Focus and Scope

Biochemistry Applications is a comprehensive, high-quality international open-access journal that brings together multi-industry features of biochemistry technology and application. The journal provides a good communication platform for scholars and experts from various industries, and we welcome the submissions of original research articles, review articles, case reports, commentaries, etc.

Topics include but are not limited to:

• molecular biology
• molecular basis of biological processes
• structural biology
• gene and protein
• synthetic biology
• membrane function
• drugs and pharmaceutics
• cell biology
• theoretical biochemistry
• advances in imaging techniques and data analysis

Section Policies

Original Research Articles

Original research article should contain completely new principal research testifying major contributions to the field. The study should represent new findings or discoveries in a subject area that were not published before. The report may contain significant findings, methodology importance and considerable evidence to the conclusions.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Review Articles

Review article is summarized descriptions of recent findings and significant developments at particular subject area of research considering the Journal’s scope. They should include critical assessments of novel technologies, evaluation of subject advancement, elucidate unresolved questions, comparative analysis with a substantial coverage of previous works and highlight future prospects. Although there are no restrictions with the length and content of a review, authors should consider drawing readers’ attention and interest with quality information.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Editorials

Editorial reflects the opinion of an Editorial Board member or staff for particular Journal highlighting recent changes, concerned issues or announcements in relevance to the journal. This may include editorial management and policies.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Case Reports

Case report summarizes the execution of a collaborative research program that is directly related to the advancement of biochemistry applications.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Commentary

Commentary contains unsolicited commentaries or analysis from the reader(s) targeting specific published articles in the journal.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Methods

Method presents new or improved version of experimental methods, tests or procedures pertaining to the field of biochemistry applications.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Erratum

Erratum is a notification of a significant error made by the editors that affects the scholarly record or the scientific integrity of a published article. An erratum is always accompanied by Publisher Correction of the error. The corrections will not be made directly in the already-published articles. Authors who notice an error in their published articles should contact editorial-ba@apacsci.com.

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Peer Review Process

Manuscripts submitted to the Journal will undergo a rigorous double blind peer review process to ensure the scientific quality of the manuscript is on par with the Journal’s standards. Reviewers are requested to provide authentic, and constructive comments for the assigned manuscript on time.

Reviewers could be the Journal’s Editorial Board Members or experts in this field. Before becoming a reviewer, editors should assess their own potential conflicts, and the candidates should declare any possible conflicts to ensure to make objective evaluation and comments.

Primarily Check

After the plagiarism check, the Editor-in-Chief will evaluate the manuscript, including its format, and whether the research matches the scope of this Journal. Then, the Editor-in-Chief or an associate editor will assign it to at least two expert peer reviewers. Authors could recommend or avoid reviewers, but the Publisher reserves the right to adopt them.

Peer Review

Once agreeing to review the assigned manuscript, the reviewer will get full access to the entire manuscript (at least 3 weeks are allowed). Both the reviewer and the author are anonymous in this process. The assigned manuscript does not contain any identifying information, including names, affiliations, fundings, and acknowledgements.

Review Decision

• Accept: the manuscript will undergo the copyediting and proofreading stages without editorial revision.
• Minor revision: the manuscript only needs minor revisions before accepted. It does not need a peer review process any more, and will be accepted after revision (usually 2 weeks).
• Major revision: the manuscript needs more revisions within 4 weeks. It will be assigned to the same or new reviewers for further assessment.
• Reject: comments from the reviewers will be sent to the author.

Production

Once a manuscript is accepted, the editorial staff will organize the production of the paper, which entails copyediting, layout editing, and proofreading.

The whole submission, peer-review, and editorial processes are maintained through the OJS system. The average number of weeks between article submission & publication is about 8 weeks.

Confidentiality

Manuscripts under peer review should be strictly confidential. Reviewers must not share any details or discuss the research with others. The Editorial Office must not disclose any information about the manuscript to anyone except reviewers, co-authors.

Publication Frequency

The publication frequency of Biochemistry Applications is semi-annual.

Open Access Policy

This journal is in the Gold Open Access model. This means that the article is universally and freely accessible without charge to users.

• Higher Visibility, Availability and Citations – free and unlimited accessibility of the publication over the internet without any restrictions increases citation of the article
• Ease of Search – publications are easily searchable in search engines and indexing databases
• Rapid Publication – accepted papers are immediately published online

All published content is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium under the condition that the original work is properly cited.

Editorial Policies

Authors must avoid academic misconduct including plagiarism, ensure the manuscripts are written in accordance to the “Author Guidelines”, and comply with publishing ethics.

All the manuscripts submitted will be screened for the language, novelty and relevance to the scope of the Journal. The manuscripts will be treated as confidential materials, and all the participants will not be disclosed to anyone except editorial staff, reviewers and editors.

A manuscript would not be accepted if it has been published or is currently under consideration for publication in any other journals. The author will need to notify the editorial team if the data in their submission has been presented in conferences or preprint.

Before submitting, please read the editorial policies, including Open Access Policy, Publishing Ethics, Conflict of Interest, Plagiarism, Preprint Policy, Erratum, Retraction & Withdrawal Policy, Authorship, APCs.

Publishing Ethics

Asia Pacific Academy of Science Pte. Ltd. follows the rules, regulations and best practices set by:

• Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals from the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)
• The Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing as stipulated by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) 

Experiments should be carried out in accordance with the guidelines laid down by the International Animal Ethics Committee (IAEC), ICMR, or local Institutional Ethics Committee (IEC) and in accordance with local laws and regulations. All studies using human or animal subjects should include an explicit statement identifying the review and ethics committee approval for each study, if applicable. An informed consent should be obtained for all clinical treatment where disclosure is required regarding medical information that includes discussion on the risks, benefits, and alternatives.

The Editorial Office adopts a zero-tolerance policy concerning any misconducts, including plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification/fabrication, among others. The journal editors take all possible misconducts seriously. The editors, authors or readers can forward their concerns to the Journal if they find out that the description in a submitted article may constitute an academic fraud, research misconduct or publication malpractice. The complainant could direct all correspondence to editorial-ba@apacsci.com. The Editorial Office will deal with it according to the procedure set out in the COPE.

Ethical Oversight

BA always follows the Ethical Oversight policy of COPE, and monitors every stage of the completion of best practice followed by the Core Practice and the ethical problem of COPE. All academic misconduct is strictly prohibited. If there is any potential for, including but not limited to academic fraud, plagiarism, and multiple contributions, the manuscript will not be assigned to the next stage for evaluation, and authors are responsible for explaining doubts to the Editorial Office. WT promises that all the submissions are private, and they will not be disclosed to third parties unless the publishing purposes. Authors, editors, and reviewers should expose any potential conflict of interest timely according to the Conflict of Interest Policy.

For subjects involving humans or animals, WT asks authors to be deeply concerned the privacy and welfare of the subjects based on the policy of Statement of Human and Animal Rights. Authors should provide the approval from the institutional ethical regulator or committee. All the information of the subjects is private, and authors should hide the identifiable information such as face picture, name, and fingerprint picture. Most importantly, Informed Content Statement from all the research subjects should be obtained, and authors need to inform the subjects that this research will be published in future. For the vulnerable, it is necessary to obtain oral or written Informed Content Statement from their parent of kinship.

Section Collection Policy

The Section Collection program has been driven by Asia Pacific Academy of Science Pte. Ltd. for a new chance to run an open access journal. This program aims to collect multidisciplinary topics, and concentrate authors from diverse research fields to focus on a special theme. It is great attempt to develop new ideas and applications. Section editorial team is composed of many scientists whose research fields covering various interests. They all supervise the implementation of the program, and the editorial process must comply with editorial policies of the journal.

A Section Collection is usually launched by an expert with great trust among peers and invited by the Editorial Office, or scholars could apply a section collection. Section Editors are representatives focusing on a theme from multidisciplinary topics. They have different research background, and gather to initiate new ideas and collaborations. Great responsibilities of Section Editors include:

• Preparing the title, summary, keywords, submission deadline, etc.
• Preparing a potential contributors’ list.
• Suspecting and contributing to the editorial progress , including but not limited to the initial screening, peer-reviewed process, and final decision making.

 

Workflow of Section Collection

Section Editors are invited to prepare the summary of Section Collections, and advert the project. New manuscripts should be submitted via the open journal system, and then Section Collection Editors will evaluate the research field and the integrality of the manuscripts. Assistant Editors will screen the originality by iThenticate. Any manuscript with potential misconduct must be prevented to the next stage. The Editorial Office will pass it for the double-blind peer-reviewed process for further review comments with no less than two reviewers. The Section Collection Editors have the responsibility to supervise the rigor and scientificity of the whole process. All the comments are collected to Section Editors, who will make the final decision on the manuscript such as acceptance, revision, or rejection. Accepted manuscripts will go through the production stage. Meanwhile, authors will get the article accepted notification. Published papers will be archived in the current issue of the journal, and also collected on the Section Collections page.

Authorship

According to the ICMJE, authors should meet the following three points at the same time:

• have made substantial contributions to the conception, design, acquisition and analysis of data;
• have made intellectual contribution to writing the manuscript or revising it;
• provide final approval of the version to be published.

All authors must read and approve the final version of the manuscript. All authors have the right to explain the questions raised, and agree the author rank before publishing.

Changes to Authorship

The Editorial Office considers the authorship list is definitive by the time the original submission is received.

Any addition, deletion or rearrangement of author names should be made only before the manuscript is accepted for publication. The corresponding author should provide the reasons for the change in the authorship list and the proof of written confirmation from all authors (including the existing authors, author(s) to be added and/or removed) agreeing with such changes.

The requests for authorship changes need to be approved by the Editorial Office before any changes can be made.

Conflict of Interest

During the peer-review process, authors, editors and reviewers all should avoid any potential or actual conflict of interest. It is to be noted that even perceptions of conflicts of interest are as important as the actual conflicts of interest.

• For authors: authors must declare any potential conflict of interest in related to the research when submitting the manuscript, including academic competition, and financial benefits, especially the agreement with research sponsors, that could make some influence on your study results. The avoidance list from the author(s) is welcome.
• For editors: editors should assess their own potential conflicts, that they must not be one of the co-authors or at the some organization with one of the authors, nor any potential conflict of interest related to the research; otherwise, they should avoid participating in the whole peer-review process.
• For reviewers: reviewers should avoid relationship with any author, e.g. work at the some organization with one of the authors, being one of the co-authors. If they feel unable to be objective, they must declare potential interest, and decline to review the manuscript. If the reviewers are on the list of avoidance list from the author(s), and they will not be invited to be a reviewer.

Plagiarism

Asia Pacific Academy of Science Pte. Ltd. is a member of Crossref. All submissions are screened by iThenticate. Any plagiarism (fabrication or falsification of data) is unacceptable, including duplicate publication without proper citations.

The Publisher will follow the flowcharts of COPE to handle cases of potential plagiarism in a submitted manuscript or a published article. All the authors and their institutions will be informed about the case.

Any complaint about reviewer suspected to have appropriated an author’s ideas or data, the journal office will investigate, and react according to the procedure set out in COPE's guidance as a flowchart.

Erratum, Retraction & Withdrawal policy

Erratum

Editors, authors and readers, whoever find a correction is required in the publication, please feel free to contact editorial-ba@apacsci.com. Please clearly state the content needing to be changed. Please also send the article title, DOI, and page number to us. Upon approving by the Editorial Office, an erratum will be published in the current issue.

Retraction

The journal considers retracting the publication including but are not limited to:

• Editors have clear evidence that the result is unreliable, there is a tendency of misconduct, or evident calculation error, etc.
• It reports unethical research including plagiarism.

The journal will post a notice of retraction by clearly identified as a retraction with the reason(s), and link to the retracted article wherever possible to minimize harmful effects.

WT abides by Retraction Guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Please note that APC will not be refunded due to the retraction of an article.

Withdrawal

This journal does not support withdrawal of publication considering that it may be suspected of academic misconduct. If the author can provide reasonable application to the Editorial Office after the manuscript has been accepted (but not yet published), and once the Editorial Office has agreed it, then the processing fee of USD 200 is chargeable upon withdrawal. Authors are advised to keep in mind that an article should only be withdrawn if the authors detect significant errors or flaws, as it is not an acceptable practice to withdraw an article after it has been sent for peer review. Once the approval of submission withdrawal is granted, the submission will be removed from the Journal’s online submission system, and a confirmation email of submission withdrawal will be sent to the authors. The withdrawal process is considered to be complete once the author receives a confirmation of withdrawal from the Journal Editorial Office.

Language

The language used in manuscripts submitted to this Journal is required to be English. Authors from non-English speaking countries may have their manuscripts professionally edited before submission to ensure the article content is fully understood by readers.

Copyright

Authors retain the copyright, and they agree to make their original work completely available and free to be used, copied, downloaded, distributed and reused as long as the original source is properly cited. Authors should declare that there is no any academic misconduct, and will grant the right of first publication by signing a License for Publishing before formal publication.

License

Papers will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) by default. The Journal displays licensing information in its articles.

According to this license, users are free to:

• Share: copy and redistribute the material;
• Adapt: transform, reuse, remix and build upon the material;
• Attribute: distribute the material on the premise of the correct original citation.

Preprint Policy

Authors are permitted to post their original research manuscripts without peer-review to preprint servers before submitting to our journal. But authors are not allowed to post any versions of articles that have been revised on the preprint server during or after the peer-review process.

The manuscript whose corresponding preprint version has been indexed (e.g. in MEDLINE or PubMed) will not be considered.

We encourage formal citation of preprints in the reference list if appropriate.

Permissions and Reprints

The authors reserve the copyright. Papers will be published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) by default. It is free to use, copy, download, distribute and reuse the work as long as the original source is properly cited. All the publications could be explored to the e-version; if you’d like to discuss in more detail how our content could work with your marketing strategy, please contact editorial-ba@apacsci.com.

Statement of Informed Consent

All papers submitted to Biochemistry Applications should declare that they have obtain the "statement of informed consent" written or oral during submitting. Any paper lacking it will not be considered for publication.

Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Nonessential identifying details should be omitted. All information which could contribute to identify patients, including patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, etc., unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives explicit written or oral informed consent for publication. If identifying characteristics are de-identified, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning, and editors will note that. Furthermore, individuals who provide writing assistance should be identified by the authors, and they should disclose the funding source for this assistance.

Statement of Human and Animal Rights

All papers submitted to Biochemistry Applications should declare agreement with the following "statement of human and animal rights". Any paper lacking it will not be considered for publication. Papers describing procedures involving humans or animals must include an explicit and easily identifiable statement pointing out that the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000 and 2008. If any doubt exists as to whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach, and then demonstrate that the institutional ethical committee explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study.

When reporting experiments on animals, authors should be asked to indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.

Indexing & Archiving

• All the publications will be archived by Portico.
• Authors are encouraged to self-archive the final version of their published articles into institutional repositories (such as those listed in the Directory of Open Access Repositories).

Authors are also encouraged to use the final PDF version published on the website of Academic Publisher especially on personal academic media.

Article Processing Charges (APCs)

Asia Pacific Academy of Science Pte. Ltd. publishes all its journals in Gold Open Access format. In order to defray our editorial and production costs, authors of the accepted articles are required to pay an article processing charge (APC) of USD 800. The charges will come from authors' institutes or research funding bodies.

Waiver Policy

The Journal develops a waiver policy for authors from low-income countries. Please contact editorial-ba@apacsci.com for application. WT reserves the right to approve or reject a waiver application.

Declaimer

This journal  is not liable to the statements, perspectives, and opinions contained in the published articles. The appearance of advertisements in the journal shall not be construed as a warranty, endorsement, or approval of the products or services advertised and/or the safety thereof. This Journal and the Publisher disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any ideas or products referred to in the articles or advertisements.

As an author, once submitting a manuscript, it means that you have been aware of all publishing policies & ethics,  and will strictly abide by them.

As a reviewer, once reviewing a manuscript, it means that you must be aware of the peer review policies, and proactively disclose of all potential conflicts of interest, and guarantee that the article will be judged fairly and objectively. 

Advertising Policy

All advertising policies are independent of editorial decisions. Advertisements must comply with the regulations of the local country. For more inquiries, please get in touch via editorial-ba@apacsci.com.