International Journal of Infection Prevention · Editorial policies
Editorial Policies
The rules the journal applies to submitted and published work: how review is conducted, who decides, what authors must declare, and what happens when something has to be corrected.
ISSN 2690-4837 CC BY 4.0 COPE-guided practice
01 · Peer review
How manuscripts are reviewed and decided
- Screening
- All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal’s scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review.
- Review model
- Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request.
- Reviewers
- Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts.
- Anonymized review
- When double-blind review is requested, editors must ensure that author-identifying information is not shared with reviewers, and reviewers must not attempt to identify the authors. The author’s side of that arrangement — which details to remove and where to put them instead — is set out in the instructions for authors.
- Decision criteria
- Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal.
- Confidentiality
- Submitted manuscripts are confidential. Editors and reviewers may discuss a manuscript only with people involved in its assessment, and may not use unpublished material for their own purposes. After submitting the review, reviewers should securely delete downloaded manuscript files and must not retain or use unpublished material.
- Appeals and complaints
- Authors who consider a decision to rest on a factual or procedural error may write to the editorial office at [email protected], setting out the specific point at issue. Appeals are considered by an editor who was not responsible for the original decision. Complaints about the conduct of the editorial process are handled the same way, and are investigated following COPE guidance.
02 · Independence
Editorial independence
Editorial decisions are reached independently of fees, memberships, optional services, and editorial or reviewing roles.
- Competing interests
- Authors, editors and reviewers must declare financial and non-financial interests that a reasonable reader could consider relevant to the work — funding, employment, consultancy, patents, advisory roles, and personal or institutional relationships. Declarations are published with the article.
- Editor recusal
- Editors recuse themselves from decisions on their own submissions, which are handled independently, and from any manuscript where a declared interest could affect their judgment.
- Paid services
- Optional author-paid services, where used, are independent of the editorial process and do not affect the review outcome or decision. An optional language-editing service may improve grammar, clarity and style; scientific content is not changed.
- Membership
- Membership is optional and supports the journal’s open-access publishing. It confers no advantage in the review or acceptance of a member’s own manuscripts. Its terms are on the membership page.
03 · Authorship
Authorship and contribution
- Who qualifies as an author
- Authorship requires a substantial contribution to the work, involvement in drafting or critically revising the manuscript, approval of the version submitted, and agreement to be accountable for its accuracy and integrity. Everyone who meets those conditions is listed; everyone listed must meet them.
- Contributors acknowledged rather than listed
- People whose help falls outside those conditions — technical assistance, data collection, language editing, general supervision — are named in the acknowledgments with their permission.
- Corresponding author
- One author takes responsibility for communication with the journal, for confirming that co-authors have approved the submission, and for responding to questions after publication.
- Changes to the author list
- Any addition, removal or reordering after submission requires the written agreement of every author, including the person added or removed, together with the reason for the change.
04 · Research ethics
Ethical conduct of the research
- Human participants
- Research involving people, their tissue or their identifiable data requires approval from a named research ethics committee or institutional review board, with the approval reference reported in the manuscript, and informed consent from participants. Where a committee granted an exemption or waived consent, that decision and its grounds are reported in the same terms.
- Consent to publish
- Case reports, clinical images and any other material from which an individual could be identified require written consent to publication from that person or their legal representative, and the manuscript must state that consent was obtained.
- Clinical 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 approval from the relevant animal care and use committee, and should report housing, husbandry and humane endpoints in line with applicable national requirements.
- Biosafety and dual use
- Work with pathogens, antimicrobial-resistant organisms or clinical specimens must report the containment level and the approvals under which it was conducted. Authors should tell the editorial office at submission where findings carry a foreseeable biosafety or dual-use concern, so the point can be considered during review.
05 · Data
Data, code and materials
- Data availability statement
- Every empirical research manuscript must include a data-availability statement. It names where the underlying data are held, the conditions under which they can be obtained, and any identifier or accession number.
- Sharing and its limits
- Authors are encouraged to deposit data and analysis code in a public repository where this is possible. Surveillance and clinical data frequently include information that could identify a patient, a facility or an outbreak location; in those cases the statement describes the controlled-access route and the approval needed, so that a reader can see how the data may be reached.
- Reporting guidelines
- Manuscripts should follow the reporting guideline appropriate to their design, and submit the completed checklist with the manuscript. The guidelines relevant to the journal’s subject matter are listed in the instructions for authors.
06 · Artificial intelligence
Use of artificial intelligence
- Authors
- Generative AI tools may not be listed as authors, because they cannot take responsibility for the work. Where such a tool has been used in producing the manuscript, its use is disclosed in the methods or acknowledgments, naming the tool and the purpose, and the authors remain answerable for the accuracy and originality of everything submitted.
- Reviewers and editors
- Reviewers must obtain journal permission before using AI to assist with a review. Any permitted use must be disclosed, and confidential manuscript content must not be uploaded where confidentiality cannot be assured. The same condition applies to editors handling a manuscript.
07 · Integrity
Publication integrity and misconduct
- Originality and prior publication
- Submitted work must be original and not under consideration elsewhere. Posting a preprint is compatible with submission; authors should state where the preprint is held and link the published version to it once the article appears.
- Similarity screening
- Manuscripts may be screened with Crossref Similarity Check, powered by iThenticate. A similarity report is read by an editor in context rather than against a fixed percentage, since quoted methods, standard definitions and the authors’ own prior work each raise a score for entirely ordinary reasons.
- Concerns about published work
- Concerns about data, images, authorship or ethics may be raised with the editorial office at any time. They are investigated following COPE guidance, with the corresponding author given an opportunity to respond, and the institution involved where the matter warrants it.
08 · The record
Correcting and withdrawing the record
- Corrections
- Errors that affect the record are corrected by a citable correction notice linked to the original article. The article itself remains available, so the version readers have already cited stays retrievable.
- Retraction and expressions of concern
- An article is retracted when its findings are unreliable or its publication breached publication ethics. The retraction notice states who is retracting the article and why, and the original remains accessible, marked as retracted. Where an investigation is under way and readers need to know, an expression of concern is published and updated when the matter is resolved.
- Withdrawal before publication
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Authors should contact the editorial office promptly and wait for written confirmation before submitting the work elsewhere.
Manuscripts withdrawn within 3 days of submission are not subject to a withdrawal charge.
Manuscripts withdrawn more than 3 days after submission incur a withdrawal charge equal to 30% of the journal’s APC.
Authors must receive official withdrawal confirmation before submitting the manuscript to another journal.
These terms are stated in full on the article processing charges page.
09 · Rights and terms
Rights, privacy and charges
- Copyright and license
- Authors retain copyright. Articles are published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, which allows reuse with attribution. Third-party material reproduced in an article needs permission from its rights holder and a credit line identifying its own terms. Full terms are on the copyright and license page.
- Privacy
- Personal data supplied to the journal by authors, reviewers and editors is used only to operate the editorial process. Manuscripts, reviews and correspondence are kept confidential within it.
- Article processing charge
- The charge is invoiced only after acceptance and takes no part in the editorial decision. Amounts and payment terms are on the article processing charges page.
- Preservation and discovery
- Arrangements for long-term preservation, DOI registration and metadata distribution are described on the indexing and preservation page.
Questions
Raising a question about a policy
Questions about any policy on this page, and reports of a concern about published work, go to the editorial office at [email protected].
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.