Policies

PABC is built on a set of core principles that guide its operations and decision-making, but there's still room to shape the vision. The founding editorial board will decide policies marked proposed below.

Decided

Open access and licensing

We keep this simple on purpose. There is one license and nothing for authors to choose. Every PABC article is open access from the moment of publication. There is no subscription, embargo, or paywall. PABC does not offer NonCommercial, NoDerivatives, or other restricted variants. Those options add complexity and cost. Every article is published under a single license: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). Authors retain copyright; PABC never takes copyright assignment. Anyone may read, download, reuse, and build on the work, including commercially, as long as they credit the authors. CC BY 4.0 is the standard for genuine open access and satisfies the mandates of NIH, Plan S, Wellcome, and other funders.

Decided

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 A withdrawn article is tombstoned, not deleted — the article page remains at its original URL with its DOI intact, clearly marked as withdrawn and stating the reason.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.

Decided

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.

Proposed

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. LLMs and other tools may not be authors, as they cannot take responsibility for the work. Honorary and ghost authorship are both misconduct. Contributions are recorded with CRediT roles, which we treat as supplemental information rather than clutter in the author byline. 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.

Proposed

Tiers: one submission, one review

One of the deepest inefficiencies in academic publishing is re-review: a paper rejected from one journal is sent to the next, where fresh reviewers repeat the same work. PABC proposes to remove this by reviewing once. When you submit, you submit to PABC, and reviewers bin your paper into the tier its impact and rigor warrant. At the bottom is a no-impact-required tier: any scientifically sound paper is guaranteed to publish there. The goal of review is to populate the higher-impact tiers above it — the question shifts from "should this be published?" to "where does this belong?"

The tier model is a possibility, not a settled policy. The number of tiers, their names and criteria, and whether the bottom tier carries a true publication guarantee will be decided by the Academy's leadership.

Proposed

Publishing fee

PABC's target is under $1,000 per article. The actual number, whether members pay less, and whether review service can offset the fee are all open questions for the editorial board.

Proposed

Review credit

Reviewers earn something for their work — but what exactly? Possibilities include standing within the Academy, publishing credits, a citable review record, a monetary payout, or some combination. The editorial board will decide.

Proposed

Membership

How does one become an Academy member — application, nomination, or invitation? And what does membership carry beyond access to the member submission track? These details are open.

Proposed

Member submission track

Like PNAS, PABC accepts submissions through two tracks: community and member. What concretely distinguishes the member track — a communicated route, a reduced fee, a separate queue — is not yet decided.

Proposed

Article types

PABC currently plans to publish research articles, methods, software, data resources, benchmarks, brief reports, and perspectives. Whether PABC ever publishes commissioned reviews or editorials, and how perspectives are handled, remains open.