Policies

Some things about PABC are fixed — they are the reason the journal exists. Most of the rest is genuinely open, and the founding editorial board will decide it. This page states the intended positions and marks clearly what is settled and what is not.

Open access and licensing

Every PABC article is open access from the moment of publication. There is no subscription, embargo, or paywall. Articles are published under an open license that permits reuse with attribution, and authors retain copyright — PABC never takes copyright assignment. The expected license is CC BY 4.0, the standard for genuine open access and the one most funder mandates require; the exact license and version is not formally adopted yet. PABC is fully open access: there is no closed track and no option to publish behind a paywall.

Ethics and integrity

Authorship

An author is someone who made a substantive intellectual contribution to the work and can take responsibility for it. Everyone meeting that bar must be listed; no one else may be. Honorary and ghost authorship are both misconduct. Contributions are recorded with CRediT roles, and the corresponding author confirms that every listed author has seen and approved the submission.

Conflicts of interest

Authors disclose financial and personal interests a reasonable reader might consider relevant. Reviewers decline papers where they have a competing interest; conflicts are also checked automatically during matching, but that check is a backstop, not a substitute for the reviewer's judgment. Editors recuse themselves from papers where they have a conflict, including their own submissions. Disclosure is the standard, not prohibition.

The fee buys nothing editorial

Publishing fees never influence editorial decisions, review outcomes, or tier placement. Editors and reviewers do not see payment status while making decisions, and the money gate sits at the very end of the pipeline, after every editorial judgment has already been made.

Misconduct

Plagiarism, data fabrication, data falsification, image manipulation, duplicate submission, and undisclosed material conflicts are all grounds for rejecting a submission or withdrawing a published article. Allegations are investigated on the evidence, with authors given an opportunity to respond before any action is taken. Where an author's institution has jurisdiction, we refer the matter to it. A withdrawal always states its reason.

AI use

Authors may use AI tools in preparing a manuscript and should disclose material use; AI cannot be an author, and authors remain fully accountable for everything in the paper. Reviewers may use AI to help them read and check, but the review must be their own judgment — and they must not paste a manuscript into a third-party service, as it is confidential material. The journal uses AI for reviewer matching, mechanical checks, drafting routine correspondence, and advisory reviews labeled as such; AI never assigns a tier, recommends a verdict, or counts toward a decision, and every run is logged.

Corrections and withdrawals

The published scholarly record is immutable by default; changes are made transparently. A published article is never silently edited and never disappears.

When an error is found, a correction is attached to the published record as a first-class object with its own text and date, linked bidirectionally to the article. We distinguish author corrections (errata) from publisher corrections (errors introduced in production). Trivial, non-substantive presentation fixes are made directly and logged, without a formal notice.

Grounds for withdrawal are serious: fabricated or falsified data, plagiarism, undisclosed conflicts that materially affect the work, or an error so fundamental the conclusions do not stand. A withdrawn article is tombstoned, not deleted — the article page remains at its original URL with its DOI intact, clearly marked as withdrawn and stating the reason. Deleting it would corrupt the citation record for everyone who already cited the work.

Every submission and revision is recorded as an immutable version. At publication, one version is designated canonical — what the DOI resolves to and what should be cited. Corrections and withdrawals attach to the existing canonical version rather than creating a new one.

Archiving and indexing

Every article receives a DOI at publication and is deposited with Crossref. PABC aims to be indexed in the major discovery services, including PubMed.

Indexing has real requirements: PubMed, for example, expects roughly 25 papers per year over about two years before indexing, and consumes precisely formatted metadata. PABC's computable, single-source pipeline is designed to meet these legacy requirements automatically rather than by hand.

Current status: PABC is not yet indexed anywhere, because it has not yet published. The realistic order of pursuit is Google Scholar and Crossref first (effectively automatic once articles are live), then DOAJ, then PubMed/PMC after roughly two years of sustained volume, with Scopus and Web of Science on a longer horizon. Articles are exposed through standard protocols (OAI-PMH) and carry embedded citation metadata.

A journal that might not exist in twenty years has an obligation to make its content survive it. PABC will place articles in an independent long-term archive — CLOCKSS, Portico, or an institutional one, not yet chosen — so the record does not depend on us continuing to run a server.

Policies under review

The specific policies of PABC are still under consideration and will be decided once the leadership of the society is established. This section exists so the distinction is explicit.

What is settled

These are the commitments the journal is built on:

• Open access, always. No subscriptions, embargoes, or paywalled track.
• Markdown-first, single-source production. No Word or LaTeX. This constraint is where the cost savings come from.
• An ultra-low publishing fee. The whole point is to demonstrate rigorous publishing can cost a fraction of what it currently does.
• Reviewing as a condition of membership.
• Real peer review. The efficiency comes from removing administrative waste, never from reviewing less carefully.
• Fees never buy editorial outcomes.
• AI does not render judgment.

Open questions

• Tiers and the one-submission model — should reviewers bin a paper into the tier it earns? How many tiers, by what criteria, and does the bottom tier carry a true guarantee?
• The fee — the actual number below the under-$1000 target; whether members pay less; whether review service can offset a fee.
• What review points are worth — standing, publishing credits, a citable record, a monetary payout, or some combination.
• Membership — application, nomination, or invitation; and what it carries beyond the submission track.
• The member submission track — what concretely distinguishes it.
• Licensing — CC BY 4.0, or another license permitting reuse with attribution.
• Indexing and preservation — which services, in what order; which long-term archive holds the content.
• Article types — whether PABC ever publishes commissioned reviews or editorials, and how Perspectives are handled.

Once the editorial board is seated, each open question becomes a decision for the board to make and publish here. Until then, treat anything not listed under "What is settled" as provisional.