Authorship and Contributions

Authorship must be limited to those who have contributed substantially to the work. All authors hold responsibility for the data presented, and the major responsibility lies with the corresponding author. Co-authors who make specific, limited contributions to a paper are responsible for their contributions but may have only limited responsibility for other results. The corresponding author must ensure data accuracy and assess the contributions of authors to list them as authors and take their written permission to list them as authors. Those with minimal or indirect contribution may be listed in the acknowledgement section. Authors must indicate their specific contributions to the published work, which will be published as a footnote to the paper.

 

Corresponding authors

Throughout submission and peer review, a single corresponding author is responsible for providing all necessary manuscript information and interactions with the editorial office. After acceptance, multiple corresponding authors, who are responsible for checking the accuracy of the proof contents and who will act as points of contact for queries about the published article, are permissible; these authors should be indicated on the title page.

 

Group Authors

A group author is an organization or conglomerate of researchers that is collectively credited with authorship. An individual can appear as both an author and a member of a group author on the same paper.

 

ORCID and affiliation

Polymorphism encourages all authors to use their ORCID identifier when submitting papers. ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher.

 

Competing Interest

Polymorphism recognizes the multiplicity of financial and other competing interests confronting authors, referees, and editors. All authors, members, referees, and editors must disclose any association that poses or could be reasonably perceived as posing a financial or intellectual competing interest in connection with the manuscript. In case of a competing interest disclosed either by an author or an editor, a descriptive footnote will be included with the published article. Failure to disclose a competing interest at submission may result in author sanctions. Please see ‘publication ethics’ link for further details.

 

Author Responsibilities

During manuscript submission, authors are required to complete the online form, disclose any competing interests, and acknowledge all funding sources supporting the work. The corresponding author must ensure that all authors have disclosed any competing interests.

 

Editor and Reviewer Responsibilities

When asked to evaluate a manuscript, reviewers and editors must disclose any association that poses a competing interest in connection with the manuscript. Referees and editors are asked to recuse themselves from handling a paper if the competing interest makes them unable to make an impartial scientific judgment or evaluation. A referee or editor who has a competing interest but believes that it does not preclude his or her making a proper judgment must disclose to the journal the nature of the interest.

 

Embargo Policy

From the day of online publication of abstract, the authors are allowed to publish a note on their findings in press or media.

 

Errata

During the review process, copyediting and final publication, the authors are informed at every step for proofreading. Still, if the authors identify errors anytime after publication of PDF file, they should write to the journal for publication of erratum. In case of substantial errors leading to the change of conclusion, Polymorphism reserves the right to retract articles. Otherwise, article can also be retracted by the authors or by the editors because of pervasive error or unsubstantiated or irreproducible data. Articles may be retracted, for example, because of honest error, scientific misconduct, or plagiarism.

 

Human and Animal Participants and Clinical Trials

Studies must have been approved by the author's institutional review board. Authors must include in the methods section a brief statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments. For all experiments involving human participants, authors must also include a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all participants, or provide a statement why this was not necessary. For details, please see ‘Human and animal ethics’ section.

 

License to Publish

All authors must sign a licence to publish their article upon final acceptance. The form will be sent to the authors by email after the acceptance of their article.

 

Materials and Data Availability

In the best interest of the scientific community, we encourage material distribution and exchange. The authors who used public funding sources should encourage sharing of research material such as DNA clones, softwares and other sources to help others. Data availability is the responsibility of the corresponding author. There is a clause in the author signature form where the corresponding author needs to disclose data availability statement.

 

Open Access

All article published in Polymorphism are available in open access free of payment.

 

Preprint Servers

We do not encourage publication of article on preprint servers; however, this is not the criteria for rejecting the articles.

 

Previous Publication

Previous publication of data or part thereof in any form would call for rejection or retraction of published article. However, publication in the form of an abstract in conference or as a thesis for fulfilment of a degree is allowed.

 

Research misconduct

All work should be free of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism as defined by the US Office of Research Integrity. In cases of suspected or alleged misconduct, Polymorphism follows the recommended procedures from COPE. Please see ‘publication ethics’ section for further details.

 

Resubmissions and appeals

In case of rejection and suitable reasons, the authors may appeal against the decision of the editor, but the editor’s decision in these cases shall be final.

 

Statistical Analysis

Statistical analyses should be done on all available data and not just on data from a "representative experiment." Statistical analyses should include data source, data limits, software used and the method of analysis followed.

 

For science policy

We believe all authors, reviewers and editors to work for science and in the best interest of the scientific community. All decisions should be taken keeping the scientific welfare in mind.