly, authors should not cite references that they have not read. Editors and reviewers should not engage in coercive citation manipulation (citation manipulation is considered coercive citation manipulation when it is made a condition for having an article accepted in a journal).

Advanced Virology, in close working with Kenzym Publishers, is committed to investigating thoroughly all suspected or alleged instances of inappropriate requests or occurrences of citation manipulation, and taking appropriate actions where required.

Conflict of Interest

Advanced Virology understands the importance of and is committed to transparency regarding potential conflict of interest. As per the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, “a conflict of interest exists when professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients’ welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain). Perceptions of conflict of interest are as important as actual conflicts of interest.” However, blanket ban or harsh policies preventing people with conflicts of interest from publishing may prove counterproductive as it encourages authors to conceal relevant information and interests. Advanced Virology provides the following policy guidelines regarding conflict of interest with respect to authors, editors and peer-reviewers:

Authors

Advanced Virology requires the author(s) to declare all conflicts of interest in relation to their work. Authors are required to list all conflicts of interest in the ‘conflict of interest section’ in the manuscript just before the references. If the author(s) have no conflict of interest to declare, they should provide a statement in the abovementioned section reading: “The authors declare no conflicts of interest”. The editor(s) may ask for further information relating to conflicts of interest.

The corresponding author of the manuscript is responsible to disclose and/or confirm if co-authors hold any potential conflict of interest. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to furnish the written disclosure forms duly completed by all co-authors. Statement and/or disclosure of potential conflict of interests should be submitted prior to the acceptance of the manuscript. The following information should be declared at the time of submission of the manuscript:

• all sources of relevant funding, including direct and indirect financial support, supply of equipment, or materials (including specialist statistical or writing assistance);
• the role of the research funder(s) or sponsor(s), if any, in the research design, execution, analysis, interpretation, and reporting;
• any relevant financial and non-financial interests and relationships that might be considered likely to affect the interpretation of their findings or that editors, reviewers, or readers might reasonably wish to know. These might include, but are not limited to, patent or stock ownership, membership on a company’s board of directors, membership of an advisory board or committee for a company, consultancy for a company, or receipt of speaker’s fee from a company.

Editors

The journal editors, board members, and staff who are involved with decisions about publication are expected to declare their competing interests at the time of agreeing to their positions and update them periodically.

Where an editor or editorial board member is on the author list, they must declare this in the ‘conflicts of interest’ section on the submitted manuscript. The editors, and other editorial staff, are required to recuse themselves from individual manuscripts if their own interests may be perceived to impair their ability to make an unbiased editorial decision and to avoid creating potential conflicts of interest through assignment of handling editors or peer reviewers.

Peer-Reviewers

Potential conflicts of interest should be considered while assigning peer-reviewers, and editors should ask reviewers to declare potential conflicts of interest when they respond to the invitation and also when they submit the review (since conflicts may also be identified after reading the full manuscript). In case a reviewer declares a potential conflict of interest, the editors should opt for an alternate reviewer. Advanced Virology will remove reviewers from the journal database who fail to declare a conflict of interest.

Advanced Virology will publish authors’ relevant conflicts of interest or a statement of their absence. In case of doubt, the editor(s) should favour greater disclosure. Similarly, Advanced Virology implements disclosure of conflict of interest in connection with editorials and review articles as it is more difficult to detect bias in these types of publications than reports of original research. The editor(s) will handle the investigations of suspected undisclosed conflicts of interest according to the COPE guidelines for undisclosed conflicts of interest in a submitted manuscript or a published article.

Editorial Independence

Advanced Virology enjoys full editorial independence from its publisher. All articles published in Advanced Virology are peer-reviewed and assessed by our independent editorial board, and Kenzym Publishers’ staff are not involved in decisions to accept manuscripts. For details read Kenzym Publishers’ editorial independence policy.

Editors, editorial board members, or any other staff member of Advanced Virology are not allowed to be involved in editorial decisions or handling submissions when they are authors or have contributed to a manuscript. For submission involving editors/editorial staff as author(s), another editor or member of the editorial board is assigned to assume responsibility for overseeing peer review. These submissions are subject to the exact same review process as any other manuscript.

Peer-review Policy

Advanced Virology applies single-blind review model, where the authors’ identities are known to reviewers. The review reports are not published online.

The submissions are assigned to an editor, who assesses the manuscripts and decides whether they are suitable for peer review. For submission involving editor(s) as author(s), or where the editor(s) have conflicts of interest, another editor or member of the editorial board is assigned to assume responsibility for overseeing peer review. Submissions assessed suitable for peer-review undergo peer-review by at least two independent experts identified by the handling editor. The editor(s) decide on the manuscript based on the peer-reviewers’ reports and these reports are shared with authors along with the decision. The editor(s) are independent in evaluating the reviewers’ reports and are not bound by the reviewers’ recommendations while making a decision.

Advanced Virology provides author(s) an option to nominate potential peer-reviewers by providing suggested reviewers’ contact details (institutional email, where possible, and/or information that can verify the identity of the reviewer such as ORCID, Scopus ID) in the cover letter. However, whether or not to consider these nominated reviewers is at the editor's discretion. The author(s) should not suggest recent collaborators or colleagues who work in the same institution as themselves. Similarly, the author(s) may request that particular individuals do not review the manuscript. Any request for excluding someone as a reviewer should be made in the cover letter and include the underlying reasons. Again, the editor(s) may choose to select an excluded reviewer.

The peer-reviewers should read COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers for best practices.

Confidentiality

Advanced Virology expects its editors and reviewers to ensure that all manuscripts are handled confidentially in accordance with established standards. It expects that if discussions between an author, editor, and peer reviewer have taken place in confidence they should remain in confidence unless explicit consent has been given by all parties, or unless there are exceptional circumstances (for example, when they might help substantiate claims of intellectual property theft during peer review). Similarly, if a reviewer wishes to delegate the review or seek the opinion of a colleague on a specific aspect of the paper, they are expected to clear this with the editor in the first instance.

Suspected or alleged instances of an editor or reviewer appropriating ideas from a manuscript they handled will be thoroughly investigated in accordance with these COPE guidelines.

Peer-review fraud

Advanced Virology provides an option for authors to nominate peer-reviewers or request that particular individuals do not peer-review the manuscript. It is the responsibility of the lead author to nominate only genuine reviewers and provide correct contact details.

Any suspected or alleged instance of authors submitting fabricated reviewer details will be thoroughly investigated. Such allegations, if proven, may result in immediate rejection of a submitted manuscript or retraction of an already published article. Furthermore, Advanced Virology may choose to report the authors in question to the institutional or local ethics committee(s). Depending on the severity of the case, a ban on future submissions from the author group may also be imposed.

Research Data Policy

Advanced Virology understands the importance of open scientific exchange and thus encourages that materials described in the manuscript including all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers. It encourages authors to ensure that their datasets are either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main manuscript or additional/supplementary files (such as spreadsheets rather than PDFs) whenever possible.

Where ethical, legal or privacy issues are present, data should not be shared. The authors should make any limitations clear in the data availability statement upon submission. Authors should ensure that the data shared are in accordance with the consent provided by participants on the use of confidential data.

Data sharing policies concern the minimal dataset that supports the central findings of a published study.

Pre-prints

Advanced Virology accepts submissions that have previously been made available as preprints provided that they have not undergone peer review. A preprint is a draft version of a paper made available online before submission to a journal. Posting of preprints is not considered prior publication and will not jeopardize consideration at Advanced Virology. However, authors are required to disclose details of preprint posting, including DOI and licensing terms, upon submission of the manuscript or at any other point during consideration at Advanced Virology. Furthermore, once a manuscript is published in Advanced Virology, it is the author’s responsibility to ensure that the preprint record is updated with a publication reference, including the DOI and a URL link to the published version of the article on Advanced Virology’s website.

Preservation and archiving

Advanced Virology understands the importance of digital preservation of the content published in the journal and hence is committed to permanently archiving all content published in Advanced Virology in various databases/archives.

In order to keep the record, all submitted manuscripts and accompanying files/materials are retained by Kenzym Publishers. However, files related to rejected submissions may be deleted on request by submitting authors.

Corrections, retractions, and updates

Each contribution published in Advanced Virology, constitutes the version of record (VoR). Recognizing a published contribution as a version of record establishes the expectation that it can be relied upon as accurate, complete, and citable. Sometimes after a contribution has been published it may be necessary to make a change to the version of record. Such changes are made after careful consideration, and approval, of the editor(s) of the journal who are also supported by our staff.

Necessary changes made to, or retractions of, published contributions are accompanied by post-publication notices which are bidirectionally linked to the original contribution. These post-publication notices i.e. a correction notice, a retraction, or an expression of interest describe the alterations made to the original contribution and are widely indexed. Under some exceptional circumstances, a published contribution may have to be removed from the website and archives. This will be accompanied by a removal notice.

Authors, readers and organizations are encouraged to contact the editorial office of Advanced Virology in the first instance if they become aware of any errors, especially errors that could affect the interpretation of data or reliability of information presented, or ethics issues in the published material. The editor(s) will carefully consider such reports, supported by Kenzym Publishers, and may require additional expert advice before deciding the most appropriate course of action.

Corrections

Changes to published articles that affect the interpretation and conclusion of the article, but do not fully invalidate the article, will, at the editor(s)’ discretion, be corrected via publication of a Correction notice that is indexed and bidirectionally linked to the original article.

Publication of correction notices depends on the nature of errors corrected: major or minor errors. For correction notices, major errors or omissions are considered to be any changes that impact the interpretation of the article, but where the scholarly integrity of the article remains intact. In case of major errors, changes will be made to the version of record (online article) and a separate correction notice, bidirectionally linked to the original article, will be issued detailing the error and changes made.

Minor errors and omissions are those that do not impact the reliability of, or the reader’s understanding of, the scholarly content. Any minor errors will not be accompanied by a separate correction notice. Instead, a footnote will be added to the article detailing to the reader that the article has been corrected.

Retractions

In situations, when the interpretation or conclusion of an article is substantially undermined, it may be necessary for published articles to be retracted. This could be due to inadvertent errors made during the research process, gross ethical breaches, fabrication of data, large amounts of plagiarism, or other reasons. Such articles threaten the integrity of scientific records and need to be retracted. Advanced Virology deals with the retraction process in accordance with COPE guidelines for retraction. If a published article is to be retracted, it shall accompany the publication of a retraction notice. Retraction notices are indexed and bidirectionally linked to the original article. The original article is watermarked as retracted and the title is amended with the prefix “Retracted article:” Partial Retractions might be published in cases where results are only partially wrong.

Expressions of concern

In some cases, editor(s) may consider publishing an expression of concern notice, where concerns of a major nature have been raised (e.g. serious research or publication misconduct), but where the outcome of the investigation is inconclusive or where due to various complexities the investigation will not be complete for a considerable time. An expression of concern notice will detail the points of concern and what actions, if any, are in progress. An expression of concern notice may be superseded by a subsequent correction or retraction notice, but will remain part of the permanent published record.

Removal of published content

Under some exceptional circumstances, Advanced Virology and Kenzym Publishers reserve the right to completely remove a published material, or part of it, from its online platforms and relevant index databases, where leaving it available will constitute an illegal act or be likely to lead to significant harm. Such actions may be taken under rare circumstances when there are serious problems that cannot be resolved by a retraction or correction. Removal of published content will be considered in situations such as: (i) content is defamatory, infringes a third party’s intellectual property right, right to privacy, or other legal right, or is otherwise unlawful; (ii) a court or government order has been issued, or is likely to be issued, requiring removal of such content; (iii) content, if acted upon, would pose an immediate and serious risk to health. Removal may be temporary or permanent. The metadata (e.g. title and authors) will be retained and will be accompanied by a statement explaining why the content has been removed.

Updates and scholarly discussions

Addenda

If the author(s) of a contribution needs to update or add some key information then, this can be published as an addendum which may or may not be subject to peer-review depending on the editor(s) assessment. However, the addenda do not contradict the original publication and are not used to fix errors (for which a correction notice will be published). Addenda are bidirectionally linked to the original contribution.

Comments including response and rejoinder

Comments are short articles that outline an observation on a published article and may be submitted by readers to the journal editor for publication. Comments may be subject to peer review, and will be shared with the authors of the published contribution to invite them to submit a response which may also be subject to peer review. The authors’ response may be shared with the commentator to allow him to submit a rejoinder which may be subject to peer review as well. No further correspondence will be considered for publication. The editor may decide to reject correspondence at any point before the comment, response and rejoinder are finalized. All published comments, responses, and rejoinders will be bidirectionally linked to the published contribution to which they relate.

Appeal against rejection

Authors can appeal against a rejection of a manuscript if they can demonstrate that an error has been made by an editor or reviewer in determining the final decision, demonstrate a convincing case of bias in the process, or if important additional data is provided. Such appeals should be directed to the journal editor via the editorial office of Advanced Virology. Only one appeal is permitted for each manuscript. Final decisions on appeals will be made by the editorial board member handling the paper or the editor.

Complaints

Complaints about our processes or about publication ethics will in the first instance be handled by the editor responsible for the journal. If the editor is the subject of the complaint, please approach the editorial and publishing management team by email at advanced.virology@kenzym.com and policy.complaint@kenzym.com.

Kenzym Publishers is committed to ensuring that journal editors adhere to the best practices and industry standards, for example COPE guidelines. Editor(s) may seek advice from our staff, and then decide on a course of action and provide feedback to the complainant. Please understand that complaint resolution and/or any relevant investigations may take some time.

If the complainant remains dissatisfied with the handling of their complaint, it will be escalated to the journal's editorial and publishing management team for investigation. If no publishing contact is identified in journal guidelines, send the query to policy.complaint@kenzym.com.