Ethics

BASE follow the COPE (Committee on Publication Ethics) « code of conduct for journal publishers » and « The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity » (ALLEA).

1. Animal Research

For articles describing animal research, the section 'materials and methods' must mention the experimental protocol number and the name of the animal ethic committee that approved the protocol.

For experiments conducted in laboratories accredited by the European Community, animal testing must comply with the European Directive 2010/63/eu. For Belgian accredited research units, animal experiments must respect the Royal decree of May 29th, 2013.

Without this warranty, papers are automatically rejected.

2. Peer Review

The corresponding author may only suggest reviewers with whom they have no relationship and have never been associated in other publications. Identity, email address and affiliation of the proposed reviewers are always verified. Unless explicit agreement, the author undertakes to not contact the reviewers.

To make evaluation process as fair as possible, the instructions to ensure the integrity of the blind peer-review should be strictly followed (deletion of author names and their affiliations in the header section and in the property of the manuscript).

For papers with at least one author belonging to CRA-W or University of Liège, the editorial board shall choose reviewers outside these institutions.

The reviewer agrees that he may neither distribute the article, nor use the results before publication and that the manuscript must be reviewed within one month. If problems occur with a reviewer, the editorial board may blacklist his or her name.

3. Fraud and plagiarism

All items submitted to BASE are checked using ULiège's anti-plagiarism software.

When plagiarism is detected, we follow the recommendations of COPE (https://publicationethics.org/). The level of plagiarism is assessed and, depending on its severity, the following sanctions may be applied:

  1. You and your co-authors receive an email informing you of the detection of plagiarism and its definition. You are asked to correct your article according to the principles of good practice.
  2. We inform you that in the event of plagiarism detected during a subsequent submission, it will be directly rejected without the possibility of amendment. This is a matter for all authors of the original manuscript.
  3. In case of severe plagiarism, and depending on the evaluation of the authors' intention, the submission will be rejected, the authorities of the authors' parent institutions may be informed, and we also reserve the right to no longer accept publication from the main author, or even co-authors, for a period of up to four years.

Double publications and papers with self-plagiarism are also affected by these rules, as well as data fraud (data fabrication, data manipulation and data falsification).

4. Conflict of interest

In the cover-letter, the corresponding author must declare on honor that the described research is not subject to any conflict of interest (financial, commercial, contractual or patent).

5. Co-authors

In the cover-letter, the corresponding author must also declare on honor that all co-authors have approved the submitted article and are aware of all the instructions (particularely regarding plagiarism, fraud and conflict of interest).

All co-authors receive a receipt upon submission.

The corresponding author must also specify the individual contribution of each contributor.

 

Complaints about animal research ethics, peer review process, fraud and plagiarism, conflict of interest or authorship must be send to the editorial team