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The University of Louisville Journal of Respiratory Infections

Policies

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Who Can Submit?

Anyone may submit an original article to be considered for publication in the Journal of Respiratory Infections provided that he or she owns the copyright to the work being submitted or is authorized by the copyright owner or owners to submit the article. Authors are the initial owners of the copyrights to their works (an exception in the non-academic world to this might exist if the authors have, as a condition of employment, agreed to transfer copyright to their employer.

This journal does not charge article processing/publishing charges (APCs) or submission charges. We strongly believe that investigators submitting significant research should not be required to pay for article processing fees.

General Submission Rules

Human subjects protection

All research submitted to the Journal of Respiratory Infections must be in compliance with all applicable laws, both in the USA and in any other country or countries in which the research occurred, for the protection of human subjects and their confidential health information. All human subjects research must be conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (2013). Approval or waiver, as appropriate, by an institutional review board or equivalent must be secured prior to implementation of research practices involving human subjects and reported in the submitted manuscript.

Identifying information (e.g., names, initials, hospital numbers) must be omitted from all manuscripts unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient or parent/guardian has been shown the manuscript and provides written informed consent for publication.

Animal subjects protection

All research submitted to the Journal of Respiratory Infections must be incompliance with all applicable laws, both in the USA and in any other country or countries in which the research occurred, for the protection of animal subjects. All animal subjects research must be conducted in accordance with the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, 8th edition (2011).

For all research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study should be obtained from participants (or their parent or legal guardian in the case of children under 16) and a statement to this effect should appear in the manuscript. For manuscript reporting studies involving vulnerable groups (for example unconscious patients) where there is the potential for coercion (for example prisoners) or where consent may not have been fully informed, manuscripts will be considered at the editor’s discretion.

For manuscripts that may be publishing personal information about identifiable patients, such as a case report, the journal requires a blank copy of the consent form used for the patient to be uploaded as a supplementary file with their article submission.

Competing interests

Authors are required to declare all competing interests in relation to their work. Submissions must include a ‘Conflict of interest” section listing all competing interests (financial and non-financial). Where authors have no competing interests, they should state that "All authors declared no conflict of interest in relation to the main objective of this work." The Editor(s) may ask for further information relating to competing interests.

Editors and/or reviewers are also required to declare any competing interests and may be excluded from the peer review process if a competing interest exists.

Duplicate publication

Submitted articles cannot have been previously published nor be forthcoming in an archival journal or book (print or electronic).

Preprint servers

Posting of un-refereed manuscripts to a community preprint server by the author will not be considered prior publication, provided that the following conditions are met: 1) During submission, authors must acknowledge preprint server deposition and provide any associated accession numbers or DOIs; 2) Versions of a manuscript that have been altered as a result of the peer review process may not be deposited; 3) The preprint version cannot itself have been indexed in MEDLINE or PubMed; 4) Upon publication, authors are responsible for updating the archived preprint with a DOI and link to the published version of the article.

Abstracts/webcasts

If some or all of the work in the manuscript has been published or submitted in abstract form, and/or overlapping data exists, the following rules apply: 1) The published or submitted abstract must accompany the submitted manuscript; 2) The abstract cannot itself have been referenced in MEDLINE or PubMed; 3) The potentially overlapping work and a separate explanation of the nature of any possible overlap with the submitted manuscript must accompany the submitted manuscript.

Please note: ‘publication” in a working-paper series does not constitute prior publication. Submissions are checked for plagiarism, and editors follow published COPE guidelines in cases of suspected plagiarism.

All figures/images must be either a) completely original work of the author, never published before, not based on published work or b) if replicated from other published sources, accompanied by appropriate permissions, citation, and copyright information.

In addition, by submitting material to the Journal, the author is stipulating that the material is not currently under review at another journal (electronic or print) and that he or she will not submit the material to another journal (electronic or print) until the completion of the editorial decision process at Journal. If you have concerns about the submission terms for the Journal of Respiratory Infections, please contact the editors.

Data availability

Authors are strongly encouraged to make the data used to produce their research findings available. Authors can submit a dataset as a supplementary file with their article submission or provide a link to an online data repository.

Review Process

Submissions to the Journal of Respiratory Infections undergo peer review or single review, depending on the article type.

Peer Review Single Review
Original Research Brief Review
Review Article Brief Communication
Case Report Multimedia
Methodology Patient Management Article
Study Protocol Opinion Piece
Persepctive Piece
Correspondence

Peer review

Original research, review articles, case reports, methodologies, and study protocols undergo single-blind peer review—reviewers remain anonymous, but the identity of the authors is not concealed—by at least two external (i.e., not on the Journal staff) peer reviewers. Reviewers are selected according to their expertise in the topic covered in a given submission. The review process takes approximately 2–3 weeks.

In addition to their comments, the reviewers are asked to provide the editors with one of the following four recommendations on the basis of scientific merit, research ethics, and manuscript quality:

  1. Accept for publication
  2. Accept, pending minor revisions (as described in the reviewer’s report)
  3. Major revisions required (as described in the reviewer’s report)
  4. Reject

The recommendations and comments are reviewed by one of the Editors-in-Chief, who issues a single decision out of the same four options based on the reviewers’ recommendations. This decision, the reviewers’ comments, and instructions for next steps are communicated to the authors.

Revised versions are reviewed by the same Editor-in-Chief, who then issues an editorial decision. Revised manuscripts may be accepted for publication if the authors have responded appropriately to the reviewers' comments, as determined by the Editor-in-Chief. Alternatively, further revisions may be requested at this time, with as many rounds of revision occurring as are necessary to address all reviewer comments and achieve sufficient quality for publication. Manuscripts persistently failing or refusing to address reviewer comments may be rejected.

Single review

All other article types are reviewed by one of the Editors-in-Chief, who makes comments and issues a decision without input from peer-reviewers. As in peer review, the authors receive the comments, instructions for next steps, and a decision out of one of the following four options:

  1. Accept for publication
  2. Accept, pending minor revisions (as described in the reviewer’s report)
  3. Major revisions required (as described in the reviewer’s report)
  4. Reject

Revised versions are reviewed by the same Editor-in-Chief, who then issues an editorial decision. Revised manuscripts may be accepted for publication if the authors have responded appropriately to the editor's comments. Alternatively, further revisions may be requested at this time, with as many rounds of revision occurring as are necessary to address all editor comments and achieve sufficient quality for publication. Manuscripts persistently failing or refusing to address editor comments may be rejected.

Editorial conflict of interest

If one of the two Editors-in-Chief authors or co-authors a submission, the other Editor-in-Chief will perform all editorial duties concerning that submission. If both Editors-in-Chief co-author a submission, a third editor will assume the role of Acting Editor-in-Chief for the purposes of that submission.

If the Managing Editor authors or co-authors a submission, a second editor will assume the role of Acting Managing Editor for the purposes of that submission.

In the submission system, editors are automatically prevented from viewing the editor tools or performing editorial operations on submissions authored by themselves.

Attribution and Usage Policies

Author(s) submitting to the Journal of Respiratory Infections retain full copyright in the submitted article and therefore can exercise copyright accordingly and consistently with governing copyright law. Upon acceptance, author(s) will grant the University of Louisville a nonexclusive license to publish the submitted article subject to the other terms and conditions of the JRI publication agreement signed by author(s) and any requirements governing any Creative Commons licenses affixed to the journal and individual articles.

This policy is compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Creative Commons License

Allegations of Research Misconduct

The journal takes allegations of research misconduct seriously, and follows up on all cases of suspected plagiarism, citation manipulation, and data falsification or fabrication according to the published standards of the Committee on Publication Ethics.

Upon receiving an allegation, the editorial office will open a case to collect evidence, contact involved parties, and render a decision. Depending on the outcome, correction or retraction of an article may be required, as well as notifying of the appropriate regulatory bodies. Useful definitions of scientific misconduct are available here.

Authorship and Contributions

Manuscripts should contain a section listing author contributions. This list is required for editorial purposes but will not be included in the final publication unless duplicated in the Acknowledgements.

Per the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), authors must meet all of the following four criteria:

  1. Made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work.

  2. Drafted the work or revised it critically for important intellectual content.

  3. Gave final approval of the version to be published.

  4. Agreed 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.

More details can be found at the ICMJE page for authorship roles. An example of an author contribution statement is:

‘FWA had full access to all study data and takes responsibility for the integrity and the accuracy of the analysis. FWA, JB, JAR, RMC, RFB, and RC made substantial contributions to the study design, analysis and interpretation of the data, and writing of the manuscript.”

Contributions to the research or manuscript preparation from anyone who is not an author should be stated in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript with the permission of the contributor in question. Manuscripts must be submitted by one of the authors.

Funding

Every submission must include a funding statement declaring any funding received to conduct the work. Any role of the funding body in study design, research interpretation, or reporting must be declared. If no funding was received, the statement should read ‘The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.”

Appeals

In the case of authors(s) wishing to make appeals to the editorial decisions of the journal, correspondence should be directed to the editorial office containing the specific grounds for the appeal. This correspondence will be reviewed by the editorial office and the Editors-in-Chief. The author(s) will then be informed of the results of the appeal and the appropriate next steps.

Corrections

Errors by the authors may be corrected by submitting an update to the editorial office including the name of the article along with proposed corrections. All authors will be asked to agree to the content of these corrections. The correction will be listed in an erratum on the article.

For errors that significantly affect the scientific conclusions of the work or if there is evidence of misconduct, a retraction may be required or an expression of concern in keeping with COPE Retraction Guidelines.

The Journal of Respiratory Infections reserves the right to correct errors in published articles.

Advertising

The Journal of Respiratory Infections does not accept support through advertising or other commercial promotions. All forms of advertising, including native advertising, are strictly prohibited in Journal publications and on the Journal website.

General Terms and Conditions of Use

Users of the website and/or software agree not to misuse the service or software in any way.

The failure of to exercise or enforce any right or provision in the policies or the Submission Agreement does not constitute a waiver of such right or provision. If any term of the Submission Agreement or these policies is found to be invalid, the parties nevertheless agree that the court should endeavor to give effect to the parties’ intentions as reflected in the provision, and the other provisions of the Submission Agreement and these policies remain in full force and effect. These policies and the Submission Agreement constitute the entire agreement between and the Author(s) regarding submission of the Article.