Editorial Policies
How editorial decisions are governed
These are the rules under which manuscripts submitted to the Journal of Digestive Disorders and Diagnosis are screened, reviewed, decided and published.
They apply to every submission, and they are the same for every author. Where a rule carries an exact publisher-wide wording, that wording is reproduced here without alteration.
The decision path
From submission to decision
01
Editorial screening
All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal's scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review.
02
Independent 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.
03
Decision
Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal.
Editorial decisions are independent of fees, membership, editorial or reviewing roles, and optional author services.
04
Publication
Accepted articles are published open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0). Authors retain copyright in their work.
Research integrity
What every submission must carry
Ethical approval
Research involving human participants requires approval from an institutional review board or equivalent ethics committee, and informed consent as applicable. Research involving animals requires the corresponding institutional approval.
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.
Authorship
Authorship requires substantial contribution to the work, drafting or critical intellectual review of the manuscript, approval of the version submitted, and accountability for its accuracy and integrity.
Competing interests
All authors disclose financial and non-financial competing interests. Funding sources are named in the manuscript.
AI use
Any use of AI tools in preparing a manuscript is disclosed. Authors remain accountable for the whole of the submitted work.
Review arrangements
What authors, editors and reviewers each do
Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request. When double-blind review is requested, three handling rules apply, one to each party.
Authors
For double-blind review, remove author names, affiliations, acknowledgments, funding details, institution names, and other identifying information from the reviewer manuscript. Provide identifying information separately in the title-page file or submission form.
Editors
When double-blind review is requested, editors must ensure that author-identifying information is not shared with reviewers.
Reviewers
For double-blind manuscripts, reviewers must not attempt to identify the authors.
Confidentiality
Submitted manuscripts are confidential. Editors and reviewers do not disclose, distribute or use unpublished material, and editors recuse themselves from decisions on their own submissions, which are handled independently.
Similarity reports are read in context by the handling editor. The journal applies no fixed similarity percentage as an automatic accept or reject threshold.
The published record
Corrections, retractions and withdrawal
The journal corrects the record when an error is established, and issues a retraction when the findings are no longer reliable. Correction and retraction notices are published, linked to the article and retained permanently, so the record shows what happened.
Concerns about a published article should be sent to the editorial office with the evidence supporting them. The journal assesses the concern, contacts the authors where appropriate, and publishes the outcome.
Withdrawal
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.
The complete withdrawal terms are also published on the article processing charges page.
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.