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Curation policy

Purpose

The Automation in Biology community collects and organises scholarly outputs that advance, document, evaluate, or apply automation in biological research.

Scope

Submissions must have a clear and substantial connection to automation in biology.

Automation must be an important component of the scientific method, experimental infrastructure, software, hardware, data collection, analysis, or scholarly contribution. A minor or incidental mention of automation is not normally sufficient.

Relevant subject areas

Relevant areas include:

  • Laboratory automation
  • Robotic experimentation
  • Automated sample preparation
  • High-throughput experimentation
  • Autonomous laboratories
  • Self-driving laboratories
  • Biofoundries
  • Automated microscopy
  • Automated imaging and phenotyping
  • Automated data collection
  • Automated biological data analysis
  • Workflow-management systems
  • Laboratory-information systems
  • Scientific software
  • Automated instrumentation
  • Interoperability and standards
  • Reproducible automated protocols
  • Machine learning integrated with experimental workflows
  • Automation in genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, synthetic biology, microbiology, cell biology, and related fields

Eligible outputs

The community may accept:

  • Journal articles
  • Preprints
  • Software and source code
  • Research datasets
  • Protocols
  • Computational or experimental workflows
  • Book chapters
  • Technical reports
  • Hardware designs
  • Posters
  • Presentations
  • Educational and training materials
  • Other relevant scholarly outputs

Review criteria

Curators consider:

  1. Relevance to automation in biology
  2. Completeness and accuracy of metadata
  3. Presence of a licence or rights statement
  4. Consistency between files and the record description
  5. Availability of sufficient documentation
  6. Apparent compliance with legal and ethical requirements
  7. Absence of spam, malware, advertising, or misleading claims
  8. Whether the resource type is correctly assigned
  9. Whether authors and contributors are adequately identified
  10. Whether related outputs are linked where appropriate

Possible outcomes

A submission may be:

  • Accepted
  • Returned with requested changes
  • Declined as outside the community scope
  • Declined because required information is missing
  • Declined because the files and metadata do not correspond
  • Declined because of legal, ethical, security, or integrity concerns
  • Withdrawn by the submitter

Reasons for requesting changes

Curators may request changes when:

  • The relationship to automation in biology is unclear.
  • The title or description is incomplete.
  • The resource type is inaccurate.
  • Author or contributor metadata is incomplete.
  • The licence or rights statement is missing or unclear.
  • Software lacks basic version or documentation information.
  • A dataset lacks sufficient documentation.
  • Related identifiers should be added.
  • The uploaded files do not match the description.
  • The record contains avoidable formatting or metadata problems.

Meaning of acceptance

Acceptance confirms that the record is considered relevant to the community.

Acceptance does not constitute:

  • Peer review
  • Reproduction of results
  • Verification of scientific claims
  • Verification of authorship
  • Security auditing
  • Software certification
  • Legal approval
  • Ethical approval
  • Endorsement by the curators

Submitter responsibilities

Submitters remain responsible for:

  • Authorship and contributor attribution
  • Accuracy of files and metadata
  • Copyright and licensing
  • Research ethics
  • Privacy and data protection
  • Disclosure of restrictions
  • Software and data security
  • Compliance with applicable laws
  • Compliance with institutional requirements
  • Obtaining permission to share third-party material

Open access

Openly accessible outputs and clear reusable licences are encouraged.

Restricted-access records may be considered when restrictions are clearly explained and are consistent with legal, ethical, privacy, contractual, or intellectual-property requirements.

Duplicate and versioned records

A duplicate submission may be declined unless there is a clear reason for a separate record.

Versioned software, datasets, protocols, and other evolving outputs should use clear version identifiers and should link related versions where possible.

Removal from the community

Curators may remove a record from the community if significant scope, metadata, legal, ethical, security, or integrity problems are identified after acceptance.

Removal from the community does not necessarily delete the underlying Zenodo record.

Conflicts of interest

Curators should avoid reviewing submissions where a significant conflict of interest could affect impartial judgement. Another curator should conduct the review where practical.

Policy changes

This policy may be updated as the community develops. Significant changes should be documented through the GitHub repository history.