EMBO Policies

Open Access

EMBO encourages funded researchers and members of the EMBO community to publish their results in journals that have rigorous and transparent peer review processes. These journals contribute to the research community by using policies that promote open research practices, such as requiring authors to make all data related to their work publicly available, and allowing authors to publish Open Access.

The EMBO Press journals have been published exclusively Open Access since January 2024, and there are several schemes that offer financial support for the publication fees at EMBO Press journals, such as tiered Article Processing Charge (APC) pricing, fee waivers for scientists within the EMBO increasing participation scheme, additional support for authors in India, and waivers and charge reductions on a case-by-case basis.

Licencing 

EMBO encourages members of its community to use an Open Access compliant licence that facilitates the sharing of scientific information, and mandates citation of the source. There are several Open Access licenses, which have different impacts on good scholarly practices. Choosing the appropriate license is particularly important for academic re-use of the data, such as for systematic literature analysis.

EMBO recommends choosing licences with the following features:

• Attribution. Users must attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they or their use of the contribution is endorsed by the author or licensor).
• Non-commercial. Users may not use this contribution for commercial purposes.
• No derivative works. Users may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

Frequently used Creative Commons licences (CC BY and CC BY non-derivative) protect the authors’ moral rights under the following terms:

• For any reuse or distribution, users must make clear to others the license terms of this work, preferably using a link to the Creative Commons webpage
• Any of the above conditions can be waived if users get permission from the copyright holder.

For data, EMBO recommends using a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Licence. This type of licence includes a waiver that removes legal barriers to the re-use and mining of research data. According to standard scholarly practice, it is recommended to provide appropriate citation and attribution whenever technically possible.

Preprints and peer reviewed preprints 

EMBO encourages researchers in its community to make their research results public as soon as possible, for example by posting unpublished research results on recognised preprint servers, such as arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, Zenodo, OSF, PeerJ. EMBO also encourages the use of preprint peer review services, such as Review Commons and some scientific journals, and to make the peer review reports generally available as soon as possible.

Preprints in applications for funding programmes

The EMBO Fellows and Young Investigator programmes accept first or last author (respectively) research papers that have an “in submission” status by the application deadline. The status must be changed to “accepted for publication” by the interview date.

Additionally, EMBO accepts first or last author preprints posted online alongside authenticated reviewer reports, provided the following conditions are met:

• The preprint is posted on a recognized community preprint server such as arXiv, bioRxiv, medRxiv, Zenodo, OSF, PeerJ,;
• The peer reviews must be publicly available online;
• The peer reviews were verifiably obtained from an independent preprint peer review service such as Review Commons and some scientific journals;
• The reviews provide an in-depth and independent expert analysis of the rigor and validity of the research and its contribution to the field.

Discoverability and reusability

EMBO requires funding applicants to submit their ORCID iD (digital identifiers) to ensure unambiguous name assignment. The adoption of unique digital identifiers enables accurate attribution and improves the discoverability of published work.

EMBO Press signed a joint statement to encourage ORCID adoption, and encourages all authors to register for an ORCID iD to ensure unambiguous name assignment. Corresponding authors are required to supply their ORCID iD upon submission of a revised manuscript.

Data deposition and methods

Data repositories provide unique and persistent identifiers to datasets and derived data products, as well as a stable, resolvable link to where the data can be accessed. Repositories provide researchers with in-depth access to the data to help further the understanding of experiments, archive results and raw data to future scientists, aid in reproducibility, offer integrity and increased trust in the results, and allows scientists to re-analyze and integrate data into different scenarios or experiments.

EMBO encourages researchers to deposit the source data, metadata, methods, and protocols generated by their research in recognized public repositories that align with the FAIR principles (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability). These resources are available at https://elixir-europe.org/platforms/data and https://fairsharing.org/ can be used to identify the best repositories for your data.

EMBO Press requires authors to submit source data for all figures depicting experimental results, and further requires authors to use structured methods. EMBO Press encourages authors to describe their methods using a step-by-step protocol format, and to deposit protocols in protocols.io.

EMBO and EMBO Press are committed to maintaining high standards of integrity and have procedures in place to evaluate allegations of research misconduct relevant to the EMBO communities as they arise.

• Principles for EMBO investigations of misconduct
• EMBO Press editorial policies

EMBO Members, awardees, staff and researchers funded by EMBO are expected to observe the fundamental principles for the responsible conduct of research as laid out in the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity:

• Reliability in ensuring the quality of research, reflected in the design, methodology, analysis and the use of resources.
• Honesty in developing, undertaking, reviewing, reporting and communicating research in a transparent, fair, full and unbiased way.
• Respect for colleagues, research participants, society, ecosystems, cultural heritage and the environment.
• Accountability for the research from idea to publication, for its management and organization, training, supervision and mentoring, and for its wider impacts.

In addition, awardees and authors are expected to adhere to national and institutional standards, as well as international guidelines for research ethics such as those set out in the WMA Declaration of Helsinki; the Belmont Report; the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Research Integrity. Awardees and authors may be asked to provide evidence that their research conforms to the relevant regulations that apply at the host institution.

Training requirements

As a condition of receiving their funding, EMBO Postdoctoral Fellows and Young Investigators are required to take an online research integrity course. EMBO provides grantees with free access to an online course that was co-developed by EMBO. Awardees in other funding schemes are encouraged to take a course on research integrity. EMBO expects that the research outputs from its membership and awardees would pass a rigorous research integrity screening and adhere to reproducibility standards.

Ethics checks

To ensure the reliability of research published by EMBO Press, staff conduct routine analyses of the images and data submitted by authors with their manuscripts. The publications team at EMBO Press assesses suspected instances of scientific fraud, inappropriate image manipulation or processing, plagiarism, data misrepresentation, duplicate publication, and other cases of potential misconduct that violate research ethics in submitted manuscripts or published papers. The full policy on research integrity and misconduct is available on the EMBO Press website.

The policies and initiatives applied to EMBO funding schemes and publications align with the aims and principles of responsible research assessment, DORA recommendations, and the CoARA agreement. Peer review is considered the cornerstone of quality control in science, and it is the central mechanism for research assessment at EMBO, both for grant making and scientific publishing. Researchers carry out this time-consuming activity as part of their contribution to the scientific community.

EMBO adheres to the following principles of responsible research assessment:

Quality vs. metrics

• EMBO reviewers are instructed to avoid relying on the perceived importance of journal impact factors (JIF) or other publication-based metrics when evaluating applications.
• Applicants are instructed to avoid indicating JIF or any publication-based metrics in their publication list.
• To focus reviewers’ attention on the content of papers rather than journal metrics, applicants are asked to summarise their best two (Installation Grants) or three (Young Investigators, Postdoctoral Fellowships, Global Investigator Network) papers and highlight why those papers were chosen.

Transparency

• The guidelines for EMBO funding schemes are publicly available on the EMBO webpages and provide detailed descriptions of the criteria used within each funding programme.
• The names of the selection committee members are published on the EMBO website and in the funding scheme application guidelines.
• Board membership is balanced to create gender, expertise, and geographical diversity.

Code of conduct

• EMBO has a code of conduct with expectations for selection committee members

Conflicts of interest

• EMBO and EMBO Press have policies regarding actual and perceived conflicts of interest, that include, but are not limited to, personal, professional, and financial interests. Please refer to the following pages for the full policies related to the EMBO selection committees and EMBO Press:
  • EMBO conflict of interest policy
  • EMBO Press competing interests policy

EMBO is committed to equity, gender balance and equal opportunity in its selection committees, referee panels, pool of applicants and awardees, staff members, and conference speakers. EMBO committees and Council have on average 30% members of the underrepresented genders. This represents the gender distribution within the EMBO membership.

• To facilitate a fair and informed decision-making process in its selection, EMBO staff prime committee members before each selection committee and Council meeting on unconscious bias, conflicts of interest related to unconscious bias, and how to become aware of unconscious bias.

EMBO is the largest funder of scientific events in Europe and is aware that scientific conferences and workshops can have a high CO₂ footprint. To counteract this, EMBO has implemented several measures and initiatives, such as sustainability badges, which are awarded to meetings that implement sustainability measures.

Additionally, EMBO encourages organizers of in-person meetings to consider hybrid options. Workshop and conference organizers can apply for additional EMBO funding to implement this. Please visit the sustainable conferencing section of the EMBO website for further information.

Use of AI tools in the preparation of applications  

EMBO acknowledges the value of using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, as well as human feedback, in the preparation of writing grant applications. Applicants are fully and solely responsible for the originality and accuracy of their applications. 

Additionally, the Fellowship Programme requests applicants to disclose whether and which AI tools were used in preparing their applications, and for what purpose (e.g., to improve language style).

EMBO will continue following the developments in generative AI and adapt this policy as required. 

Use of AI tools in text, figures and authorship at EMBO Press 

An Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Large Language Model (LLM) programme cannot be listed as an author of an article.

Use of AI programmes should be primarily restricted to improve the style, accessibility or quality of human generated text and images, including schemata and data figures. Any part of an article assembled with the use of an AI-based programme must be thoroughly checked and verified by the authors, including deriving an understanding of the provenance of new information and ideas. The authors bear full responsibility for all text and images published in a paper, including factual accuracy, completeness, as well as accurate, comprehensive literature citation (including preprints and datasets, where appropriate). Authors must take care to ensure that application of AI-based tools does not lead them to plagiarize, misrepresent or falsify content, or infringe third party rights. Authors must disclose their use in the published article, including details on which parts of the article were assembled with the assistance of AI programmes and details on the tools employed.

Data figures and schemata presented in papers must be original, or, if presented for illustrative purposes, accurately cite the source. For data based on original experimentation or meta-analysis of the literature, AI programmes can be used in the collection and analysis of data if this is documented in the Methods section of the paper. If AI is used to generate synthetic data, this must be clearly labelled in the main text and figure, and it must also be documented in the Methods section. AI must not be used to synthesize or edit experimental data in a manner that misrepresents the findings. AI programmes may be used to display data or for illustrative purposes, if that is declared and attribution is provided, where appropriate.