JVATiTD - Editorial Policies

Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases (JVATiTD) is an open access interdisciplinary publication, dedicated to publish research on all aspects of toxins, venomous animals and their derivative products. It also welcomes topics in tropical medicine with a focus on infectious diseases, parasitology and immunology.

The journal adopts the continuous publication model, this means that as soon as a manuscript is prepared it will be released online, creating a rapid flow of quality articles.

Submission of a paper to JVATiTD implies that all authors have read and agreed to its content, that the manuscript conforms to the journal’s policies, and that it has not previously been published or is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere.

It is also worth considering that JVATiTD supports the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.

All submitted manuscripts must be in English. To facilitate proper peer-reviewing, it is essential that the text is submitted in grammatically correct English. If the authors are not native English speakers, we recommend that you have your manuscript professionally edited before submission or read by a native English-speaking colleague.

All articles published by JVATiTD are made immediately available worldwide, which means that: everyone has free and unlimited access to the full text of all articles published; everyone is free to re-use the published material if proper accreditation/citation of the original publication is given; and open access publication is supported by the authors’ institutes or research funding agencies by payment of an article processing charge (APC) for accepted articles.

Authors are expected to fulfil the four criteria established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE): (1) contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; (2) drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; (3) final approval of the version to be published; and (4) to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

Contributors that do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the ‘Acknowledgements’ section. Each author must describe his/her role in the manuscript. The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that all authors have agreed to the submission of the manuscript, but all of them should take responsibility for its content.

The list of authors should be carefully analyzed when submitting the manuscript. Any change (addition or removal of authors) during the evaluation process must have a reasonable and strong explanation in addition to a signed agreement of all authors. Authorship changes are not allowed after acceptance of the article.

Peer-review is the system used to evaluate the quality of a manuscript before its publication. Independent researchers in the research area assess submitted manuscripts for originality, validity and significance to help editors determine whether the manuscript should be published. JVATiTD operates using a double-blind peer-review system, where the reviewers do not know the names or affiliations of the authors and the reviewer reports provided to the authors are anonymous. The suitability of a manuscript for publication will be assessed solely on criteria of scientific excellence. Final decisions will be made by the editor-in-chief.

For all articles published in JVATiTD copyright is retained by the authors. Articles are licensed under an open access Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, meaning that anyone may download and read the paper at no cost. Moreover, the article may be reused and quoted provided that the original published version is cited. These conditions allow for maximum use and exposure of the study, while ensuring that the authors receive proper credit.

When reporting on research that involves human subjects or human material, authors must declare that an approval from an ethics committee should have been obtained before undertaking the research. A statement including the project identification code, date of approval, and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board should be cited in the article.

Clinical trials or randomized controlled trials must have been registered in a primary register of the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform.

Any experimental work using animals must conform the principles of animal welfare in experimental science. Reference must be made to principles of laboratory animal care or similar regulations. Approval by a properly constituted research ethics committee must be included containing the following data: project identification code, date of approval and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board.

Authors must ensure that the reported research is not the result of misconduct such as data fabrication, falsification, plagiarism or duplication. In case of confirmed misconduct, the journal will issue a retraction notice to correct the scientific record. All manuscripts are submitted to a plagiarism detection software to prevent misconduct and to ensure the originality of written work.