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. Moreover, the journal adheres to the principles of Open Science, promoting transparency, reproducibility, and accessibility in research.

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.

JVATiTD follows the Open Access model, providing immediate, worldwide, and unrestricted virtual access to the full text of all its published scientific content. Under this policy, authors retain the copyright and grant usage rights to third parties through the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. This allows any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles, as well as to crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, provided the original work is properly cited. This open access model is supported by an article processing charge (APC) paid by the authors’ institutions or research funding agencies for accepted manuscripts, ensuring that no financial barriers are imposed on readers.

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.

Artificial intelligence tools must not be listed as authors or co-authors, as they cannot take responsibility for the accuracy, integrity, or originality of the work. These are essential criteria for authorship and remain the sole responsibility of the human authors.

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.

JVATiTD is committed to maintaining the highest standards of publication ethics and follows the principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE). All research involving human subjects, human material, or animals must be approved by an appropriate Institutional Review Board (IRB) or Institutional Ethics Committee before undertaking the research. For research conducted in Brazil, this includes approval from the CEP/CONEP system (for humans) or CEUA (for animals). A statement including the name of the ethics committee, the project identification code, and the date of approval must be cited in the manuscript.

Clinical trials or randomized controlled trials must have been registered in a primary register of the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform. Furthermore, any experimental work using animals must conform to the principles of animal welfare in experimental science, and reference must be made to specific principles of laboratory animal care or similar national regulations to ensure ethical standards are met.

Authors must ensure that the reported research is free from misconduct, such as data fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, or redundant publication. Submission of a manuscript implies that the work is original and is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere. To ensure the integrity of the scientific record, all manuscripts are submitted to plagiarism detection software. In cases of confirmed misconduct, the journal will follow COPE guidelines and flowcharts, which may result in the issuance of a retraction notice or formal correction.