Editorial policies
How the journal operates
The standards the Journal of Respiratory Diseases applies to every manuscript, from first screening to the published record and any correction that follows it.
Review and decisions
How a manuscript is assessed
Screening
Initial editorial screening
All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal's scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review.
Peer review
The review model
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 validity, methodological rigor and clarity of reporting. Authors who prefer double-blind review say so at submission and prepare their manuscript as the author instructions describe.
Decisions
What decisions are based on
Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal.
Decisions are independent of fees, services, membership, and editorial or reviewer roles. Editors recuse themselves from decisions on their own submissions, and those manuscripts are handled independently.
Research ethics
What the journal requires of the research
Approvals
Ethical approval and consent
Studies involving people require approval from the relevant research ethics committee or institutional review board, and the manuscript must name the approving body. Research involving animals requires the equivalent institutional approval.
Authors confirm that participants gave informed consent, and that consent for publication was obtained wherever an individual could be identified from the text, an image or a case description.
Trial registration
Clinical trials
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
Data availability
Every empirical research manuscript must include a data-availability statement. The statement says where the data supporting the findings can be found and on what terms, or gives the reason access is restricted.
Reporting
Reporting standards
Authors report their work against the reporting guideline that fits the study design, and describe methods in enough detail for another group to repeat them. Statistical methods are stated with the analysis they support.
Authorship and disclosure
Who is accountable for the work
Authorship
Who qualifies as an author
Authorship requires a substantial contribution to the work, involvement in drafting or critically revising it, approval of the version submitted, and accountability for its accuracy and integrity. Everyone who meets those conditions is listed; contributors who do not are acknowledged instead.
Changes to the author list after submission require the written agreement of all authors.
Conflicts
Competing interests
Authors declare financial and non-financial interests that a reader could reasonably consider relevant to the work, including funding, employment, consultancy, patents and personal relationships. Editors and reviewers declare the same and step aside where an interest would compromise an assessment.
Funding
Funding statements
Every manuscript names its funding sources and the role the funder played in the design, conduct, analysis and reporting of the work, or states that the work received no specific funding.
AI use
Disclosure of AI assistance
Authors disclose any use of generative AI in preparing a manuscript, name the tool and describe what it was used for and how its output was checked. AI tools are not authors, and the named authors remain accountable for everything the manuscript contains.
The published record
Keeping the record accurate
Screening
Originality
Submissions are screened for similarity with the published literature before review. Text reused from the authors' own earlier work is cited like any other source.
Corrections
Corrections and retractions
Factual and metadata errors are corrected through a published correction linked to the original article. Findings that are no longer reliable are retracted through a published retraction notice that states the reason and who requested it.
Where a concern is substantiated but not yet resolved, the journal may publish an expression of concern. Published articles are never removed: the original record and its notice both remain available.
Misconduct
Allegations
Allegations of misconduct are investigated with the authors and, where required, their institution. The article's status is updated in public once the investigation concludes.
Licensing
Rights and reuse
Articles are published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license. Authors retain copyright, and readers may reuse the work with attribution.
Withdrawal
Withdrawing a submission
The journal's withdrawal policy is set out in full on the article processing charges page. Authors who need to withdraw a manuscript contact the editorial office first.
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.