Journal Policies
Submitting your bioRxiv or medRxiv preprint to the journal
Permission to Reproduce Figures and Extracts
Manuscript Preparation Instructions
Peer Review
All submissions to the journal are initially reviewed by one of the Editors. Manuscripts may be rejected without peer review at this stage if it is felt that they are not of high enough priority or not relevant to the journal. Otherwise manuscripts are sent out for peer review, usually to two independent reviewers. Based on the feedback from these reviewers and the Editors’ judgment a decision is given on the manuscript. The average time from submission to first decision is 6 weeks. If a paper is not acceptable in its present form, we will pass on suggestions for revisions to the author.
Virus Evolution adheres to a policy of single-blind reviewing, in which the identity of the reviewers is kept confidential.
In the case of manuscripts in which one of the authors is a handling editor (Editor-in-Chief, Section Editor or Associate Editor ) for the journal, that editor will be blinded from reviewing or making decisions on the manuscript, and this will be acknowledged in the conflict of interest statement of the published paper.
Virus Evolution warmly welcomes molecular epidemiology submissions that contain new genetic or phenotypic data. Manuscripts will be considered suitable for peer-review if they contain novel and substantial results and address epidemiological, ecological, virological, genetic or evolutionary questions. Manuscripts whose sole purpose is to report new virus gene sequences will not be considered suitable.
Appeals and complaints
Authors may appeal an editorial decision. To do so, please contact the editorial office at [email protected] providing as much specific detail as possible about why the original decision should be reconsidered. Every appeal will receive a response within a reasonable timeframe. Please do not resubmit your manuscript in the interim.
To register a complaint regarding non-editorial decisions, the Journal’s policies and procedures, editors, or staff, please contact [email protected]. Complaints will be taken seriously and will be carried forward following COPE guidelines and processes.
Open Access
All content published in Virus Evolution is made freely available online under an Open Access model. After a manuscript is accepted for publication, the corresponding author must accept a mandatory license to publish agreement. Authors can use the Creative Common Attribution license (CC-BY) and Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license (CC-BY-NC) for their articles. Visit the OUP licensing website to find out more about Creative Commons licences.
Publication Ethics
Authors should observe high standards with respect to publication ethics as set out by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Falsification or fabrication of data, plagiarism, including duplicate publication of the authors’ own work without proper citation, and misappropriation of the work are all unacceptable. Any cases of ethical misconduct will be treated seriously and will be dealt with in accordance with the COPE guidelines.
Ethics Statement
Any study using human subjects or materials that requires ethical approval should state the relevant Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval or relevant Institutional Animal Care approval. Please also list other relevant ethics approvals.
Authorship
Authorship is limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the design and execution of the work described. Any contributors whose participation does not meet the criteria for authorship should be acknowledged but not listed as an author. For a detailed definition of authorship, please see the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) definitions of authors and contributors.
Virus Evolution does not allow ghost authorship, where an unnamed author prepares the article with no credit, or guest/gift authorship, where an author who made little or no contribution is listed as an author. The Journal follows Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidance on investigating and resolving these cases. For more information, please see the OUP Publication Ethics page.
Natural language processing tools driven by artificial intelligence (AI) do not qualify as authors, and the Journal will screen for them in author lists. The use of AI (for example, to help generate content or images, write code, process data, or for translation) should be disclosed both in cover letters to editors and in the Methods or Acknowledgements section of manuscripts. Please see the COPE position statement on Authorship and AI for more details.
After manuscript submission, no authorship changes (including the authorship list, author order, and who is designated as the corresponding author) should be made unless there is a substantive reason to do so. For the avoidance of doubt, changing the corresponding author in order to access Read and Publish funding is not permissible. For more information on Read and Publish funding, see the Open access charges section.
The editor and all co-authors must agree on the change(s), and neither the Journal nor the publisher mediates authorship disputes. If individuals cannot agree on the authorship of a submitted manuscript, contact the editorial office at [email protected]. The dispute must be resolved among the individuals and their institution(s) before the manuscript can be accepted for publication. If an authorship dispute or change arises after a paper is accepted, contact OUP’s Author Support team. COPE provides guidance for authors on resolving authorship disputes.
'Umbrella' groups
Some large collaborative studies are organized under a group name which represents all the participants. All articles must have at least one named individual as author. Authors who wish to acknowledge the umbrella group from which the data originate should first list the author(s) of the article and follow this with 'on behalf of the GROUP NAME'. If necessary, names of participants may be listed in the Acknowledgements section.
Plagiarism
Manuscripts submitted may be screened with iThenticate anti-plagiarism software in an attempt to detect and prevent plagiarism. Any manuscript may be screened, especially if there is reason to suppose part or all of the text has been previously published. Prior to final acceptance any manuscript that has not already been screened may be put through iThenticate. Please see more information about iThenticate.
Conflicts of interest
Each author should reveal any financial interests or connections, direct or indirect, or other situations that might raise the question of bias in the work reported or the conclusions, implications, or opinions stated – including pertinent commercial or other sources of funding for the individual author(s) or for the associated department(s) or organization(s), personal relationships, or direct academic competition. When considering whether you should declare a conflicting interest or connection please consider this test: Is there any arrangement that would embarrass you or any of your co-authors if it was to emerge after publication and you had not declared it?
Statement of informed consent
Patients have a right to privacy that should not be infringed without informed consent. Identifying information, including patients' names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that a patient who is identifiable be shown the manuscript to be published. Authors should identify individuals who provide writing assistance and disclose the funding source for this assistance. Identifying details should be omitted if they are not essential. Complete anonymity is difficult to achieve, however, and informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt. For example, masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate protection of anonymity. If identifying characteristics are altered to protect anonymity, such as in genetic pedigrees, authors should provide assurance that alterations do not distort scientific meaning and editors should so note.
Use of GenBank Data
Virus Evolution considers it correct research practice when using unpublished but publically available data for authors, wherever practically reasonable, to contact and discuss data use with those who have generated the sequences
Data Policy
We strongly encourage authors to make the data underlying their published research freely available to others, wherever legally and ethically possible. We request that authors make the availability and location of their data clear in a data availability statement after the Acknowledgements section of their article. Please see Instructions to Authors.
If your paper reports new sequence data then that data must be submitted to an open database such as GenBank, or similar. Accession numbers must be provided in the manuscript as a condition of acceptance.
Where specialised, subject-specific public repositories are available, we encourage authors to deposit their data in these. See bio sharing for a curated list of databases in the life sciences. Where it is not possible to upload data to a public repository, authors may also upload datasets as Supplementary Material with their paper for publication.
Where none of these options are feasible, authors are required to make data their available upon reasonable request for the purposes of verification.
Submitting your bioRxiv or medRxiv preprint to the journal
You can submit your bioRxiv or medRxiv preprint directly from the bioRxiv or medRxiv server to Virus Evolution. To do this, visit the Author Area in bioRxiv or medRxiv and select Virus Evolution from the list of options.
This will transfer all manuscript files and author information to Virus Evolution. You will then receive an email with a link to your submission in Virus Evolution, where you will need to answer some additional questions and approve the manuscript for submission.
Authors submitting their bioRxiv or medRxiv preprint to Virus Evolution should refer to the section on Preprint Policy. In particular, you should note the following:
- The preprint that you submit to Virus Evolution must be the Author’s Original Version before any peer review.
- You should not submit your preprint to more than one journal simultaneously.
- If your paper is accepted for publication in Virus Evolution, you are responsible for ensuring that the preprint is updated with the DOI of and a link to the published paper. bioRxiv and medRxiv do this automatically for most papers, but the process is imperfect, particularly if the preprint and paper titles are different.
ORCID
Virus Evolution requires submitting authors to provide an ORCID iD at submission to the journal. More information on ORCID and the benefits of using an ORCID iD is available. If you do not already have an ORCID iD, you can register for free via the ORCID website.
Permission to Reproduce Figures and Extracts
In order to reproduce any third party material, including tables, figures, or images, in an article authors must obtain permission from the copyright holder and comply with with any requirements the copyright holder may have pertaining to this reuse. When seeking to reproduce any kind of third party material authors should request the following:
- non-exclusive rights to reproduce the material in the specified article and journal;
- electronic rights, preferably for use in any form or medium;
- the right to use the material for the life of the work; and
- world-wide English-language rights.
Guidelines on clearing permissions.
Third-Party Content in Open Access papers
If you will be publishing your paper under an Open Access licence but it contains material for which you do not have Open Access re-use permissions, please state this clearly by supplying the following credit line alongside the material:
Title of content
Author, Original publication, year of original publication, by permission of [rights holder]
This image/content is not covered by the terms of the Creative Commons licence of this publication. For permission to reuse, please contact the rights holder.
Material Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in Virus Evolution are those of the authors and contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the editors, the editorial board, Oxford University Press or the organization to which the authors are affiliated.
