The policies that govern how Genesis Biologica reviews, publishes, licenses and preserves research. Every policy on this page has its own permanent link.
Genesis Biologica follows the COPE Core Practices and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing issued jointly by COPE, DOAJ, OASPA and WAME. Each policy below is separately linkable — use the anchor link when a directory or index asks for a policy URL.
Genesis Biologica is a fully open access journal. Every article is free to read from the moment of publication. There is no embargo, no subscription, no paywall and no registration requirement of any kind.
The journal meets the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of open access: readers may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search and link to the full texts of articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, and use them for any other lawful purpose consistent with the article licence.
Genesis Biologica does not operate a hybrid model. No article in this journal is ever placed behind access control.
Authors retain copyright in their articles. Genesis Biologica does not require a copyright transfer.
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Readers may copy and redistribute the article in any medium or format, provided the author and source are credited, the article is not altered or built upon, and the use is not commercial.
Funder mandates. Where a funder requires a different licence, authors may request CC BY 4.0 at submission at no additional charge. This applies to work funded by Wellcome, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the European Research Council, Horizon Europe, UKRI and other cOAlition S funders. State the request in the Licence Selection statement of your manuscript. Authors retain copyright in every case.
Licence to publish. On acceptance, authors grant Genesis Biologica a non-exclusive, irrevocable licence to publish, reproduce, translate into markup formats, distribute and sub-licence the article and its metadata — including supply to indexing, abstracting, aggregation, discovery and preservation services — and to authorise text and data mining. The grant is non-exclusive: authors remain free to deposit, reuse and republish their own work without restriction or embargo.
This grant is separate from, and additional to, the Creative Commons licence offered to readers. It is what permits abstracting and aggregation services to carry the article, and it does not limit any right the author holds.
Licence and copyright information is displayed on every article landing page, in the
PDF, and in machine-readable form in the article's JATS XML
(ali:license_ref) and Crossref deposit (license_ref).
All research content published in Genesis Biologica is peer reviewed.
Model. Double-anonymous. Authors do not know the identity of reviewers, and reviewers do not know the identity of authors. Submissions are made as two files — an anonymised manuscript and a separate title page — and the platform runs an automated anonymity check before a manuscript is released to reviewers.
Reviewers per manuscript. No manuscript is accepted on fewer than two independent external reviews. Reviewers are subject experts who are not members of the journal's editorial staff and who have no conflict of interest with the work.
Process. Submissions pass a formatting and scope check, plagiarism and AI-content screening, and a technical compliance check before a handling editor is assigned. The handling editor invites reviewers, collects reports, and makes a recommendation. The final decision rests with the Editor-in-Chief.
Editorial submissions. Manuscripts authored by editors or editorial board members are handled by an independent editor with no access to the decision record, and the editor-author takes no part in any stage of the assessment.
What is not peer reviewed. Editorials, Letters to the Editor, Commentaries and Corrections are assessed editorially rather than by external peer review, and are labelled as such in the article metadata so that indexing services classify them correctly.
Genesis Biologica follows the COPE Core Practices and the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing issued jointly by COPE, DOAJ, OASPA and WAME.
Authorship is limited to those who made a substantial contribution to the work, and every author's contribution is recorded using the CRediT taxonomy. Changes to the author list after submission require written agreement from all authors. Guest, gift and ghost authorship are treated as misconduct.
Originality. Every submission is screened for text overlap. Duplicate submission, duplicate publication and salami slicing are grounds for rejection or retraction.
Research integrity. Data fabrication, data falsification and image manipulation are investigated under COPE guidance. Original data and unprocessed images may be requested at any stage, including after publication.
Human and animal research must have prior approval from a named ethics committee, with a protocol number and date, and must comply with the Declaration of Helsinki where human participants are involved.
Allegations of misconduct may be raised by anyone, are assessed confidentially, and are pursued regardless of the seniority of those involved or how long ago the work was published.
Authors must follow the reporting guideline appropriate to their study design and supply the completed checklist as a supplementary file:
The full catalogue is maintained by the EQUATOR Network. Where a study design has an applicable guideline, the study design must also be stated explicitly in the article title.
Every article carries a Data Availability Statement, including articles that generated no new data.
Where data are deposited, authors give the repository, the accession number or dataset DOI, and a direct link. Nucleotide and protein sequences must be deposited in GenBank, ENA or DDBJ, and structures in the PDB, before submission. Where data cannot be shared, the statement must give the specific restriction — confidentiality, ethical or legal — and say on what conditions access is possible.
During double-anonymous review, authors supply an anonymised view-only or reviewer link rather than an accession number or institutional URL, and restore the full details at acceptance.
Datasets are cited in the reference list in the same way as literature, so that data citations are captured in the article's Crossref deposit and JATS XML.
Discoverability in the subject databases depends on identifiers, not prose. Genesis Biologica requires the following in every article where they apply:
Article metadata is deposited to Crossref with references and open citations (I4OC-compliant), exposed as full-text JATS XML, and made available for harvesting over OAI-PMH.
Genesis Biologica maintains redundant backups of every published article — the version of record, its JATS XML, its PDF and all supplementary files — held independently of the live website so that the published record survives a failure of the journal platform.
Every article carries a Crossref DOI, so its citation metadata and the record of its existence are preserved independently of this website and remain resolvable if the article moves.
Third-party preservation. The journal is not yet enrolled with an external preservation service. Establishing a deposit arrangement with a recognised archive is a current priority, and this policy will be updated with the name of the service and the coverage date as soon as it is in place.
Where the journal is accepted into PubMed Central, PMC provides a further permanent, independent archive of the full text.
Authors may deposit their work in any repository they choose, at any time, with no embargo.
This applies to institutional repositories, subject repositories, preprint servers, funder repositories, personal and departmental web pages, and scholarly collaboration networks. Authors are asked to link to the version of record by its DOI.
Genesis Biologica participates in repository delivery through Jisc Publications Router and DeepGreen, so that articles reach institutional repositories automatically where those services are in use.
This policy is registered with Open policy finder (formerly Sherpa Romeo), which is where research offices and repository managers check deposit rights.
Genesis Biologica permits text and data mining of its full-text corpus for research purposes, including by automated agents.
Full text is available as JATS XML for every article, and metadata for the whole journal can be harvested over OAI-PMH. No technical measure is applied to prevent crawling or bulk retrieval, and no separate permission is required for non-commercial mining.
Machine-readable licence information is carried in each article's JATS
<permissions> block and in the Crossref deposit, including a
tdm licence reference, so that automated systems can determine reuse rights
without human intervention.
Mining for commercial purposes requires permission; contact the Editorial Office.
Currently free. The article processing charge is waived in full for every manuscript submitted on or before 31 December 2026. Authors submitting during this period pay nothing at any stage.
From 1 January 2027, manuscripts accepted for publication carry a single article processing charge:
The charge is billed in the currency appropriate to the corresponding author's location. The date of submission determines whether a charge applies, so a manuscript submitted in 2026 and accepted in 2027 remains free.
There are no other charges of any kind. No submission fee, no page charges, no colour figure charges, no charges for supplementary material, and no charge for a correction or retraction notice.
When it is payable. The charge falls due only after a manuscript has been accepted following peer review. Nothing is payable to submit, and nothing is payable if a manuscript is rejected.
Payment plays no part in editorial decisions. Editors and reviewers are not told an author's payment status, and acceptance is never conditional on payment. No author is ever asked to pay in order to be reviewed.
Publisher. Genesis Biologica is owned and published by Dr. Anami Ahuja.
Publisher's address.
Flat Number 22, Dreamland Apartment,
Pocket 10, Nasirpur, Dwarka Sector 1A,
New Delhi 110045, India
Correspondence about the journal should be sent through the Contact page.
Management. Editorial decisions are made by the Editor-in-Chief and handling editors listed on the Editorial Board page. The publisher takes no part in the assessment of any individual manuscript and has no access to reviewer identities or review reports.
Revenue sources. The journal's only source of revenue is the article processing charge described above, which is currently waived in full. The journal carries no advertising, receives no sponsorship, and sells no reprints, supplements or subscriptions. It is otherwise supported directly by the publisher.
Revenue generation has no influence on editorial decision-making. No commercial arrangement of any kind confers preferential treatment in review or publication, and the waiver period does not alter the standard applied to any manuscript.
Publishing schedule. Genesis Biologica publishes continuously, with articles assigned to a volume and issue on publication. Each article carries a permanent article number and DOI from the moment it appears.
Genesis Biologica carries no advertising of any kind on its website, in its articles, or in its correspondence, and accepts no sponsorship.
Should advertising be introduced, it would never be linked to editorial content, never be targeted on the basis of what a reader is viewing, and never be seen by editors or reviewers handling a related manuscript. Advertising decisions would be made independently of editorial decisions.
Direct solicitation. The journal does not send unsolicited bulk email inviting submissions. Invitations to submit are individual, are sent by a named editor, and relate to specific relevant work. Any message claiming to represent Genesis Biologica that does not meet this description should be reported to the Editorial Office.
The version of record is permanent. Errors are addressed by publishing a separate, linked notice — never by silently altering a published article.
All notices follow COPE retraction guidelines, are open access regardless of the status of the original, and are registered with Crossref so that the correction propagates to every index and reference manager that carries the article.
Appeals against a decision. Authors may appeal any editorial decision by writing to the Editorial Office within 30 days, setting out specifically what they believe was misjudged and responding point by point to the reviewers. Appeals are considered by an editor who was not involved in the original decision. The outcome of an appeal is final.
Complaints about editorial process, conduct, publication ethics or the behaviour of any editor, reviewer or member of staff should be addressed to the Editorial Office. Complaints are acknowledged within five working days and resolved within 30 days wherever possible.
Where a complaint concerns the Editor-in-Chief, it is escalated to the publisher and handled independently.
Complainants who are not satisfied with the outcome may refer the matter to COPE.
Generative AI tools cannot be listed as authors. Authorship carries accountability that software cannot hold.
Any use of generative AI in the conduct of the research, in the preparation of the manuscript, or in the production of figures must be disclosed in the Use of Generative AI statement, naming the tool, its version and what it was used for. Routine language correction and reference formatting do not require disclosure.
Authors remain fully responsible for everything in the manuscript, including anything produced with AI assistance — factual accuracy, the integrity of citations, and the absence of plagiarism.
Reviewers must not upload any part of a manuscript to a generative AI service. Manuscripts are confidential, and uploading one is a breach of that confidentiality regardless of the tool's data-retention terms.
Posting a preprint before or during submission is welcomed and is not treated as prior publication.
Authors must declare any preprint at submission, giving the server and the DOI. In the anonymised manuscript, give the server name only; the DOI goes on the title page. An undeclared preprint discovered during or after review is treated as a breach of the submission conditions.
On publication, Genesis Biologica registers the relationship between the preprint and the version of record with Crossref, so that citation and version linking work correctly across indexes.
A preprint makes complete anonymity impossible if a reviewer searches for the title. Declaring it lets the Editorial Office handle reviewer assignment accordingly.
Personal data supplied to Genesis Biologica — by authors, reviewers, editors and registered users — is used only for the operation of the journal: managing submissions, peer review, publication and correspondence.
Names, affiliations, ORCID iDs and the corresponding author's email are published as part of the article record and are deposited with Crossref and the indexing services, as is standard scholarly practice. Reviewer identities are never disclosed to authors.
Personal data is not sold, rented or supplied to third parties for marketing. Users may request access to, correction of, or deletion of their personal data by contacting the Editorial Office, subject to the journal's obligation to maintain the integrity of the published record.