Focus and Scope

Applied Environmental Biotechnology（AEB） is an open access journal published by Urban Development Scientific Publishing. The purpose of this journal is to understand the latest advances, innovation and technologies of applied environmental biotechnology, and by doing so, to promote active communication and collaborations among the environmental biotechnology scientists around the world. Authors and readers should be included in the following areas: biotechnology, environmental, microbial, metabolism, degradation, bioproducts, ecosystem, water research and other related fields.  All articles submitted to AEB will undergo a rigorous double-blind peer review, and all published articles can be downloaded and read for free. AEB will pay wide attention to the trends in related fields and insist on publishing original research work of highest quality. 

Section Policies

Editorial

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Research Articles

Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Review

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Biodegradation and Bioremediation

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Biodegradation Microbiology

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Biofilms and Nanotechnology

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Biodegradation and Transformation

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Biotechnology and Applications

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Biodegradation and Gene Expression

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Commentary

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Commentary and Research Analysis

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Ecotoxicology and Ecosystem Health

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Gut Microbiology

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Methods

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Microbial Growth

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Microbial Dynamics

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Microbial Biofilms

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Microbial Ecology and Biotechnology

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Nanotechnology

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Oilfield and Geomicrobiology

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Phytoremediation and Antibiotics

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Plastics and Biodegradability

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Phytoremediation

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Tree Disease and Diagnosis

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Wastewater Treatments

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Opinion

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Peer Review Process

All manuscripts submitted to AEB will follow the following procedures: 

• The initial submission is reviewed by in-house editors to ensure adherence to journal policies and for a double blind peer review.
• Editor-in-chief decides on the manuscript to be sent out for review process and assigns the manuscript to one of the editors according to the particular topic.
• The editor assigns reviewers from inside the editorial board or outside depending on the topic.
• After evaluations by the reviewers have been received, the editor-in-chief makes one of the following recommendations: Accept Submission; Revisions Required; Resubmit for Review and Decline Submission.
• If the decision is Revisions Required, the authors have 14 days to resubmit the revised manuscript. Revised manuscripts must contain a detailed point by point response to the comments of the reviewers. The response to reviewers has to be uploaded as a separate file.
• If the decision is Resubmit for Review, the authors have 7 days to resubmit the manuscript. After resubmission, the same procedures as for the initial submission applies.
• Authors may appeal for a rejected submission. Appeal requests must be made in writing to editorial@udspub.com with detailed reasons for the appeal and point by point responses to the reviewer’s remarks.
• For all manuscripts accepted for publication, the peer review process will be deemed to be completed. The manuscript will proceed to be copyedited，layout edited and proofread before being published online.

Note: The author may suggest up to four academically qualified reviewers for consideration. Please insert the current contact details of the reviewer and state the reason(s) for recommendation under the "Comments for the Editor" section. However, please take note that the Editorial team strives to ensure the peer review process is fair, unbiased and hence, there is no guarantee that a recommended reviewer will be approached to perform the peer review. 

Open Access Policy

Applied Environmental Biotechnology (AEB) is an open access journal：

• Free reading and online download are available immediately.
• The journal allows readers to read online, download, copy, distribute, print or search publications. AEB is released under the Creative Commons(CC by-nc) license (more...). This license lets others remix, adapt, and build upon your work non-commercially.
• The log allows the software / spider to automatically capture the log content.
• Based on open access, the journal allows authors to own and retain copyright without restriction.
• The unique identifiers (DOIs) for each article will be registered with Crossref allowing citation linking to the full texts of its articles.

Archiving

This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.  More...

Digital Preservation Policy

Urban Development Scientific Publishing will preserve e-journals with Portico, ensuring that they will be secure and available into the future.

All Open Access journals will be catalogued at the National Library Board Singapore.

Language Policy and Services

All articles must be written in English — preferably American English. SI units should be used. If you are not a native English speaker, you may want to utilize an external or Urban Development Scientific Publishing’s optional professional language editing service before submitting the final version.

UDS Publishing offers its own professional editing services. By using this service, you can be sure that your English-language manuscript will be polished and ready for submission to your publication of choice at a very reasonable price. For further details about the Language Editing Services, please contact us at editorial@udspub.com. Please note that utilizing a language editing service is not a guarantee of acceptance.

Privacy Policy

Personal information

While interacting with the UDS Sites, we may request personal information from you, which may include items such as your name, mailing address, email address, company name, institutional affiliation, telephone number, credit card or other payment information, and ORCID iD. Your provision of such information is strictly voluntary. You can generally visit the UDS Sites without disclosing such information. If you register on a UDS website, we will gather and store your user name and password.

If you are an author who is submitting or has submitted a manuscript or other research outputs to UDS for our consideration or for posting on our sites or as a preprint, we will require you to provide the above types of information so that we may consider, process, and possibly publish your paper, in conformance with accepted publishing standards. Where your paper is published or posted as a preprint, at least your name, affiliation, and ORCID iD will appear as part of the paper. Likewise, when you register on a UDS site for updates or to receive other types of notifications from us, we will ask for your email address at a minimum to enable us to send you the information you have requested.

Technical information

Additionally, by means of your interactions with the UDS Sites, we may collect, have access to, store and use your computer’s IP address, the URL/domain name of any referring website, the time and date of your visit to the UDS Sites, and certain information known as “clickstream data” to enable us to understand how people interact with the UDS Sites, to analyze data for trends and statistics, to help diagnose and solve issues with the UDS Sites and our technologies, products, and services, and to optimize the performance of the UDS Sites. We also use session cookies, small data files stored in your browser so you don’t have to log in each time you visit any of our web pages. From time to time, we use software tools to play back user sessions for purposes of assessing our customers’ interactions with our software, and these sessions may be linked to your user account. If you do not want session cookies stored on your computer, you may be able to adjust your browser settings to prevent this, but note that by not accepting cookies, some pages may not fully function and you may not be able to access certain information on the UDS Sites.

How we may use and disclose your information

    1.use by UDS

UDS uses your personal information to customize your experience on the UDS sites and to facilitate our interactions with you. If you are an author, we will use your personal information for the purpose of processing, reviewing, communicating about, facilitating editorial review and peer review, for publishing, and to facilitate payment of article processing charges. If you are an editor or reviewer, we may use your personal information to contact you about your potential or actual role as an editor or reviewer, to request and facilitate your review and handling of manuscripts, and to update you on news and developments at UDS as it may affect your work with us. If you simply come to UDS websites to read content, we will use information such as your URL and cookies to provide a good experience, as described above.

Except as where necessary to provide services to you, UDS staff do not typically take note of your personal information; the information is mainly stored on or by our computers, computer networks, servers, tools, and systems, as described above.

    2.Potential disclosure to third parties

If you submit a manuscript to us for possible publishing, we will send the title and abstract of your paper, and your name, to one or more potential editors and reviewers, to gauge their interest in reviewing your paper. If they agree to handle your paper, we will send them your full manuscript and any revisions and relevant comments you have provided relating thereto.

We may disclose personal information as discussed above and as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this privacy policy to our employees and to third parties under contract with us, including vendors, volunteers, independent contractors, and consultants, to financial institutions for the purposes of facilitating payment of fees owed, web and technical support providers, other publishers and/or content hosting providers under contract with us, third parties authorized by you to receive such information, and as may be required or permitted by law. As described above, we may also share information regarding you and your manuscript or other research content as reasonably necessary with parties such as external editors and reviewers, and with community journal staff, curators, and channel managers.

If you choose to have your manuscript published as a preprint, we will send your manuscript to our preprint partner(s) for posting of your paper.

If an author chooses to publish their peer review history, then emails and other communications between reviewers, editors and authors via a UDS Site will be made public. If you are a reviewer and provide us with your consent, we will disclose your name as part of the peer review history when an article is published and the author has chosen to publish the peer review history. To remove your name from the peer review history after disclosure to the public, you can email editorial@udspub.com

We share only the information necessary for third parties to provide the intended products and services. In some cases, the applications or user interfaces you encounter while on our sites are managed by third parties, who may require that you provide your personal information and who have assured us of their compliance with applicable laws.

    3.No sale or leasing of your information

Except as described in this privacy policy, we will not disclose your personal information to third parties without your consent. We will not sell or lease your personal information to any third party. We may disclose aggregate demographic and statistical information with our business partners; this information is not specific to the identification of you as an individual.

How long we retain your information

We keep your personal information for as long as is necessary to provide services to you, and for as long as your account and/or registration with UDS is active. We will retain and use your information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, to resolve disputes, and to enforce our agreements.

Additional reasons why we may gather, use, disclose and store personal information

In addition to the reasons stated above, we may use your personal information to comply with contracts, legal agreements, our terms of use and privacy policies, and to comply with applicable laws. We may produce personal information as and to the extent compelled by court order or a law enforcement agency.

Protection of personal information

We endeavor to protect the personal information we receive, gather and store, by such means as password protection, firewalls, encryption, and other means.

Third party websites

If you are linked, directed to or click on a third party website in your interactions with the UDS Sites,  we cannot control what information you may provide to that party or on/at that website. As such, we urge that you exercise caution before providing them with your personal information.

Consent to receive email communications

Except in countries or jurisdictions where it is not be permitted by law, we may from time to time send you email communications regarding our business, products or services in response to your use of the UDS Sites, and by providing your email address, you consent to receive such communications. Where required by law, we will request that you opt-in (consent) to receive such communications from us before sending you such information.

You may opt out of receiving such communications by contacting us at editorial@udspub.com or by using the unsubscribe link(s) in emails we send you.

How to contact us regarding your personal information

If you wish to discuss what personal information we may have pertaining to you, or the handling or potential disclosure of the same, or you wish to withdraw consent regarding these matters or to ask us to delete your personal information, you may contact us at editorial@udspub.com

Ethical Policy

The ethical policy of Urban Development Scientific Publishing journals follows the " European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity " and the "Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing " of "COPE". Authors must be honest in presenting their results and conclusions of their research. Research misconduct is harmful for knowledge. It could mislead other researchers.

Research results

Fabrication, falsification or selective reporting of data with the intent to mislead or deceive is unethical, as is the theft of data or research results from others. The results of research should be recorded and maintained to allow for analysis and review. Following publication, the data should be retained for a reasonable period and made available upon request. Exceptions may be appropriate in certain circumstances in order to preserve privacy, to assure patent protection, or for similar reasons.

Authorship

Applied Environmental Biotechnology assumes that all gave explicit consent to submit the manuscripts and that they obtained consent from the responsible authorities at the organization where the work has been carried out before the work is submitted.

Authorship should be limited to people who have contributed substantially to the work. The Publisher recommends authors to include contribution statements in the work that specifies the contribution of every author in order to promote transparency. This information should be listed in the manuscript under the section ‘Author Contribution’. Examples of contributions include: designed research, performed research, contributed new reagents or analytic tools, analyzed data, wrote the paper. Contributors who do not meet all criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgements section.

The corresponding author should be clearly indicated for all manuscripts submitted. A maximum of two corresponding authors is allowed for the responsibilities associated. The corresponding author(s) is responsible for: i) Obtaining permission from all the authors mentioned in the manuscript; ii) Ensuring adherence to all editorial and submission policies and for any communications and actions that may be necessary before and after publication; iii) Including written permission from the authors of the work concerned for any mention of any unpublished material included in the manuscript, making sure disclosures, such as data from manuscripts-in-press, personal communication, or work in preparation.

All authors are requested to include information regarding sources of funding, financial or non-financial interests. All authors are also requested to make sure that all data and materials comply with field standards.

Authors are strongly advised to ensure that the names of all authors are present and correctly spelled and that addresses and affiliations are current, and the correct order of authors at submission. Adding and/or deleting authors at the revision stage is generally not permitted, but in some cases, it may be warranted. Reasons for these changes in authorship should be explained. In the case of an authorship dispute during peer review or after acceptance and publication, authors will be asked to resolve the dispute themselves, and the Journal will not be in a position to investigate or adjudicate and reserves the right to withdraw a manuscript from the editorial process.

Authors are strongly recommended to use their ORCID ID when submitting an article for consideration or acquire an ORCID ID via the submission process.

Duplicate submission

A manuscript would not be accepted if it has been published or is currently under consideration for publication in any other journals. The submitted article will be removed without consideration.

Plagiarism

The editorial team does not approve of any plagiarism attempts. iThenticate will be utilized at the editor’s discretion to verify the originality of submitted manuscripts. If any plagiarism is found during the review process, the manuscript may be rejected, depending the severity of plagiarism. Reproducing text from other papers without properly crediting the source (plagiarism) or producing many papers with almost the same content by the same authors (self-plagiarism) is not acceptable. Submitting the same results to more than one journal concurrently is unethical. Exceptions are the review articles. Authors may not present results obtained by others as if they were their own. Therefore, if a manuscript uses a text copied directly from another source, this text must be written in quotation marks and the original source must be cited.

Post-publication Additions and Corrections

Additions and Corrections may be requested by the author(s) or initiated by the Editor to address important issues or correct errors and omissions of consequence that arise after publication of an article. All Additions and Corrections are subject to approval by the Editor, and should bring new and directly relevant information and corrections that fix scientific facts. Additions and Corrections must be submitted as new manuscripts by the Corresponding Author. The corresponding author should obtain approval from all coauthors prior to submitting or provide evidence that such approval has been solicited. The manuscript should include the original article title and author list, citation including DOI, and details of the correction. Minor corrections and additions will not be published. Readers who detect errors of consequence in the work of others should contact the corresponding author of that work.

Intellectual Property

Authors are responsible for ensuring that all intellectual property issues are satisfactorily resolved prior to first publication. Acceptance and publication will not be delayed for pending or unresolved issues of this nature.

complaints and appeals

The below procedure applies to appeals to editorial decisions, complaints about failure of processes such as long delays in handling papers and complaints about publication ethics.

Complaint about scientific content
If your manuscript is declined by AEB and the author believes an error has been made, you may appeal the decision directly to the editor who made it, providing a clear explanation for why you believe he or she should reconsider the decision. If the editor upholds the rejection, you may appeal the decision to the Editor-in-Chief (jdgu.aeb@gmail.com). The Editor-in-Chief’s decisions on appeals are final.

Complaint about processes, e.g. time taken to review
The Editor-in-Chief together with the in-house contact will investigate the matter. Feedback is provided to relevant stakeholders to improve processes and procedures.

Complaint about publication ethics, e.g., author's or reviewer's conduct
The Editor-in-Chief or Handling Editor follows guidelines published by the Committee on Publication Ethics, then decides on a course of action and provides feedback to the complainant. If the complainant remains dissatisfied with the handling of their complaint, he or she can submit the complaint to the Committee on Publication Ethics, more....

Human and Animal Rights

If the work involves the use of human subjects, the author should ensure that the work described has been carried out in accordance with The Code of Ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki) for experiments involving humans; Uniform Requirements for manuscripts submitted to Biomedical journals. Authors should include a statement in the manuscript that informed consent was obtained for experimentation with human subjects. The privacy rights of human subjects must always be observed.

All animal experiments should comply with the ARRIVE guidelines and should be carried out in accordance with the U.K. Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act, 1986 and associated guidelines, EU Directive 2010/63/EU for animal experiments, or the National Institutes of Health guide for the care and use of Laboratory animals (NIH Publications No. 8023, revised 1978) and the authors should clearly indicate in the manuscript that such guidelines have been followed.