International Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases
About the journal
IJSTD is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal for research on sexually transmitted infections — the organisms themselves, the tests that find them, the care of the people who have them, and the surveillance and prevention that reduce the next infection.
Publisher Open Access Pub ISSN (electronic) 2994-6743 Crossref DOI prefix 10.14302 Access Open access, CC BY 4.0
01 · Definition
What IJSTD is
The International Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases (IJSTD) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by Open Access Pub under ISSN 2994-6743. It publishes original research, reviews and short reports on the clinical, epidemiological and public-health dimensions of sexually transmitted infection, with emphasis on pathogen biology, diagnostic innovation, treatment optimization and prevention strategies.
Every article is published open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, copyright is retained by the authors, and registered articles carry a permanent Crossref digital object identifier under the prefix 10.14302.
The journal is scoped to the infection rather than to a method or a discipline. A study belongs here if its subject is a sexually transmitted pathogen or the clinical, laboratory, epidemiological or preventive response to one — whether the work is a genomic analysis, an assay validation, a treatment trial, a surveillance series or an evaluation of a screening program. General infectious-disease research unrelated to sexually transmitted pathogens is outside that boundary.
02 · Purpose
Why the journal exists
Work on sexually transmitted infection is normally published apart. Pathogen genomics goes to microbiology journals, assay evaluations to laboratory medicine, treatment trials to infectious diseases, screening and partner services to public health, and each audience reads its own literature. The questions, however, do not divide that way.
A resistance mutation matters because it changes a treatment regimen. A treatment regimen matters because it changes what surveillance detects. Surveillance matters because it tells a screening program where to look. And a screening program is only as good as the assay underneath it. The sequence closes on itself, and the places where it breaks are usually the places where two of these literatures never met.
IJSTD exists to keep that sequence in one journal, so that a laboratory scientist, a clinician and an epidemiologist working on the same infection are publishing where the others are reading.
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01
Pathogen biology and resistance
What the organism is, how it establishes infection and evades the immune response, and how it becomes resistant to the drugs used against it.
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02
Diagnosis
Whether an infection can be found, by which assay, in which specimen, and with what sensitivity, specificity and predictive value in the population being tested.
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03
Clinical management
What is done for the person who has the infection: treatment regimens, drug-resistant infection, co-infection, and the complications that follow when either is missed.
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04
Epidemiology and surveillance
How much infection there is, in which populations, moving in which direction, and how reliably the systems that count it are actually counting.
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05
Prevention and public health
Vaccination, prophylaxis, screening programs, partner services and the evaluation of prevention policy — the work that determines whether there is a next infection.
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06
Congenital and perinatal transmission
Screening in pregnancy, vertical transmission and congenital infection, where every stage above has to work at once for the outcome to change.
The aims and scope page states the priority domains, the secondary and cross-disciplinary areas, and the boundary in full.
03 · Readership
Who the journal serves
IJSTD is written for the researchers and clinicians who work on sexually transmitted infection from different directions and need to read each other.
- Clinical
- Infectious-disease physicians, sexual-health and genitourinary-medicine specialists, HIV clinicians, and dermatology and venereology researchers.
- Laboratory
- Clinical microbiologists, molecular diagnostics researchers, laboratory-medicine scientists, and investigators working on antimicrobial resistance.
- Population
- Epidemiologists, surveillance scientists, genomic epidemiologists, and public-health researchers working on STI burden and its measurement.
- Prevention and services
- Sexual-health researchers, prevention and vaccine investigators, implementation scientists, and those evaluating screening, partner services and access to care.
04 · Responsibility
Publishing in a sensitive health domain
Research on sexually transmitted infection is research about people. A cohort record in this field can carry a person's sexual history, their HIV status, or both, and a study that would be unremarkable in another discipline can identify someone here through a combination of details no single field would reveal on its own.
The journal therefore treats the handling of the data as part of the science rather than as an administrative preliminary. Research involving human participants, identifiable information or biological material must include an ethics statement naming the approving committee and reference number, or explaining any exemption or waiver under the applicable requirements. Authors must state whether consent to participate was obtained where required. Written consent for publication is required for identifiable case material. Authors must minimize the risk of identification, including through combinations of indirect details. Authors must minimize the risk of identification, including through combinations of indirect details.
Reporting is expected to match the study design — CONSORT for clinical trials, STROBE for observational studies, PRISMA for systematic reviews, STARD for studies of diagnostic accuracy, ARRIVE for animal research. Interventional clinical trials must be registered in an accepted public trial registry at or before the first participant provides consent for enrollment. Every empirical research manuscript must include a data-availability statement. Competing interests and every funding source are disclosed.
Research on stigma and on the barriers that keep people from testing and treatment is within the journal's scope, and is read as sexual-health science rather than as commentary on the people it describes.
05 · Principles
How the journal publishes
The mechanisms below are the journal's, stated as they operate rather than as claims about quality.
- Editorial independence
- Editorial decisions are independent of any fee, service, membership or role. Nothing an author pays for or holds affects whether a manuscript is reviewed or accepted.
- Screening
- All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal's scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review.
- Peer 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.
- Decision criteria
- Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal.
- Open access and licensing
- Every article is published open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Copyright is retained by the authors, and no transfer of copyright is required.
- Identification and correction
- Registered articles carry a permanent Crossref DOI under the prefix 10.14302. Corrections, retractions and expressions of concern are published as part of the record and remain linked to the article they concern.
- Preservation
- IJSTD is included under Open Access Pub's Portico digital-preservation program. As articles are deposited, they enter Portico's permanent archive for long-term preservation.
- Discoverability
- The journal is registered with the ISSN International Centre, registers its articles for Crossref DOIs, and is represented in the OpenAlex open catalog of scholarly works. ISSN identifies the journal, Crossref registers persistent article identifiers, and OpenAlex supports discovery of scholarly works.
The registration and discovery page lists every service with the date its status was last checked, and the copyright and license page states the license terms in full.
06 · The record
What the journal has published
The published record is the honest account of what a journal is, and IJSTD's is concentrated on the infections its title names. Recent research includes a laboratory analysis of sexually transmitted infection prevalence in home-collected samples in the United Kingdom, a five-year retrospective analysis of syphilis epidemiology in the United Arab Emirates with a companion study of associated infections and comorbidities, and a cross-sectional study of correlations with congenital syphilis in the United States.
These studies span the laboratory, the clinic, national surveillance and perinatal transmission — which is the sequence this page describes, in the journal's own archive.
07 · Oversight
Editorial oversight
Manuscripts are handled by an editorial board whose members work in the fields the journal publishes — among them laboratory medicine and the molecular detection of STI pathogens, pathology and the cytological diagnosis of HPV-associated lesions, and community-engaged HPV vaccination and prevention research. Board members are listed with their affiliation and, where they have supplied one, their ORCID iD, with links to their individual profiles.
Researchers and clinicians working across sexually transmitted infection are invited to join the board or to review.
08 · Routes
Where to go next
- Aims and scopeEvery research domain with a worked example, and the boundary.
- Editorial policiesEthics, consent, authorship, competing interests, corrections.
- Instructions for authorsPreparation, structure, references and supplementary files.
- Article processing chargesCharged after acceptance only, and set by article type.
- Current issueThe most recent research the journal has published.
- Submit a manuscriptThree routes to one editorial office.
International Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases (IJSTD) · ISSN 2994-6743 · Crossref DOI prefix 10.14302 · published open access by Open Access Pub under CC BY 4.0. Editorial decisions are independent of any fee, service, membership or role.