OPEN ACCESSPEER REVIEWEDISSN 2576-9359
Editorial Policies
The policies below govern every manuscript the journal receives. They are stated in full here, and the editorial office will answer a question about any of them.
PEER REVIEW
How manuscripts are reviewed
Review is the journal’s central editorial process, and the same process applies to every submission.
SCREENING AND REVIEW
All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal’s scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review.
Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request.
Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts.
DECISIONS
Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal.
Decisions remain independent of fees, services, memberships and editorial or reviewing roles.
Editors recuse themselves from decisions on their own submissions, which are handled independently.
Authors who wish their manuscript to be handled double-blind should say so on submission and follow the anonymization requirements on Instructions for Authors.
INTEGRITY
Research integrity
The journal follows the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).
ORIGINALITY
Submissions are screened with Crossref Similarity Check, powered by iThenticate. A similarity report is read in context by the handling editor; it informs an editorial judgment rather than producing an automatic outcome.
COMPETING INTERESTS
Authors declare financial and non-financial competing interests on submission, reviewers declare any that would affect their assessment, and editors recuse themselves where one exists. Declarations are published with the article.
AUTHORSHIP
Authorship follows the ICMJE criteria. Every listed author takes public responsibility for the work, and contributions are recorded where authors supply them.
RESEARCH ETHICS
Ethics in human and animal research
Work involving people, identifiable data or animals carries requirements that are checked before review begins.
- ETHICAL APPROVAL
- Studies involving human participants require approval from the relevant research ethics committee or institutional review board, named in the manuscript with its reference number.
- CONSENT
- Informed consent is required from participants, and separate written consent is required to publish any identifiable image, case detail or personal data.
- DONATION AND TRANSPLANTATION
- Studies involving organ or tissue donation must state how consent or authorization for donation was obtained, and must confirm that no organ came from an executed prisoner or from a donor subject to coercion or payment.
- TRIAL REGISTRATION
- Interventional clinical trials must be registered in an accepted public trial registry at or before the first participant provides consent for enrollment. The registry name, registration number, and registration date must be reported in the manuscript.
- ANIMAL RESEARCH
- Studies involving animals require the approving body and protocol number, and should follow the ARRIVE reporting guidelines.
- DATA AVAILABILITY
- Every empirical research manuscript must include a data-availability statement.
THE PUBLISHED RECORD
Corrections, concerns and retraction
The published record is permanent. Where something in it needs to change, the change is made visibly and the original remains available.
CORRECTION
A correction notice records an error that affects the record but not the conclusions. It is linked to and from the article and carries its own DOI.
EXPRESSION OF CONCERN
Where a serious question is raised and remains open, an expression of concern records it while the matter is investigated under COPE guidance.
RETRACTION
Where findings are unreliable or the work breaches publication ethics, the article is retracted. The article stays online, watermarked, with the retraction notice attached.
Concerns about a published article, including suspected misconduct, may be sent to the editorial office at [email protected] and are handled under COPE guidance.
RIGHTS AND TERMS
Access, rights and charges
The terms on which the journal publishes are stated on the pages that own them, and are the same terms on every page of the journal.
- ACCESS AND LICENSE
- Open access under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0), with copyright retained by the authors.
- ARTICLE PROCESSING CHARGE
- Payable after acceptance. The charge, the withdrawal terms and the billing arrangements are published in full on Article Processing Charges.
- PRESERVATION AND DISCOVERY
- Identifier registration, metadata harvesting, selective indexing and digital preservation are each set out on Indexing.
- APPEALS
- An author may appeal a decision in writing to the Editor-in-Chief, setting out the specific points at issue. An appeal is considered by an editor who did not take the original decision.
NEXT
Reading and submitting
The preparation requirements, the charges and the ways to submit are set out on the pages below.
Digital preservation
This journal’s content is committed to Portico, a not-for-profit digital-preservation archive run by ITHAKA (the organization behind JSTOR). As articles are deposited they enter Portico’s permanent archive, so the scholarly record stays available for the long term — even if a title one day ceases to publish. Read our preservation policy.