Quality assurance

Peer review

Publications on BOP undergo a quality assurance checks, usually in a peer-review process.  

At Bop Books, the external and independent reviewers for individual book projects are selected by the Academic Advisory Board. For volumes in series, the series editors determine the external and independent reviewers.

In justified exceptional cases, the Scientific Advisory Board may allow other review procedures established in the relevant subject.

Reviewers report possible conflicts of interest to the Academic Advisory Board. Conflicts of interest within the advisory board must be declared and assessed by the other members of the advisory board.

Preprints

In principle, BOP accepts the submission of unrefereed preprints that are already available on preprint servers or in open repositories. The decision to accept preprints in journals or book series rests with the journal and book series editors.

Ethical guidelines

BOP follows the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines for maintaining scholarly integrity. BOP expects that high standards of ethical behavior will be upheld by all parties involved in a publication. This includes authors, editors, reviewers, and publishers.

Plagiarism

Editors of publications on BOP carry out plagiarism checks. Contributions and texts found to contain plagiarism will not be published on BOP.

Conflicts of interest

Reviewers, authors and editors must disclose any financial or non-financial conflict of interest related to the manuscript. In case of doubt, the editors of the series or volume or the responsible member of the scientific advisory board should be contacted.

Artificial Intelligence

Nonhuman artificial intelligence, language models, machine learning, or similar technologies do not qualify for authorship. If these models or tools are used to create content or assist with writing or manuscript preparation, authors must take responsibility for the integrity of the content generated by these tools. Authors should report the use of artificial intelligence, language models, machine learning, or similar technologies to create content or assist with writing or editing of manuscripts in the Acknowledgment section or Methods section if this is part of formal research design or methods.

Data protection declaration

This privacy statement is based on the Data Protection Act of the Canton of Bern (KDSG). Data processing is based on university legislation and only for the purposes stated in this data protection declaration.

On the publication platform Bern Open Publishing BOP (BOP Serials and BOP Books), which is operated by the Open Science team of the University Library of Bern, anonymized statistical values are collected about the access to the publications. No cookies are set.  

Personal data of authors, reviewers and editors can be stored in the Open Journal System (for BOP Serials) or in Open Monograph Press (for BOP Books). Personal data not directly related to the publication, such as names and persistent identifiers of authors and editors, are accessible only to authorized persons (responsible editors, editors and administrators). These personal data are used exclusively for editorial processes. They will not be used for marketing purposes or the like, nor will they be passed on to third parties. 

In accordance with the applicable data protection regulations, registered users (authors, reviewers, editors) of Bern Open Publishing have a right to information, correction and deletion of their personal data vis-à-vis the Open Science Team of the Bern University Library (bop@unibe.ch).