Peer review process

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Level 1: Editorial Board Evaluation

The IJS Editorial Board is composed of IJS members who are active scientists and experts in their fields. In submission, your work is assigned to a member of the Editorial Board    and if the Board member determines that the role should proceed, she or he assigns it to a   reviewing member or, if the IJS  is not sufficiently aware, a non-member guest editor to oversee the peer review process. The Council may reject manuscripts without further review, or review and reject manuscripts that do not comply with IJS  standards. More than 30%of submissions are refused in the initial assessment.

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Level 2: Review of member or guest reviewer

A reviewer member is an IJS member who is an active scientist in the field most relevant to your research. The member reviewer manages the peer review process for articles in your area and determines the suitability of your work for IJS.

A guest reviewer is an active scientist who is not a member of the IJS, but is recognized by the Board as an expert in its field. Guest  reviewers manage the peer review process in emerging and interdisciplinary fields where  IJS does not have sufficient  knowledge. With the supervision of the Editorial Board, the guest editors determine the suitability of their work for IJS.

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Level 3: Independent peer review

Research papers on all submission routes are reviewed by at least two independent experts. If your work to submit for review, your reviewer or guest reviewer selects  recognized experts to review your work. Editors evaluate reviewers' comments and make a recommendation to the editorial board member, who makes the final decision to accept or reject their work. Currently, the acceptance rate is 40%.

A member or guest member will typically ensure two independent peer reviews. However, a single negative review, with which the editor agrees, may be sufficient to recommend rejection. The names of Direct Submission reviewers are confidential and unshared unless express permission is granted by reviewers. As contributed submissions have open peer review (named reviewers).

For all articles, the peer review banner is identified below the author's affiliation line on the article title page, along with the name of the member responsible for editing or contributing the article.

 

Editorial Policies

Authorship and Contributions

Competing interest

Design and analysis transparency

Double-use research of concern

Embargo Policy

Errata

Human and Animal Research

Image integrity

License to publish

Availability of materials and data

Name changes

Open Access

Previous publication

DNA recombinant

Research misconduct

Reintroductions and Resources

Statistical analysis

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Authorship and Contributions

Authorship should be limited to those who contributed substantially to the work. The corresponding author must have obtained permission from all authors to submit each version of the article and for any authorship change.

All employees share some degree of responsibility for any information in the manuscript. Some co-authors are responsible for the entire article as an accurate and verifiable research report. These include co-authors who are responsible for the integrity of the data reported in the article, perform the analysis, write the manuscript, present major discoveries at conferences, or provide scientific leadership to junior colleagues.

Co-authors who make specific and limited contributions to an article are responsible for their contributions, but may have only limited responsibility for other results. Although not all co-authors may be familiar with all aspects of the research presented in their article, all contributors should have in place an appropriate process to review the accuracy of the reported results.

Authors should indicate their specific contributions to the published work, which will be published as a footnote to the article. As published contributions are taken from the submission system, not from the handwritten file. Examples of designations include:

• Projected research

• Conducted research

• Contributed to new reagents or analytical tools

• Data analyzed

• I wrote the paper

An author can list more than one contribution, and more than one author may have contributed to the same aspect of the work.

 

ORCID

IJS encourages all authors to use their ORCID identifier when submitting papers. ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes it from all other researchers. When provided, published articles display the orcid logo and link to an author's ORCID record. Learn more or register with ORCID.

 

Corresponding authors

Throughout submission and peer review, a single corresponding author is responsible for providing all the information and interactions necessary for the manuscript with the writing. After acceptance, several corresponding authors are allowed, responsible for verifying the accuracy of the content of the test and who will act as points of contact for doubts about the published article; these authors should be indicated on the title page (see Submit your manuscript).

 

Competing interest

Non-disclosure of a competing interest in submission may result in copyright penalties. Authors shall disclose, in submission, any association that represents or may reasonably be perceived as a competing financial or personal interest in connection with the manuscript, and recognize all sources of funding that support the work. How disclosures should be inserted directly into the submission system; providing a link to full disclosures hosted on a website is not permitted. When asked to evaluate a manuscript, members, reviewers, and publishers shall disclose any association that represents a competing interest in relation to the manuscript.

 

IJS Competing Income Policy

IJS recognizes the multiplicity of financial interests and other competitors that confront authors, arbitrators and publishers. The IJS policy  is designed to manage, not eliminate competing interests. The most important element of our policy is that all authors, members, arbitrators and publishers must disclose any association that represents or may reasonably be perceived as a competing financial or intellectual interest in connection with the manuscript. Disclosing a potential competing interest generally does not invalidate the research or comments of an arbitrator or editor; it simply provides the reader with the information needed to independently evaluate the work.

 

When a competing interest is disclosed by the author or editor, a descriptive footnote will be included in the published article.

 

IJS reserves the right to publish an erratum disclosing competing interests related to a previously published article. Authors, arbitrators or publishers who have deliberately or recklessly failed to disclose a competing interest may receive sanctions, including being prohibited from publishing on IJS.

 

This policy applies to all materials published in IJS, including research articles, Perspectives, Editorials, Reviews, Colloquium Articles, and Comments. For more  details, please contact IJS.

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Orientation

Competing Financial Income

A financial interest in an organization whose products or services are related to the subject of the article and could reasonably be perceived as capable of influencing the objectivity, integrity or interpretation of a publication should be disclosed as a competing interest.

When determining whether the financial interest meets the "reasonably perceived as..." criterion, use your best judgment to come to a determination in good faith. A useful criterion is whether an undisclosed competing interest would embarrass it if it became public after the publication of its work.

 

These financial interests may include employment, substantive ownership of shares or mutual funds, membership of a permanent advisory board or committee, service on the board of directors, public association with the company or its products, consulting fees, patent filings, compensation as a spokesperson, honoriary received in exchange for services or financial support.

 

These considerations apply to financial interests held by you, your spouse, or domestic partner, or your dependent children over the past 48 months.

*For example, many U.S. universities require faculty to disclose income sums of more than $10,000 or 5percent equity in acompany.

Competing participation of the Personal Association

 

A competing interest due to a personal association arises if you are invited to serve as editor or reviewer of a manuscript whose authors include a person with whom you have had an association, such as a thesis advisor (or advisor), postdoctoral mentor (or mentee), or co-author of an article, in the last 48 months. When such a competing interest arises, you cannot serve as an editor or reviewer.

 

A competing interest due to personal association also arises if you are invited to serve as editor or reviewer of a manuscript whose authors include a person with whom you have a family relationship, such as a spouse, domestic partner, or parent-child relationship. When such a competing interest arises, you cannot serve as an editor or reviewer.

 

A personal association of competing interest may exist for Academy members who submit a contributed manuscript if a suggested reviewer is, for example, the member's thesis advisor (or counselor), postdoctoral (or mentor) or co-author of an article in the last 48 months. When such a competing interest arises, an alternative reviewer should be suggested.

 

Author's Responsibilities

During the submission of the manuscript, authors are invited to complete form, disclose any competing interests and recognize all sources of funding that support thework. The corresponding author shall ensure that all authors have disclosed any competing interests.

 

Editor and Reviewer Responsibilities

When asked to evaluate a manuscript, reviewers and publishers shall disclose any association that represents a competing interest in relation to the manuscript. Arbitrators and editors are asked to refuse to handle an article if the competing interest renders them unable to make an impartial scientific judgment or evaluation. An arbitrator or editor who has a competing interest but believes that this does not prevent her from make a proper judgment should disclose to the magazine the nature of the interest.

 

Design and analysis transparency

Authors should follow field standards to disseminate key aspects of research design and data analysis, and should report on the standards used in their study. IJS encourages authors to pre-record their study and analysis plans and provide links to pre-registration in their submission.

 

Double-use research of concern

Authors and reviewers should notify the IJS if a manuscript reports possible research on double use of concern. IJSS will evaluate these papers and, if necessary, consult additional reviewers.

 

Embargo Policy

IJS may distribute interstates copies of an article accepted to the press prior to publication. Embargoes expire at 15:00 Eastern Time, Monday of the week of publication.

 

If a version of your IJS manuscript has already been posted, in whole or in part, on any publicly accessible form, including pre-printed servers, or if you plan to present your embargoed document at a conference prior to publication, please note that different embargo policies may apply and you should contact  IJS immediately.

 

Errata

Authors must notify IJS when a fix is required for a published article by contacting SUPPORT TEAM. At the discretion of the IJS, errors discovered after the publication of the article that do not substantively affect scientific results, such as small typographical errors that could affect the meaning, can be corrected online without a formal correction. A note about the post-publication update will be attached to the updated article.

 

For errors of a scientific nature that do not alter the overall results or conclusions of a published article, IJS will publish independent and critical corrections. Requests for these fixes will be sent to an editor for review to determine whether the errors warrant a fix.

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IJS articles may be withdrawn by their authors or publishers due to widespread errors or unfounded or unreproducible data. Articles can be retracted, for example, by honest error, scientific misconduct or or or by-information.

 

Name changes do not require a formal fix unless specifically requested. See Name changes for more information.

 

Human and animal participants and clinical trials

The studies must have been approved by the author's institutional review board. The authors should include in the methods section a brief statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee that approves the experiments. For all experiments involving human participants, the authors should also include a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all participants, or provide a statement why this was not necessary. All experiments must have been carried out in accordance with the principles expressed in the Declaration of Helsinki. Authors should follow the policy of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and the draft of an accepted clinical trial record prior to the start of patient enrollment. For animal studies, the authors should report the species, tension, gender and age of the animals.

 

Image integrity

No specific features within an image can be enhanced, obscured, moved, removed, or introduced. The grouping or consolidation of images from multiple sources should be explained by the arrangement of the figure and in the legend of the figure. Brightness, contrast, or color balance adjustments are acceptable if applied to the entire image and do not obscure, delete, or misrepresent any information present in the original, including backgrounds.

 

Questions about images raised during the display of images will be forwarded to the editors, who may request the original data of the authors for comparison with the prepared numbers. If the original data cannot be produced, the manuscript can be rejected. Cases of deliberate misgiving of the data will result in rejection of the article and will be reported to the institution of origin or funding agency of the corresponding author. Authors should obtain consent to the publication of figures with recognizable human faces.

 

License to publish

The completion of the online submission form gives a License to Publish the work on the NAS. If an article is declined for publication, the publishing license will be terminated.

 

Availability of materials and data

To allow others to replicate and build on works published in IJS, authors must make associated materials, data, and protocols, including code and scripts, available to readers after publication. Authors should follow the FAIR data principles (findable, accessible,  interoperable, and reusable) and deposit data into community-approved public repositories (see the DataCite Repository Finder to search for appropriate repositories) prior to publication. Authors must disclose upon presentation of the manuscript any restrictions on the availability of materials or information. In submission, authors should describe how readers will be able to access the data, associated protocols, code, and materials mentioned in the article.

 

A statement detailing data sharing plans (including all data, unique materials, documentation, and code used in the analysis) will be included in the published article. Any restrictions on access to the data, or any part thereof, must be disclosed in detail in the submission. Authors are encouraged to deposit lab protocols and include their DOI or URL in the methods section of their article. Data not shown and personal communications cannot be used to support claims at work.

 

Authors should deposit as much of their data as possible into publicly accessible community-supported databases and, where possible, follow the guidelines of the Joint Statement of Data Citation Principles. If data deposition is not possible, authors can use support information (SI) to show all the necessary data. The search datasets should be cited in the references. In rare cases where subject-specific repositories are not available, authors can use a general repository, such as figshare, Dryad,  or  Open Science  Framework. Fossils or other rare specimens must be deposited in a museum or repository and made available to researchers qualified for examination. The authors must ensure that the specimens were collected in accordance with all national and local laws of the territory in which they were discovered.

 

For more information on accessibility of data and materials, see:

• Reproducibility and Replicability in Science (2019)

• Joint Statement of Data Citation Principles

 

Failure to comply with IJS materials and data availability policies may prevent future publication in the journal. Contact us journalofsceinces.ijs@gmail.com  have difficulty obtaining materials or data.

 

IJS encourages the use of Search Resource Identifiers  (RRIDs), unique searchable identifiers, for reagents, and critical tools (antibodies, organisms, cell lines, and software projects). RRIDs connect readers to external resources and allow search engines to return all work in which a particular antibody, organism, or tool has been used. After you find an RRID, enter "RRID:" plus the identifier in the appropriate location in the manuscript.

 

Data availability requirements:

Material/Politics

Unique materials (e.g., cloned DNAs; antibodies; bacterial, animal or plant cells; viruses)

• Authors must make unique materials readily available at the request of qualified researchers for their own use. Failure to comply will prevent future publication in the journal.

• Authors may charge a modest amount to cover the cost of preparing and shipping the requested material.

Algorithms and Computer Codes

• Authors should make computer algorithms and codes available to readers, for example, through GitHub  or Zenodo.

• The version of the code associated with the article must be maintained by the authors.

Plasmid

• Authors are encouraged to deposit plasmid buildings in a public repository such as Addgene.

Datasets

• Prior to publication, authors should deposit large sets of data (including microarray data, protein sequences or nucleic acids, and atomic coordinates for macromolecular structures) into an approved database and provide a number of add-ons for inclusion in the published article. The citation to the dataset must be included in the references.

• When there is no public repository, authors must provide the data as SI or, if this is not possible, on the author's institutional site.

• Authors should contact IJS about special circumstances or privacy concerns.

Characterization of Chemical Compounds

• Authors must provide sufficient information to establish the identity of a new compound and its purity.

• The authors should include enough experimental details to allow other researchers to reproduce the synthesis.

• Authors should include characterization data and experimental details in the text or in the SI.

Sequences of proteins and nucleic acids

• Authors must deposit data in a publicly available database such as GenBank, EMBL,  DNA Data Bank of Japan, UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot,or PRIDE.

• Authors must provide a link to the associated membership data and numbers prior to publication.

Structural Studies: Biological Macromolecule Structures of Electron Microscopy Experiments involving any mean method (including subtomogram mean)

• Authors must deposit the 3D map on the EMBL-EBI (UK)  or RCSB (US) deposition site.

• Any atomic structure models installed on EM maps must be deposited in PDB.

• For tomographic studies of electrons without mean, the deposition of one or more representative tomograms in EMDB is strongly recommended.

• PDB and/or EMDB sign-up codes must be included in the manuscript, along with a brief descriptive title for each ad.

• Where PDB models have been installed on EMDB maps, matches between them must be clearly declared.

Structural Studies: Small-angle dispersion experiments

• The authors are encouraged to follow the guidelines of the International Crystallography Union (IUCr).

• Prior to submission, authors are encouraged to use the IUCrCIF verification  service to validate their crystallographic information files (CIFs) and structure factors.

• Validation reports can be submitted as SI to editors and reviewers.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Studies (fMRI)

• Authors must deposit data in XNAT Central or  the publicly accessible equivalent repository.

Genomic and Proteomic Studies

• Authors should send genomic, proteomic, or other high-yield data to the publicly accessible ncbi and hybridization matrix (GEO)data repository.

• Authors should deposit data in dbGaP.

• The support numbers must be provided and access to the deposited data must be available at the time of publication.

• The data sent must follow the MIAME  checklist.

Enzyme data

• When reporting kinetic and binding equilibrium data, authors should follow the guidelines of the  Enzymetology Data Reporting Standards Committee (STRENDA).

Earth and Space Science Data

• Authors must follow FAIR's data  principles.

• See DataCite Repository Finder

 

Name changes

IJS recognizes that people change their names for a variety of reasons (e.g., gender identity or change in marital status). An author, editor, or reviewer who wants to change the way their name appears in a published IJS article should send an email to IJS requesting the name change. IJS will work on each request to ensure that the change is made quickly, accurately and confidentially if requested. Data/family names and initials will be updated in all versions of the article (HTML and PDF), as well as paper metadata records. No indication or notification of the change will be published unless a formal correction is requested. Once the change is made, only the new name will be associated with the paper.

 

Open Access

All IJS articles are free and ALL authors are aware that they have opted for OPEN ACCESS and must make their articles available at no cost to the reader immediately after publication. Open access articles are published under a non-exclusive license to publish and distributed under a Creative Commons  Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CCBY-NC-ND) license or a creative commons attribution (CCBY)license for authors whose funders or institutions require it.

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Previous publication

Manuscripts submitted must not have been previously published or simultaneously submitted for publication elsewhere. What constitutes prior publication should take into account many criteria, including the extent of the review, and will be determined if the case is. Related manuscripts that are in press or submitted elsewhere should be included with an IJS submission.

 

DNA recombinant

Physical and biological containment must be in accordance with the guidelines of the National Institutes of Health or as a corresponding body.

 

Research misconduct

All work must be free of manufacturing, forgery, and or by origin, as defined by the U.S. Bureau of Research Integrity. In cases of suspicion or alleged misconduct, IJS follows the procedures recommended by COPE.

 

IJS uses software to select handwriting for possible duplication of text. IJS also evaluates questions with text, data, or numbers that are brought to our direct attention and may ask authors for source data, descriptions of how the experiments were conducted, or explanations of how the numbers were prepared. IJS may discuss concerns with a member of the Editorial Board, reviewer, or authors.

 

Authors should place direct quotations or quotation marks and should identify the original references of origin. For overlapping passages that are not verbatim, authors must include the original source reference.

 

Reintroductions and Resources

Resubmissions may be permitted upon request of the editorial board. Resources must be made in writing and sent to journalofsceinces.ijs@gmail.com. IJS may consider the copyright appeals of decisions on rejected articles; however, resources are unlikely to be granted based on novelties or general interests. Due to the high volume of submissions that IJS receives, a quick decision on resources cannot be guaranteed. If an appeal for rejected, new appeals of the decision will not be considered and the paper cannot be resubmitted. Repeated resources or resubmissions of a rejected manuscript without invitation from the Editorial Board will not be considered and may result in the authors prohibiting them from submitting to IJS.

 

Statistical analysis

Statistical analyses should be done on all available data and not only on data from a "representative experiment". As statistical analyses should include:

• the source and version of all software used, and

• complete information on the statistical methods and measures used for each table and figure, such as a statistical test, parameter estimates, exact sample sizes, and evidence strength measurements (frequent or Bayesian).

Statistics and error bars should only be shown for independent experiments and not for replicas within a single one. Publishers can submit manuscripts for statistical review.