Editorial policies
Editorial Policies
The rules that govern how International Marine Science Journal assesses, decides on, publishes and corrects research.
These policies apply to every manuscript. Where marine research raises requirements that general publishing policy does not cover — permits, protected species, fisheries data, sampling provenance — they are stated here rather than left implicit.
Governance
Editorial independence
- Decision authority
- Editorial decisions rest with the handling editor and the editorial board. Editorial judgment is separate from the publisher's commercial operations.
- Charges
- Payment of an article processing charge plays no part in the assessment of a manuscript. Editorial decisions remain independent of fees, membership, or roles.
- Author standing
- An author's seniority, institution, nationality or funding source plays no part in the decision.
- Competing interests
- Authors, reviewers and editors declare financial and non-financial interests that could be seen to influence the work or its assessment.
- Recusal
- An editor with a competing interest in a manuscript — a shared institution, a recent collaboration, a personal or financial relationship — takes no part in handling it and is replaced by another editor.
- Manuscripts from editors
- A manuscript authored or co-authored by a board member is handled by another qualified editor without a competing interest. The member takes no part in the assessment of their own work and has no access to reviewer identities or reports.
- Confidentiality
- Submitted manuscripts are confidential. Editors and reviewers do not disclose, distribute or use unpublished material, and reviewers securely delete downloaded manuscript files after submitting a review.
Assessment
Peer review
- 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.
- Double-blind handling
- When double-blind review is requested, editors must ensure that author-identifying information is not shared with reviewers.
- Reviewers
- Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts.
- Reviewer selection
- Reviewers are selected for subject expertise and the absence of a competing interest with the authors or the work.
- Decision criteria
- Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal.
- Similarity screening
- Manuscripts are screened with Crossref Similarity Check, powered by iThenticate. A similarity report is assessed in context by an editor; there is no automatic threshold for acceptance or rejection.
Operational expectations for each role are set out for editors and for reviewers.
Attribution
Authorship and contribution
- Criteria
- All authors must meet the ICMJE authorship criteria: substantial contribution to conception, design, acquisition or analysis; drafting or critical revision; approval of the final version; and accountability for the work.
- Contributions
- Individual contributions are declared, and contributors who do not meet the authorship criteria are named in the acknowledgments with their permission.
- Changes to authorship
- Any addition, removal or reordering of authors after submission requires written agreement from every author, sent to the editorial office.
- Corresponding author
- The corresponding author is responsible for communication with the journal and for confirming that all co-authors have approved the submission.
- Funding
- All sources of funding and material support are declared on every article, including grant numbers where applicable.
Integrity
Research and publication integrity
The journal follows the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines, and allegations of misconduct are investigated according to established COPE procedures.
- Originality
- Submissions must be original work that is not published elsewhere and not under consideration elsewhere.
- Duplicate publication
- Republishing work already published, in whole or in substantial part, is grounds for rejection or retraction. Prior publication of a preprint or a conference abstract is not duplicate publication and should be disclosed at submission.
- Plagiarism
- Text, data, figures or ideas taken from others without attribution are grounds for rejection or retraction, whatever the stage of the process.
- Fabrication and falsification
- Invented data, and data or images altered so that they no longer represent what was observed, are serious misconduct.
- Image and data handling
- Adjustments to images must be applied to the whole image and must not obscure, remove or introduce a feature. Gels, micrographs, acoustic records and remote-sensing products should be supplied unprocessed on request.
- Misconduct by a reviewer or editor
- Breach of confidentiality, appropriation of material under review, undisclosed competing interests, or obstruction of a submission are investigated under the same COPE procedures, and may end an appointment.
Marine research
Requirements specific to marine research
Applied where the work involves them, not to every manuscript.
- Permits and protected settings
- Studies involving protected species, marine protected areas or sensitive habitats require the appropriate permits. The issuing authority and permit reference should be reported in the methods.
- Animal welfare
- Animal research must comply with institutional guidelines. Work on vertebrates and cephalopods should report the approving body, the approval reference, and the measures taken to minimize harm.
- Sample and specimen provenance
- Sampling location, date and method, the origin of specimens and material, and the basis for species identification should be reported clearly enough for the work to be assessed and repeated. Voucher specimens and their repository should be cited where they exist.
- Genetic resources
- Where access-and-benefit-sharing obligations apply to the material studied, the relevant permissions should be declared.
- Fisheries and resource data
- The provenance of catch, survey or stock data should be stated, together with any restriction on its release and the permission under which it is used.
- Sensitive locations
- Precise coordinates for vulnerable populations, breeding aggregations or exploitable sites may be generalized where disclosure would create a risk. Authors should raise this at submission; the reduced precision is then stated in the article.
- Environmental intervention
- Work that manipulates a natural system must report the authorization under which it was done and the steps taken to limit and remediate its effect.
- Local and Indigenous knowledge
- Where research draws on local or Indigenous ecological knowledge, the terms of consent and of attribution agreed with the community should be stated.
Evidence
Data and reproducibility
- Data availability
- Every empirical research manuscript must include a data-availability statement. Deposit in an appropriate repository is encouraged to support reproducibility.
- Repositories
- Where a recognized domain repository exists for the data type — oceanographic, biodiversity, sequence or geospatial — deposit there is preferred to supplementary files, and the accession or dataset DOI should be cited.
- Restricted data
- Where data cannot be released, the statement should say why and under what conditions access can be requested.
- Code and models
- Analysis code, model configurations and processing routines that are necessary to reproduce a result should be made available on the same terms as the data.
Tools
Artificial intelligence
- Authorship
- An AI tool cannot be an author. It cannot take responsibility for the work or approve a submission, and both are conditions of authorship.
- Disclosure by authors
- Use of generative AI in producing text, figures, code or analysis is declared in the manuscript, naming the tool and describing what it was used for. The authors remain responsible for everything in the submission.
- Use by reviewers
- 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.
- Use by editors
- The same restriction applies to editors handling a manuscript.
The record
Corrections, retractions and expressions of concern
- Correction
- An error that affects the record but not the findings is addressed by a published correction, linked to the article.
- Retraction
- Findings that are unreliable, whether through error or misconduct, and cases of duplicate publication or plagiarism, are addressed by retraction following COPE guidance.
- Expression of concern
- Where a serious question is raised that cannot yet be resolved, an expression of concern may be published while an investigation continues.
- How notices are published
- Every notice is a published record with its own registered DOI, is linked to the article it concerns, and appears alongside ordinary articles in the Archives.
- Permanence
- Published records are not removed. A record withdrawn from the literature stays listed, marked, and linked to the notice that withdraws it.
Recourse
Appeals and complaints
An author who believes a decision rests on a factual error or on a material misunderstanding of the work may appeal in writing to the editorial office, stating the specific grounds and responding to the points raised in review. An appeal is considered by an editor who was not responsible for the original decision. Disagreement with an editorial judgment is not in itself grounds for appeal, and an appeal does not suspend the author's freedom to submit elsewhere once the decision is final.
Complaints about the conduct of the review process, about a member of the editorial board, or about a published article are made to the editorial office and are investigated under COPE procedures. Where a complaint concerns an editor, it is handled by someone without a relationship to that editor.
Write to the editorial office at [email protected]. Author-facing requirements are set out in the Instructions for Authors.
Withdrawal
Withdrawal terms are set out in the Article Processing Charges withdrawal policy. Authors must receive official withdrawal confirmation before submitting the manuscript to another journal.
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.