Editorial Policies

The editors of BioResources are committed to providing a high-quality scientific journal that promotes the exchange and validation of ideas, leading to progress in fields related to use of materials, chemicals, and energy derived from lignocellulosic sources. Scientific research articles and scholarly reviews are subjected to a conventional peer-review process, using a single-blind procedure. The journal also encourages contribution of editorial opinion pieces, which may be selected, on a limited basis, at the Editors’ discretion.

The general policies of BioResources are as follows:

Submitted articles must focus on the science and technology of using materials, chemicals, or energy derived from predominantly lignocellulosic sources, such as wood, agricultural residues, paper, and related byproducts.

Subjects that will be considered outside of the scope of BioResources include, but are not limited to, food technology, pharmaceuticals, and work involving biomaterials from sources that contain relatively little cellulose or lignin.

Examples of subjects that are within the scope of the journal include, but are not limited to, advances in fiber and other natural product uses for papermaking, production of fuels from agricultural residues and woody biomass, natural and synthetic composites involving lignocellulosic biomaterials, modifications of such biomaterials to improve their performance in different applications, replacement of petroleum-based materials with such biomaterials, production of biofuels from such biomaterials, synthetic chemicals derived from lignocellulosic sources, and bio-based textiles in new applications, such as medicine.

Articles to be included in the journal must describe significant advances or significantly improved explanations and overviews (as in the case of review articles) of subjects within the scope of the journal. In addition to originality, the work must be understandable to a general audience of post-secondary-educated readers with backgrounds in areas such as chemistry, chemical engineering, biomaterials, and materials science. However, we encourage all authors to provide fundamental explanations of non-basic concepts to respect the diverse backgrounds of readers who may not be conversant in the field.

English will be used as the standard language of articles in BioResources. Prospective authors are urged to consistently adhere to a standard form of English, following U.S., British, or Australian English conventions. All scientific measurements should also conform to SI standards, e.g., meters, kilograms, and liters. There will be no set standard method of describing measurement suffixes outside of the SI frame, e.g., volume may be expressed in liters, milliliters (mL), deciliters (dL), cm³, cc, etc.

Prospective authors are required to faithfully follow the format provided in the appropriate article template selected from those provided in the Author Instructions. In essence, the authors will format their articles such that they are essentially ready to publish, with the exception of page numbers.

Authors are asked, as far as they are able, to make clear differentiations in their writing between (a) facts learned from sources that they identify (followed by a citation), (b) facts that are presumed to be common knowledge (usually expressed in the present tense and requiring no citation), (c) observations made by the authors as part of the described work (usually expressed in the past tense), and (d) hypotheses and conjecture (often preceded by words such as “it is proposed that” or “possibly”).

Submission of articles advancing unconventional hypotheses or frameworks of thought is expressly welcome, although this is not a guarantee of acceptance for publication. The fact that experimental evidence or theoretical work remains incomplete, inconclusive, or conflicted will not necessarily prevent the publication of a submitted article. On the other hand, it is required in such cases that there be significant new evidence or new thinking that helps to support the unconventional views advanced in the article. Articles submitted as rebuttals will be treated independently by the editors, not necessarily on the basis of a presumed “equal time” criterion.

Commercialism will not be permitted in items submitted to BioResources. For instance, brand names of materials used in an investigation are to appear only once in an article, in the Experimental section. The research materials or equipment must be described in chemical and physical terms. Work that merely shows one product working better than another product will not be considered for publication.

Authors retain rights to their material, which, upon acceptance by the journal, is uploaded and made public on the Internet. The journal retains no copyright. Users have the right to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles in the journal, and users can use, reuse, and build upon the material in the journal for non-commercial purposes as long as attribution is given when appropriate or necessary.

By submitting an article to BioResources, the author grants the journal the right to publish the contents as a PDF file on the Internet, dependent on the results of the review process and subsequent judgment of an editor. The right to publish the article is an exclusive right held by BioResources until the article is either rejected or published and the article cannot be submitted to another journal during our review process. In cases where the journal declines to publish and so informs the author(s), this right of publication is ceded back to the author(s).

The peer-review process for research articles and scholarly reviews is carried out in an automated fashion. Each article is sent to be judged by reviewers working independently, without knowledge of each others’ identities. The reviewers are selected by the Co-Editors or by their designees.

The editors reserve the right to make a final judgement on whether or not to approve an article for inclusion in BioResources. This decision will be made based on their judgements relative to the weight of input from the reviewers, the degree to which the article falls within the scope of the journal (see earlier), the degree to which the article is expected to interest substantial numbers of readers, the uniqueness of the work, the overall quality of the work, the effectiveness of the writing in engaging the interest of potential readers, and other factors listed elsewhere on this site.

Authors are responsible for making sure that the contents of submitted articles have not previously been published. An article will be considered as having been previously published if more than 1000 copies have been produced (for instance, as part of a very large conference), if the material has been posted on the Internet, or if the article has been offered for sale to the public either alone or as part of a journal, book, or website item. Academic theses, which can be published or placed on the web, will not be counted as publications. Conference articles will not be counted as being already published, as long as the numbers of copies falls below the level described earlier in this paragraph. Authors must disclose in their Acknowledgements section any previous publication of contents of their work in conference preprints, etc., and also state whether the copyright owner has granted them permission to republish the material. Presentations and abstracts shorter than 1500 words will not be considered to be prior publications.

Authors have the responsibility to not copy the work of others. This responsibility extends to having made a good-faith effort to cite important previous work that the authors have used in the process of carrying out your work and in describing the results of that work. Evidence of verbatim copying (except for short quotes with proper attribution and quotation marks), or paraphrasing the work of others without proper attribution, will be sufficient grounds for rejection of an article. Reviewers, in the peer-review process, are asked to report to the editors any obvious evidence of plagiarism that comes to their attention. The editors reserve the right to reject or delete articles for which irrefutable evidence of unauthorized copying becomes known to them.

There is no subscription fee for BioResources. Rather, to promote accessibility and impact, the main website of BioResources is made available, free of charge, to all Internet users.

The main website of BioResources, including the pages that are most likely to be accessed by potential readers, will remain free of commercial content. This restriction is intended to help maintain a dignified spirit of scientific and scholarly inquiry within the journal.

BioResources will be organized as a quarterly journal, using volume numbers and issue numbers, i.e., there will be four issues per volume (per year).