Editorial Policies & Ethical Publishing

Plant Science Horizons (PSH) maintains policies intended to support independent editorial decision-making, fair double-blind peer review, responsible authorship, transparent reporting, research integrity, appropriate correction of the scholarly record, and open-access dissemination. These policies apply to authors, reviewers, editors, guest editors, editorial-board members, and the publisher.

Purpose and application

These policies define the principles governing manuscript assessment, peer review, editorial decisions, publication ethics, conflicts of interest, authorship, data and image integrity, research ethics, open-access publication, complaints, appeals, corrections, expressions of concern, retractions, and other matters affecting the reliability of the scholarly record.

The policies apply from initial submission through peer review, acceptance, publication, and post-publication assessment. PSH may revise these policies as editorial practice and recognized standards in scholarly publishing evolve.

Independent editorial decision-making

Editorial decisions are based on the manuscript's scientific merit, methodological quality, originality, clarity, integrity, relevance to PSH, and the adequacy of evidence supporting the conclusions.

• Editorial decisions must not be influenced by commercial relationships, sponsorship, advertising, institutional pressure, personal relationships, nationality, political considerations, or an author's ability to pay publication charges.
• The publisher supports journal operations but should not determine acceptance or rejection of individual manuscripts on non-scholarly grounds.
• Editors should resist external lobbying or pressure intended to influence a manuscript decision.
• Scientific disagreement is evaluated through evidence and editorial judgment rather than through institutional prestige or author reputation.

Responsibility for editorial decisions

Manuscripts may be handled by an Editor-in-Chief or another editor with suitable expertise. Reviewers provide recommendations, but the editorial decision is made by the assigned editor on behalf of the journal.

The Editors-in-Chief retain responsibility for the journal's overall editorial standards and may intervene where conflicts, procedural concerns, ethical issues, appeals, or policy questions require senior editorial oversight.

Editorial screening before external review

A submitted manuscript may be assessed for:

Declining manuscripts without external review

External peer review is not required when an editor determines that a manuscript is clearly outside scope, does not meet the journal's scientific threshold, has fundamental methodological limitations, lacks sufficient novelty or evidential support, is inadequately prepared, or raises major unresolved integrity or ethical concerns.

Desk decisions should be communicated professionally and should identify the principal reason for the decision where feasible.

Double-blind peer review

PSH uses a double-blind peer-review model for externally reviewed research and scholarly manuscripts: author identities are withheld from reviewers and reviewer identities are not disclosed to authors.

Suitable manuscripts are normally evaluated by at least two independent reviewers. Additional reviewers may be invited when reports conflict, specialist methods require further expertise, statistical issues arise, or an editor determines that additional assessment is necessary.

Reviewer expertise, independence and verification

• Reviewers should have relevant subject or methodological expertise.
• Editors should consider independence from the authors and avoid reviewers with significant recent collaborations, supervisory relationships, direct financial conflicts, or other relationships likely to compromise impartiality.
• Institutional or professional email addresses and research profiles may be used to verify reviewer identity and expertise.
• Author-suggested reviewers may be considered but are not guaranteed to be invited.
• Reviewer selection should not be determined solely by geography, seniority, institutional prestige, or citation profile.
• Editors should seek an appropriate breadth of scientific perspectives while prioritizing expertise and independence.

Standards expected of reviewers

• Review objectively, respectfully, and within the reviewer's expertise.
• Base criticism on evidence and scientific reasoning rather than personal opinion about the authors.
• Disclose conflicts of interest before accepting or as soon as they become apparent.
• Maintain the confidentiality of the manuscript and editorial process.
• Do not use unpublished information for personal research, competitive advantage, or other benefit.
• Do not request unnecessary citations to the reviewer's own work or to particular journals.
• Notify the editor of suspected plagiarism, duplicated data, image problems, undisclosed related work, or other serious integrity concerns.

Generative AI in editorial handling and peer review

Manuscripts under review are confidential scholarly material. Editors and reviewers should not upload confidential manuscript text, figures, data, supplementary material, reviewer reports, or identifiable editorial correspondence into external generative-AI systems when doing so would disclose confidential material or conflict with applicable privacy and data-handling requirements.

Reviewers and editors remain personally responsible for the accuracy, reasoning, fairness, and confidentiality of their work. AI-generated assessments must not replace expert editorial judgment.

Decision categories and editorial judgment

Reviewer recommendations inform editorial decisions but do not function as votes. Editors assess the complete scientific and ethical record.

Author responses and revised submissions

Authors should respond point-by-point to editorial and reviewer comments and identify where changes were made. Requests that are not followed should be addressed with a scientific explanation.

A revised manuscript may be returned to the original reviewers, assessed by the editor, or sent to additional reviewers depending on the scope of revision. An invitation to revise does not guarantee eventual acceptance.

Authorship and contributorship

Authorship should reflect substantial scholarly contribution and accountability. All listed authors must approve the submitted work, author order, and the final version intended for publication.

A contribution statement using the CRediT taxonomy is encouraged to identify roles such as conceptualization, methodology, investigation, formal analysis, software, data curation, visualization, writing, supervision, project administration, and funding acquisition.

Individuals who contributed but do not meet authorship criteria should be acknowledged with their permission where appropriate.

Addition, removal or reordering of authors

Changes to authorship after submission require a clear explanation and agreement from the affected authors. Editors may request written confirmation from all authors and may decline changes that appear inconsistent with actual contributions or that raise concerns about gift, ghost, purchased, or manipulated authorship.

Disclosure and management of competing interests

Submissions from editors and editorial-board members

Editors and editorial-board members may submit scholarly work to PSH, but they must have no involvement in the handling, reviewer selection, editorial discussions, or decision for their own manuscript. Such submissions should be assigned to an independent editor without a relevant conflict. The same scientific and peer-review standards apply as to other submissions.

Confidential manuscript handling

• Submitted manuscripts and reviewer reports are confidential editorial records.
• Unpublished data, methods, ideas, figures, or findings must not be used by reviewers or editors for personal advantage.
• Information should be shared only with individuals who require access for legitimate editorial processing or investigation.
• Reviewer identities are protected under the journal's double-blind peer-review model.
• Confidentiality obligations continue after a manuscript is rejected, withdrawn, or published.

Integrity concerns considered by PSH

Handling credible allegations

Credible integrity concerns are assessed confidentially and without assuming misconduct in advance. The journal may request explanations, raw or source data, original images, analytical files, documentation, related manuscripts, or other relevant evidence.

Where a matter cannot be resolved by journal-level assessment, PSH may contact an author's institution, employer, funder, ethics body, or other appropriate research-integrity authority.

Similarity reports and plagiarism assessment

Manuscripts may be screened with Turnitin or another similarity-detection system. Similarity software identifies textual matches but does not itself determine plagiarism.

PSH does not rely on one automatic similarity-percentage threshold as the sole basis for editorial action. Editors consider the source, location, extent, attribution, concentration, and scholarly significance of the overlap.

Accurate and traceable research data

• Reported data should faithfully represent original observations and analyses.
• Biological and technical replicates should be distinguished correctly.
• Data exclusions, transformations, normalization, filtering, and other processing that affect interpretation should be described.
• Public datasets should be identified by appropriate accession numbers or persistent identifiers.
• Source data may be requested when needed to assess a manuscript or integrity concern.

Data and code transparency

Research articles should include a Data Availability statement explaining where supporting data can be accessed. Appropriate public repositories should be used for sequencing, omics, structural, or other specialized datasets when established repositories exist.

Code, scripts, pipelines, or trained computational models essential to the conclusions should be made available where reasonably possible, subject to legitimate privacy, legal, contractual, or security restrictions.

Scientific image processing

Images must accurately represent the original scientific observations. Uniform adjustments that improve presentation may be acceptable when they do not remove, fabricate, obscure, or selectively enhance information.

Adding, deleting, cloning, relocating, selectively altering, or deceptively assembling image elements is prohibited. Editors may request original microscopy files, uncropped blots or gels, raw images, or other source material.

Quantitative reporting and reproducibility

• Statistical methods should match the experimental design and data structure.
• Sample sizes and the meaning of n should be defined.
• Pseudoreplication and treatment of technical replicates as independent biological samples should be avoided.
• Error bars and statistical annotations should be defined.
• Multiple-testing corrections, transformations, post-hoc procedures, and model assumptions should be described when relevant.

Human, animal, plant and environmental research

• Human or animal components of plant-science studies must include appropriate ethics approval and consent statements where applicable.
• Plant collection, germplasm acquisition, field sampling, microorganisms, or protected species must comply with applicable permits and legal requirements.
• Research involving genetically modified or gene-edited organisms, regulated pathogens, quarantine material, or biosafety risks must follow relevant institutional and legal requirements.
• Access-and-benefit-sharing obligations should be respected where applicable to biological material or genetic resources.

AI-assisted authoring and scientific content

• AI systems cannot be listed as authors.
• Authors remain responsible for all submitted wording, analysis, images, citations, data, and conclusions.
• Use of generative AI beyond routine spelling, grammar, or language improvement should be disclosed when it materially contributed to manuscript preparation or analysis.
• AI-generated references, facts, images, datasets, or analytical outputs must be independently verified before submission.
• Generative AI must not be used to fabricate scientific data, laboratory records, images, or evidence.

Preprints, theses and conference material

Posting a manuscript on a recognized preprint server does not by itself preclude submission to PSH when the preprint is disclosed. Relevant theses, conference abstracts, posters, reports, or other prior dissemination should be disclosed when substantial overlap exists. The same manuscript must not be simultaneously under formal review by another journal.

Appropriate and non-coercive citation practices

Citations should be selected because they are relevant and support the scholarly argument. Editors and reviewers must not require authors to add citations primarily to increase citations to themselves, the journal, affiliated journals, or preferred researchers.

Authors should likewise avoid citation padding, citation cartels, fabricated citations, irrelevant citation clusters, and references inserted solely to influence metrics.

Manipulation of peer review

Fabricated reviewer identities, false email accounts, undisclosed impersonation, coordinated review rings, manipulated reviewer suggestions, coercion, or other attempts to interfere with independent peer review are prohibited.

PSH may verify reviewer identity, disregard compromised reports, terminate review, reject a manuscript, or contact relevant institutions when evidence indicates serious peer-review manipulation.

Guest editorial oversight

• Special issues and themed collections remain subject to the journal's standard editorial and ethical policies.
• Guest editors must disclose conflicts and should not handle manuscripts from close collaborators, their own institution when a material conflict exists, or their own papers.
• Editorial independence, reviewer verification, double-blind review, and scientific thresholds must not be relaxed to increase collection size.
• The Editors-in-Chief retain oversight and may reassign manuscripts or reverse procedural decisions when necessary to protect integrity.

Open-access licensing

Current PSH articles are published as open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Authors retain copyright subject to the terms of the license and the journal's publication agreement.

Third-party content included in an article must be compatible with the article's licensing and copyright requirements or be clearly identified with separate permission or licensing terms.

APC policy and editorial separation

PSH currently waives article processing charges through 2029. Editorial assessment is independent of fee status.

If publication charges are introduced or modified in the future, fee information and any waiver or discount arrangements should be communicated transparently and should not influence editorial decisions.

Correcting published errors

A correction may be issued when a material error affects accuracy, interpretation, attribution, metadata, or another important aspect of the article but does not invalidate the central findings. Minor typographical issues that do not affect meaning may not require a formal correction.

Unresolved serious concerns

An expression of concern may be considered when substantial concerns about a published article exist but the available evidence is incomplete, disputed, or awaiting an institutional or other formal investigation. The purpose is to alert readers while the matter remains unresolved.

Removing unreliable work from the active scholarly record

Retraction may be appropriate when findings are unreliable because of major error or misconduct, when plagiarism or redundant publication is substantial, when unethical research invalidates the publication, or when other serious problems make continued reliance on the article unsafe.

Retraction is primarily a mechanism for correcting the literature rather than a punitive action. The article record should remain identifiable and linked to the retraction notice.

Editorial and procedural complaints

Complaints may concern editorial conduct, peer-review procedure, publication ethics, delays, conflicts of interest, communication, or other aspects of journal process. Complaints should identify the relevant manuscript/article and provide a clear description of the issue.

Where practical, a complaint should be assessed by an editor or journal representative who was not the subject of the complaint.

Appealing an editorial decision

Authors may appeal when they can identify a substantive scientific misunderstanding, significant procedural error, material conflict of interest, or important evidence that was not considered in the original decision.

Appeals should address the editorial reasoning directly and should not simply repeat the original manuscript arguments. Acceptance of an appeal for consideration does not guarantee reversal of the decision.

Concerns raised after publication

PSH considers credible post-publication concerns regardless of whether they originate from authors, readers, reviewers, institutions, editors, or other identifiable sources. The focus is on evidence and the reliability of the published record.

Authors are expected to cooperate with reasonable requests for clarification or supporting information.

Responsible use of citations and journal metrics

Editorial decisions should not be designed primarily to increase citation metrics. PSH does not support coercive self-citation, inappropriate journal self-citation, citation cartels, manipulation of references, or editorial practices intended mainly to influence bibliometric indicators.

Advertising, sponsorship and publisher relationships

Any advertising, sponsorship, institutional partnership, promotional arrangement, or other commercial activity should remain separate from manuscript assessment and editorial decisions. Editorial content should not be accepted or rejected because of an advertiser, sponsor, donor, or commercial partner.

Internationally recognized publishing principles

PSH's editorial policies are informed by recognized principles of responsible scholarly publishing, including relevant guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and other established publication-ethics frameworks where applicable.

This wording describes the ethical guidance used by the journal and should not be interpreted as a claim of organizational membership, endorsement, certification, or accreditation unless such status is separately and explicitly confirmed.

Responsibilities across the publication process

Policies appropriate to a journal launched in 2026

Plant Science Horizons is currently building its publication record, reviewer community, editorial systems, scholarly visibility, and long-term indexing profile. At this stage, the journal's strongest foundation is consistent adherence to transparent editorial procedures, accurate metadata, responsible peer review, ethical publication practices, timely corrections, and publication of scientifically valuable work.

PSH should therefore avoid unsupported claims of impact, indexing, certification, membership, or accreditation and should update public policy pages when the journal's verified status changes.

Core principles applied by PSH

Responsible editorial practice is central to PSH

Plant Science Horizons seeks to build a reliable scholarly record through independent editorial judgment, rigorous and fair peer review, transparent authorship and reporting, responsible use of data and images, appropriate management of conflicts, open-access dissemination, and timely correction of material errors or integrity concerns. These principles apply equally to all authors, reviewers, editors, and editorial-board members.