Return, Refund and Cancellation Policy

• When publishing article in Asian Journal of Agriculture and Biology (AJAB), the Author has the following cancellation right: The Author can withdraw her/his Article and cancel the declared intention to conclude the contract any time during the evaluation (peer-review) of the Article. Once the Article is accepted for publication, it may no longer be withdrawn by the Author. Any benefits or interests received by the Author up to the cancellation must be restituted to AJAB.
• When offering services to the Author, AJAB has the following cancellation right: AJAB may turn down or reject the Article anytime without specifying any reason and thus cancel the conclusion of the contract (submission). After the cancellation through AJAB, both parties are freed from any previous commitments of these Terms and Conditions. The Author shall be fully refunded if any service fees were already paid before the cancellation of the contract.
• In case a Customer pays more than invoiced by AJAB, any bank or transaction charges will be deduced from a partial refund of the overpaid amount.
• Once an article is published, AJAB will refund authors in exceptional circumstances only and a decision will be made on a case-by-case basis.

Shipping Policy

Articles published are available online accessible from the website and can be downloaded by the authors and other researchers freely. Being digital commodity, articles are not shipped through surface mails to the authors owing to AJAB being online only journal.

Article Withdrawal

Articles in Press (articles that have been accepted for publication or published as ONLINE FIRST ahead of schedule but which have not been formally published with volume/issue/page information) that include errors, or are determined to violate the publishing ethics guidelines such as multiple submission, fake claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like, may be “Withdrawn” from the journal. Withdrawal means that the article files are removed and replaced with a PDF stating that the article has been withdrawn from the journal in accordance with AJAB Editorial Policies.

Article Retraction

Published articles (with volume/issue/page information) which may contain infringements of professional ethical codes, such as multiple submission, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data or the like are retracted.

• A retraction note titled “Retraction: [article title]” signed by the authors and/or the Editor-in-Chief is published in the paginated part of a subsequent issue of the journal and listed in the contents list.
• In the electronic version, a link is made to the original article.
• The on-line article is preceded by a screen containing the retraction note. It is to this screen that the link resolves; the reader can then proceed to the article itself.
• The original article is retained unchanged save for a watermark on the .pdf indicating on each page that it is “retracted.”
• The HTML version of the document is removed.

Errata and Corrections in Published Articles

Authors and readers are encouraged to notify the Editor-in-Chief if they discover errors in published content, authors’ names and affiliations or if they have reasons for concern over the legitimacy of a publication. In such cases the journal will publish an ERRATUM in consultation with Editor-in-Chief and authors of the article, and/or replace or retract the article.

Editorial Policy & Workflow

All submitted manuscripts to Asian Journal of Agriculture and Biology (AJAB) undergo extensive peer-review process and circulate among Author, Editorial Office, Editor/Associate Editor, Reviewer, and Publisher before final publication. The whole process consists of following editorial workflow:

All steps, from manuscript submission to final publication, are performed in the eJManager. All submitted manuscripts are initially quality controlled by the Editorial Office for manuscript formatting, reference provision, plagiarism checking and completion of all necessary files required to perform review process. Once initial quality controls are passed, the manuscript is forwarded to appropriate Editor/Managing Editor depending upon the institution and previous co-publication record of the author with the Editor/Managing Editor. Editor/Managing Editor decides the initiation of review process or decline to do so based on the quality of the presented work and scope of the journal.

If Editor / Managing Editor finds the manuscript of high quality and is within the aims and scope of the journal, the manuscript is forwarded to at least 2-3 expert reviewers in the field. Reviewers are requested to (i) assess each section of the manuscript for values ranging from 0 to 5, (ii) to provide comments to Author (iii) comments to Editor, (iv) recommendations (accept, reject, minor revision, or major revision) and (v) willingness to review the revise version of this manuscript in case of minor and major revision.

Based on the reviewers’ comments, suggestions and overall assessments, Editor/ Managing Editor recommends one of the following options:

(i) accept, (ii) reject, (iii) minor revision, (iv) major revision, (v) returned.

Reviewers can also upload a review report in the form of an attachment if the suggestions were made in a word document or in the manuscript directly.

In case of acceptance, author is notified and the publisher processes the manuscript for formatting, copy-editing, proofreading, reference linking, metadata generation for indexing and publication purposes. The rejected manuscripts are closed, whereas, manuscripts with minor or major revision require appropriate actions from the author for re-consideration by the Editor/ Managing Editor. The Editor/ Managing Editor either makes final recommendations or considers another round of review process.

Editor / Managing Editor is final and decisive authority to make any recommendations on submitted manuscripts without involvement of the Editorial Office. This is mainly due to the fact that Editors/ Managing Editors are leading personnel in the field and they make their recommendations on the bases of reviewers’ assessment. Also Editor/ Managing Editor can’t play external reviewers’ roles, except in occasional cases, to have fair, highly professional and dynamic peer-review system.

AJAB performs single blind peer-review process, which means that reviewers know the authors whereas authors are not informed who have reviewed their manuscripts.

Though sometimes tedious and time consuming, reviewing a manuscript is also a privilege and time of publication depends on reviewers’ response and may range from 4 to 6 months.

Copyright Policy

For all articles published in AJAB, copyrights are retained by the authors. Articles are licensed under an open access Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, meaning that anyone may download and read the paper for free. In addition, the article may be reused and quoted provided that the original published version is cited.