In addition to the recent changes of our policies towards the research integrity issues (1), in February 2013, Biochemia Medica has joined CrossRef, a non-profit organization for promotion of scholarly publication research through reference linking (www.crossref.org).
CrossRef
CrossRef provides a service for unique identification of all on-line published material by assigning all their members with unique identification number that can be further used for generating digital object identifiers i.e. DOI numbers. DOI number is a permanent link to published material which can never be unassigned or deleted, regardless to the journal status (e.g. changes of the journal title, publisher, web page etc.).
Therefore, all manuscripts published in Biochemia Medica are assigned a DOI number which is accessible in on-line as well as in PDF version of the article.
CrossCheck
Being a CrossRef member provides us also the opportunity to implement some additional CrossRef services, one of which is CrossCheck (www.crossref.org/crosscheck/index.html).
CrossCheck is a plagiarism detection service which enables comparison of submitted manuscript with large database of published material. The result of such comparison is text similarity report which highlights all parts of the manuscript found to be identical to already published material in the database. CrossCheck service uses iThenticate plagiarism detection software developed by Turnitin, a leading organization for plagiarism detection.
Manuscript workflow and editorial policy
Since February 2013, all manuscript submitted to Biochemia Medica are first reviewed by the Editor-in-chief (EIC). EIC decides whether the manuscript should be rejected or forwarded to peer-review. Manuscripts are rejected mostly for being out of the scope, but also due to the insufficient methodological quality and the lack of novelty. Those manuscripts which are considered as eligible for peer-review are first assigned to Research integrity editor (before sending the manuscript for peer-review) who is responsible for submitting the text to CrossCheck analysis and reviewing the results of the text similarity analysis.
Every case is given careful individual consideration by RIE and is treated in accordance with guidelines proposed by Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). RIE provides a recommendation to the EIC on whether the manuscript should: a) be forwarded to peer-review and subsequently considered for publication; b) corrected for suspected parts prior to peer-review; or c) be immediately rejected. Final decision on the manuscript is with the EIC.
Biochemia Medica is committed to continuously improve its policy towards the research integrity and responsible publishing (2,3). We hope that this new research integrity policy and our new algorithm for manuscript processing will help us to further increase the overall quality of our Journal. We will keep improving our editorial policies in accordance with the relevant guidelines given by leading organizations in publication ethics and adopt recommended practices and algorithms in order to prevent scientific misconduct.
