Plagiarism refers to intentional copying of other people’s work (text, figures, tables, equations or illustrations) without proper attribution to the original source. Plagiarism also includes duplicate publication, sometimes called self-plagiarism, where an author reuses own copyrighted material without proper attribution. In a type of duplicate publication, called salami-slicing, authors extract and re-publish small amounts of data in increments from their previously published articles.
Detection of Plagiarism before Publication
The Bioscientist Journal discourages plagiarism and includes a statement about it in Instructions available to authors. The COPYLEAKS PLAGIARISM CHECKER, PREMIUM (Copyleaks Inc. 700 Canal St., Stamford Connecticut, 06902, USA) is employed to check the originality of all articles before they go into our review process. The articles are categorized and treated as follows:
● Detection of <5% plagiarism: the manuscript goes into the review process and plagiarism eliminated as part of the review process
● Detection of 5 - 30% plagiarism: the manuscript is sent back to the author. A preview of suspected plagiarized material is provided and the author is required to revise the manuscript and re-submit.
● Detection of> 30% plagiarism: the manuscript is rejected. If however, the authors choose, they may revise the manuscript but submission to the Bioscientist Journal will attract conditions applicable to fresh submissions, including payment of our article processing fee.
Detection of Plagiarism after Publication
If a manuscript gets published in the journal before plagiarism is detected, the Bioscientist Journal will take one or more of the following actions:
● Detection of < 30% plagiarism: the article is retracted. The author is provided a preview of suspected plagiarized material and requested to revise and re-submit. The author is also required to make another payment of article page charges. The corrected manuscript is then published again on different pages or a different volume of the journal to distinguish it from the previously published version.
● Detection of > 30% plagiarism: the article is retracted and a disclaimer issued. The Bioscientist Journal will not publish such an article again. The Bioscientist Journal may take further action involving reports to the author’s institution, funder of the research and the copyright commissions of the country of origin of author.