Governance and responsibility
Editorial Policies
The rules under which the Journal of Experimental and Clinical Toxicology assesses, publishes and, where necessary, corrects research.
Each policy below states what the journal requires and who is responsible for it.
Independence
Who decides, and on what
Editorial decisions are made by the handling editor on the evidence in the manuscript and the reports of its reviewers. Decisions remain independent of fees, membership, editorial roles and paid services.
The journal follows the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) in handling authorship disputes, suspected misconduct, corrections and retractions.
Decision criteria
Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal.
Peer review
How manuscripts are reviewed
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.
Reviewers assess the question, the design, the analysis and the strength of the conclusions drawn from the data presented. Reviewer identities are confidential, and manuscript content is confidential to the editors and reviewers handling it.
When double-blind review is requested, editors must ensure that author-identifying information is not shared with reviewers.
Core policies
Integrity requirements
- Originality and duplicate submission
- Manuscripts must be original and not under consideration elsewhere. Submissions are screened for text overlap with Crossref Similarity Check, powered by iThenticate, and overlap is assessed editorially in context rather than against a fixed percentage.
- Authorship
- All listed authors must meet the ICMJE criteria: substantial contribution to the conception, design, acquisition or analysis; drafting or critical revision; approval of the version submitted; and agreement to be accountable for the work. Changes to authorship after submission require written agreement from every author.
- Conflicts of interest
- Authors, editors and reviewers disclose financial relationships, consultancies, institutional ties and personal relationships that could be seen to influence the work. An editor with a competing interest in a submission takes no part in its assessment.
- Research ethics
- Studies involving people require documented institutional review board approval and informed consent, reported with the approving body and protocol identifier. Animal studies require documented institutional animal-care approval, and authors confirm adherence to the ARRIVE guidelines.
- 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.
- Data availability
- Every empirical research manuscript must include a data-availability statement. Deposition of datasets, code and analysis scripts in a public repository is encouraged where consent and confidentiality allow.
- Corrections and retractions
- Substantive errors in a published article are corrected through a formal notice linked to the original record. Articles whose conclusions are undermined by fundamental flaws, or where misconduct is established, are retracted following COPE guidance, and the retraction notice states the reason and remains part of the published record.
- Appeals and complaints
- Authors may appeal a decision by writing to the editorial office with a point-by-point response to the reviewers. Appeals are considered by an editor who did not take the original decision; the outcome of an appeal is final for that submission.
Publishing terms
Access, licensing and preservation
Articles are published open access and are free to read on publication. Every article in the journal’s published record carries a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, so readers may share and adapt the work with attribution.
Article processing charges apply after acceptance and are set out on the article processing charges page, together with the journal’s withdrawal terms.
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.
Journal of Experimental and Clinical Toxicology · ISSN 2641-7669 · Published by Open Access Pub.