International Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases
Editorial policies
How the International Journal of Sexually Transmitted Diseases governs peer review, ethics, research integrity and the correction of the published record — including the handling of sensitive sexual-health data.
Peer review Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request. Ethics Committee approval mandatory Data Availability statement required Corrections Published and permanently linked
01 · Contents
What these policies cover
These are the rules IJSTD applies to every manuscript it receives and every article it has published. They follow the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and the World Association of Medical Editors, and they apply to authors, reviewers, editors and the editorial office alike.
- 02Peer review and editorial decisions
- 03Editorial independence and competing interests
- 04Research ethics, consent and privacy
- 05Sensitive sexual-health data
- 06Trial registration and reporting standards
- 07Authorship and contributions
- 08Data, code and image integrity
- 09Originality, similarity and prior posting
- 10Corrections, retractions and expressions of concern
- 11Research misconduct and concerns
- 12Open access, copyright and preservation
- 13Publication charges
02 · Review
Peer review and editorial decisions
- 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. 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.
- Who decides
- A handling editor synthesizes the reviewers' assessments with their own and issues the decision, with the reasoning and the specific revisions required stated in the decision letter.
Reviewers are selected for demonstrated expertise in the subject, the methods or the population a manuscript addresses, and their freedom from competing interests is checked before an invitation is sent. Where double-blind review is requested, editors ensure that author-identifying information is not shared with reviewers, and reviewers must not attempt to identify the authors.
The obligations of each role are set out in full on the editors guidelines and the reviewer guidelines pages.
03 · Independence
Editorial independence and competing interests
Editorial decisions are independent of any fee, service, membership or role. Commercial considerations, author reputation, institutional standing and funding source play no part in whether a manuscript is reviewed or accepted, and advertising or sponsorship arrangements never influence content decisions.
- Disclosure by authors. All financial and non-financial competing interests must be declared at submission, including employment, consultancies, stock ownership, patents, paid expert testimony and close personal relationships. Every funding source is named, with grant numbers where they exist, together with any role the funder played in study design, analysis or manuscript preparation.
- Disclosure by editors and reviewers. Editors and reviewers declare competing interests of the same kinds, and recuse themselves from any manuscript where one exists or could reasonably appear to exist.
- Editor-authored manuscripts. An editor who is an author on a submission takes no part in its assessment. The manuscript is assigned to another editor, and the author-editor has no access to reviewer identities or to the decision process.
- Board members as reviewers. Editorial board members who review follow the same rules as external reviewers, with the additional disclosure their board role requires.
04 · Ethics
Research ethics, consent and privacy
Research involving human participants follows the applicable ethical requirements and principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. 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.
- Approval. Name the approving committee and give the protocol reference number in the Methods section, or explain the exemption or waiver granted under the applicable requirements.
- Consent to participate. State whether informed consent was obtained and how it was documented, including the arrangements made for participants who could not consent for themselves.
- Consent to publish. Written consent for publication is required for any identifiable case material, including clinical photographs, and the consent must cover the specific details and images submitted.
- Privacy. Authors must minimize the risk of identification, including through combinations of indirect details.
- Animal research. Studies involving animals require animal care and use committee approval and are reported in accordance with the ARRIVE guidelines.
05 · Sensitive data
Sensitive sexual-health data
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.
Authors must minimize the risk of identification, including through combinations of indirect details such as a small clinic, a narrow date range, an uncommon diagnosis and a demographic descriptor appearing together. Where a case cannot be reported without identifying detail, that detail is included only when it is clinically essential and explicitly covered by the consent obtained.
Populations are described by what is true of them, in the terminology used in the authoritative clinical and public-health literature. Infection is not treated as a property of an identity, and risk is described where it is measured rather than attributed. Manuscripts are edited for this, and reviewers are asked to raise it where the interpretation goes beyond what the data support.
Applies to
Case reports and case series. Clinical cohorts and trials. Surveillance and registry analyses. Partner-notification and contact-tracing studies. Research with adolescents, people who are incarcerated, sex workers, and other populations for whom disclosure carries additional risk.
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.
06 · Registration and reporting
Trial registration and reporting standards
- Clinical-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.
- Reporting guidelines
- 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.
Submit the completed checklist for the applicable guideline with the manuscript. The instructions for authors page states which checklist applies to each study design and where it belongs in the submission.
07 · Authorship
Authorship and contributions
Authorship is limited to those who meet the ICMJE criteria: substantial contribution to conception or design, or to acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data; drafting or critically revising the work; approval of the version submitted; and agreement to be accountable for it. Everyone who meets the criteria is listed, and no one who does not.
- Ghost and gift authorship. Neither is permitted. A named author who did not contribute, and a contributor who is omitted, are both grounds for rejection or for post-publication correction.
- Contributor statement. Describe what each author did, in the manuscript.
- Acknowledgments. Name those who contributed without meeting the authorship criteria, including medical writers and statisticians, with their permission.
- Generative AI. Following ICMJE guidance, an AI tool cannot be an author, because it cannot be accountable for the work. Any use of generative AI in preparing a manuscript is disclosed in the methods or the acknowledgments, and the authors remain responsible for the accuracy and originality of everything submitted.
- Changes after submission. Any addition, removal or reordering of authors requires the written agreement of all authors, sent to the editorial office.
08 · Data
Data, code and image integrity
- Data availability
- Every empirical research manuscript must include a data-availability statement.
- Deposition and code
- Every empirical research manuscript must include a data-availability statement. Share data and analysis code where consent, privacy and applicable requirements permit. Where access is restricted, explain the restriction and any permitted access process; do not deposit identifiable sexual-health data publicly.
- Image integrity
- Adjustments to brightness, contrast or color must be applied to the whole image and must not obscure, remove or introduce any feature. Grouping of images from different gels, fields or exposures is disclosed in the legend.
- Statistical reporting
- Report effect sizes with confidence intervals and exact p-values, name the software and version used, and state how the sample size was determined.
09 · Originality
Originality, similarity and prior posting
- Original work. A submitted manuscript must be original, not published elsewhere, and not under consideration by another journal. Authors must use only one submission route for the same manuscript.
- Similarity screening. Every submission is screened with similarity-detection software. A similarity report is read in context by the handling editor rather than against a fixed threshold: properly quoted and attributed material is acceptable, and what matters is whether the text or the findings are reused without attribution.
- Duplicate and redundant publication. Republishing substantially the same analysis, including as a translation or a divided report, without disclosure and a citation to the original, is not acceptable.
- Preprints. Preprints posted to medRxiv or bioRxiv are accepted; disclose the preprint in the cover letter and link it in the published article. Posting a preprint has no effect on consideration.
- Reused material. Written permission is required for any figure, table or extended quotation reproduced from another source, and the source is cited in the legend.
10 · The record
Corrections, retractions and expressions of concern
Corrections, retractions and expressions of concern are published as part of the record and remain linked to the article they concern. The original article is not removed: it stays available with the notice attached, so that the literature citing it remains readable and the change is visible to anyone who arrives at either document.
- Correction. Issued where an error affects the record but not the findings or the conclusions.
- Retraction. Issued where the findings are unreliable, whether through error or misconduct, or where the work was published without the required permission or consent. The notice states who is retracting and why.
- Expression of concern. Issued where a substantial concern exists and an inquiry is under way or inconclusive.
- Notices are registered. Each notice carries its own Crossref DOI and is linked to the article in the deposited metadata, so that services which harvest the record see the change.
11 · Integrity
Research misconduct and concerns
Fabrication, falsification, plagiarism and undisclosed duplicate publication are misconduct. Suspected misconduct is investigated following the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics, which may involve asking the authors for the underlying data and notifying the institution responsible for the research. The outcome may be rejection, correction, retraction or an expression of concern.
Concerns about a submitted or published article, and appeals against an editorial decision, are sent to the editorial office at [email protected] with the article title or manuscript number and the specific grounds. An appeal is considered by an editor who was not responsible for the original decision. Correspondence about a published article can also be submitted as a letter to the editor, which is peer reviewed and published as part of the record.
12 · Access
Open access, copyright and preservation
- License
- Every article is published open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license.
- Copyright
- Copyright is retained by the authors, and no transfer of copyright is required.
- Identification
- Registered articles carry a permanent Crossref DOI under the prefix 10.14302.
- 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.
13 · Charges
Publication charges
There is no submission fee and no reader charge. An article processing charge falls due only after a manuscript has been accepted, and it is set by article type. The full terms, including the withdrawal policy, are on the article processing charges page.
Payment has no bearing on any editorial decision. Editorial decisions are independent of any fee, service, membership or role.
14 · Routes
Where to go next
- Instructions for authorsLength, structure, references, ethics statements and the checklist.
- Editors guidelinesWhat a handling editor is expected to do, and when to step aside.
- Reviewer guidelinesHow to assess an STI manuscript, and what confidentiality requires.
- Article processing chargesCharges by article type, and the withdrawal policy.
- Aims and scopeEvery research domain with a worked example, and the boundary.
- 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.