Publishing Policies

The publication of each peer-reviewed article published in a CSIRO Publishing journal is considered a component in the development of a coherent and respected network of knowledge that directly reflects the quality of work of the author and the institutions that support them. 

As a publisher with a global reputation for scientific excellence, and in line with our Charter, CSIRO Publishing recognises the importance of high standards of ethical behaviour throughout the publication process. Our policies support this, and demonstrate our commitment to openness, transparency, and reproducibility in publishing. The following policies apply to all journals published by CSIRO Publishing. 

In addition to the general procedures listed here, authors should refer to the Author Instructions for the individual journals for specific policies relevant to their research communities.

CSIRO Publishing is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and supports the recommendations of the COPE Core Practices in our policies and procedures. Our journal editors are expected to work within the framework of the Core Practices.

• Authorship
• Contributorship
• Conflicts of interest
• Peer review
• Ethics approval
• Data
• Scientific misconduct, expressions of concern, and retractions
• Non-peer reviewed material
• Metrics

Authorship
It is essential that all authors agree to a manuscript’s submission, and to all stages of its revision. The corresponding authors should ensure that every author has approved all submissions, including revisions.

CSIRO Publishing requires the conditions around authorship credit follow the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), namely:

• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data
• Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content
• Final approval of the version published
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

All those designated as authors should meet all four criteria for authorship, and all who meet the four criteria should be identified as authors. Those who do not meet all four criteria should be acknowledged. Such contributors might include someone who provided technical help or writing assistance. Financial and material support should also be acknowledged. Anyone included in the Acknowledgements section should have granted permission to be listed.

In line with Principle 6 of the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, we recognise the right of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to be engaged in research that affects or is of particular significance to them. This principle is extended, in its broadest sense, to indigenous groups/communities in other geographic settings. Appropriate attribution of traditional knowledge may require sharing authorship with intercultural collaborators and this may differ from the approach to authorship credit recommended by the ICMJE.

Authorship problems generally occur when: (i) authorship is assigned to people who took little or no part in the research (gift authorship); or (ii) names of people who did take part are omitted (ghost authorship).

Changes to author attribution after initial submission must be approved by all authors. This applies to additions, deletions, a change of order to the authors’ names, or a change to the attribution of contributions. Authors should complete and return the request form.

Editors and Publishers cannot be asked to be involved in an authorship dispute. For guidance in resolving an authorship dispute the resources provided by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) may be of assistance.

For proprietary (non-society) journals, we require submitting authors to supply an ORCID iD. We encourage all co-authors to link their ORCID iDs to their author accounts in ScholarOne Manuscripts. To learn more about ORCID, please visit http://orcid.org/content/initiative.

Finally, in preparing the manuscript for publication, authors should ensure that they have followed the Author Instructions for the relevant CSIRO Publishing journal – a link can be found on the journal home page.

Author name changes after publication
CSIRO Publishing respects the rights of authors to their own identities and is committed to supporting authors who have changed their name for personal reasons, such as religious conversion, and gender identity change. Authors wishing to make such changes should contact us at Publishing.Help@csiro.au. Evidence of a legal name change is not necessary. Our journals staff will treat such requests confidentially and work with authors to ensure changes are made accurately and as quickly as possible. We will not notify co-authors of the request for change.

We will ensure that authors receive credit for all their work, by facilitating changes to author names, email addresses, biography photos, pronouns, and any other identifiers that may be necessary as a result of a change in author name. To protect the author's privacy, we will not publish a Corrigendum notice to the paper and rather update the author details directly in the article PDF and HTML. In addition to making changes to the article pdf and html, we will re-upload article metadata to the relevant abstracting and indexing services (such as Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed).

We recommend an ORCID iD to all authors, to ensure that all of their publications are discoverable in one place, even if they change their name.

Please note that we will not correct spelling errors, out-of-date affiliation details, or changes to email addresses that do not result from name changes without issuing a Corrigendum. We are also unable to correct citations to papers in which a name change has been made until the original paper has been updated and associated metadata have been uploaded to Crossref.

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Contributorship
CSIRO Publishing encourages responsible authorship practices and the provision of information about the contributions of each author. In addition, COPE recommends that clear policies, that allow for transparency around who contributed to the work and in what capacity, should be in place for requirements for authorship as well as contributorship.

Transparency around contributorship in a published article can bring a range of benefits, including:

• Providing visibility and recognition for individual contributions that may otherwise be lost in an expansive author list;
• Providing visibility for a range of research contributions that are key to research output being published;
• Facilitating resolution of author disputes by research institutions and authors by providing more transparency around individual author roles and responsibilities;
• Supporting research and researcher evaluation by providing a more holistic and nuanced view of the contributions of researchers to research output;
• Better tracking of outputs and contributions of individual research specialists and grant recipients;
• Easier identification of potential collaborators and opportunities for research networking.

The conditions around authorship for CSIRO Publishing Journals are determined by following our Publishing Policy. For multi-authored papers of primary research papers, it is the responsibility of the Corresponding Author to ensure that all co-authors agree to their individual contributions prior to manuscript submission.

Authors are encouraged to provide more transparency and detail around their diverse contributions to the published work by assigning relative values to their contributions, though the CRediT Taxonomy. Each author on a paper may have one or more CRediT contribution roles, but having a role described by the taxonomy does not automatically qualify someone as an author. Contributors whose input does not rise to the level of authorship should be named in the Acknowledgements section.

Where contributions are assigned, these will be published in the final article, and should accurately reflect contributions to the work.

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Conflicts of interest
Broadly, a conflict of interest may be seen to occur in scientific publishing when someone’s professional judgment about someone else’s research activity, the communication of that activity or its consideration for publication are influenced by a secondary interest – such as financial gain, career advancement, etc.

Importantly, the perception of a conflict of interest is as significant as an actual conflict of interest.

Financial or business relationships are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal and authors. Conflicts can also occur for other reasons, such as personal relationships or rivalries, academic competition, or intellectual or ideological beliefs.

All participants in the peer-review and publication process – authors, editors and reviewers – must identify potential conflicts of interest when fulfilling their roles and disclose all relationships that might be viewed as inappropriate.

Authors
When authors submit a manuscript of any type or format they are responsible for disclosing all financial and personal relationships that might bias or be seen to bias their work. At the end of their manuscripts, they should disclose financial and personal relationships with organisations or people that could inappropriately influence their work. If there are no conflicts of interest, authors should state that none exist. Submitted manuscripts should also disclose all sources of financial support for the research and/or preparation of the article.

Authors may identify reviewers or editors they wish to exclude from handling their manuscript due to an existing conflict of interest.

Reviewers
When asked to review a manuscript, reviewers should disclose to editors any conflicts of interest that could bias their opinions of the manuscript. If reviewers believe that they cannot judge a manuscript impartially because of contact with the authors or a possible conflict of interest, they should decline the invitation to review and provide an explanation to the Editor. Possible conflicts of interest may occur when reviewers:

1. have a history of serious (unresolved) disagreement with the authors,
2. are co-researchers on a current research project,
3. have jointly published papers in the past three years,
4. were part of an internal review panel for the paper before submission.

If a reviewer is unsure whether the potential for bias exists, advice should be sought from the editor.

Reviewers must not use knowledge of the manuscript under review before its publication to further their own interests.

Editors
If an Editor has a conflict of interest or a relationship that may bias their treatment of the manuscript under consideration, they should excuse themselves from handling the manuscript.

The online submission and peer review system ScholarOne is configured to exclude authors who are Editors from viewing or being involved in the editorial process for their manuscript.

More information:

• ICJME Author responsibilities – conflicts of interest
• COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers
• COPE conflict of interest case study

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Peer review
Peer review is key to ensuring journal quality and the publication of high-quality science. All authors are required to submit their manuscript to the peer review process before it can be accepted for publication. CSIRO Publishing’s general policy for peer review is below. A number of CSIRO Publishing journals have set policies independently, and these can be found on the individual journal pages.

In line with the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing identified by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME), we are committed to providing clear and transparent information regarding the peer review process in place for our journals. The publishing policies on this page set out our expectations for authors, reviewers and editors throughout the peer review process.

The basic principles and expectations of peer reviewers are set out in the COPE Ethical Guidelines for Peer Reviewers. Timeliness is key to the review process and reviewers are expected to communicate with the Editorial Office regarding the timely delivery of their review.

All submitted manuscripts are treated as confidential documents, which means editorial staff, editors and external reviewers will not divulge information about a manuscript to anyone without the authors' permission. The only occasion when details about a manuscript might be passed to a third party without the authors’ permission is if the Editor suspects serious research misconduct.

CSIRO Publishing does not guarantee manuscript acceptance or very short peer review times. Average time to first decision can be found on the Journal Flyer, available on the homepage of each journal. Authors may enquire about the status of their paper by writing to the journal’s Editorial Office. Contact details can be found on each journal website.

For the majority of CSIRO Publishing journals, peer review is managed through ScholarOne Manuscripts. Where society journals may use a different process, this is clearly indicated in the journal’s Author Instructions. Plagiarism screening is an established part of the editorial process for journals utilising ScholarOne Manuscripts. To support this policy, all revised manuscripts received into ScholarOne Manuscripts will be screened using the iThenticate software.

The Editor-in-Chief of the journal is responsible for maintaining high-quality peer-review for submitted papers, and works together with the Associate Editors to ensure a thorough and fair peer-review, and the highest scientific publishing standards. The name of the Associate Editor responsible for managing the peer review appears on each paper for all proprietary (non-society) journals.

All submissions undergo preliminary assessment by an Editor, who may reject a paper before peer review or at any point during peer review. Reasons for rejection are provided to authors, and may relate to editorial issues with the manuscript (such as relevance to journal scope, evidence of research ethics approval or poor language quality) or technical issues with the research being reported (such as incomplete data, inappropriate methodology or weak conclusions). Manuscripts felt to be suitable for consideration will either be sent out for ‘single-blind review’, in which the reviewer's name is not disclosed to the author, or ‘double-blind review’ in which the identity of the reviewers and the authors are not disclosed to either party. Journals published by CSIRO Publishing utilise these two types of peer review; please refer to the Author Instructions of the journal for more information.

To increase transparency, under our single-blind review policy, reviewers may choose to sign their reports. Reviewers and authors are asked not to directly contact each other while the manuscript is under consideration, rather keep all communication through ScholarOne with the Editor’s involvement.

Authors may request particular individuals to be excluded as peer reviewers. The Editor will endeavour to accommodate such requests but reserves the right to invite non-preferred reviewers if the validity of the request is deemed unreasonable. For some journals, authors may also propose suitable independent reviewers. Approaching author-suggested reviewers is at the discretion of the Editor. Intentionally falsifying contact details of proposed reviewers will result in rejection of a manuscript.

Where reviewers are unavailable, we encourage them to recommend an Early Career Researcher who would benefit from experience as a peer reviewer.

After at least two review reports are received, the Associate Editor determines whether a final determination for the paper can be reached or if the manuscript requires revision. Once peer review is complete, the Associate Editor will make either a final decision, or a recommendation to the Editor-in-Chief to make the final decision. The Author Instructions for each journal explain whether the Editor-in-Chief or Associate Editor makes the final decision.

Authors may appeal editorial decisions by sending an e-mail to the Editor-in-Chief of the journal. Editors-in-Chief should provide fair and careful consideration to appeals against editorial decisions. In the first instance, the appeal should be handled by the Editor-in-Chief responsible for the journal. If the Editor-in-Chief is the subject of a complaint, please approach the Journals Publisher.

Authors should only appeal when there is factual error in the reviewers’ comments or if a clear error in process or judgment has occurred; simply addressing reviewers’ comments on rejected manuscripts is not enough and “appeals” of this kind will not be considered. Instead, for an appeal to be considered it must provide a detailed justification along with strong evidence or new data/information, including point-by-point responses to the reviewers’ comments. Author protest alone will not affect the original rejection decision.

The Editor-in-Chief will communicate the outcome of the appeal to the author and may recommend acceptance, further peer-review, or uphold the original rejection decision. There is only one appeal possible against the original rejection decision. A rejection decision after appeal is final and cannot be reversed or appealed against again.

For journals utilising ScholarOne, once a final decision is made on the paper, reviewers are notified of the outcome and the comments made by the other reviewers. CSIRO Publishing recognises and values the significant investment of time and expertise by peer reviewers and seeks to provide recognition in a number of ways – visit our Reviewer Recognition page for more information.

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Ethics approval
In reporting research regarding human subjects, authors are required to document that a formally constituted review board (Institutional Review Board or Ethics committee) has granted approval for the research to be done, or that the principles outlined in the Declaration of Helsinki regarding human experimentation have been met. Investigators who do not have access to an institutional review board are required to provide a statement to the editor outlining why it was not possible to gain formal ethics approval. If the study is judged exempt from review, a statement from the committee is required.

Authors should state that the research was undertaken with appropriate informed consent of participants or guardians. In reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether institutional and national standards for the care and welfare of animals were followed and provide a statement within the manuscript regarding the use of appropriate measures to minimize pain or discomfort.

Authors should make an ethics statement within the manuscript to this effect.

Editors should ensure that peer reviewers consider ethical and welfare issues raised by the research they are reviewing, and to request additional information from authors where needed. In situations where there is doubt as to the adherence to appropriate procedures or approval by the relevant ethics committee, editors are required to reject these papers.

CSIRO Publishing encourages journal editors to work within the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) and CSIRO’s own guidelines on ethical human research and guidelines provided by the CSIRO Animal Ethics committee.

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Data
CSIRO Publishing encourages authors to share the research data underlying their papers to support transparency and reproducibility of research. Some of the benefits of sharing data are:

• Fosters new collaborations
• Increases trust in research findings
• Accelerates research progress
• Improves reproducibility
• Avoids unnecessary duplication of experiments
• Allows researchers to get credit for their data
• Sharing data with a DOI increases discoverability

CSIRO Publishing authors are encouraged to deposit the data used to generate the results in their paper in an appropriate public repository. Where ethical or privacy issues exist, data should not be shared.  The decision to publish will not be affected by whether or not authors have shared their research data. Where data is shared, authors should cite their data in line with the journal guidelines. For transparency, a Data Availability Statement must be included in each manuscript stating whether data are available and, if so, where, with a link (if applicable) to the data.

What is research data?
Research data does not include the manuscript or data submitted and published as part of an article. Research data includes additional data that were used to generate the results in the paper or assist in validating the results. Research data types differ depending on field and may include, but are not limited to, raw or processed data, software, code, models, methods, materials. 

Research data that are not included as part of the manuscript are not formally peer reviewed as a part of the journal editorial process. It is the author’s responsibility to ensure the soundness of data. 

What is a public data repository?
The preferred mechanism for sharing research data is via data repositories. A number of discipline-specific data repositories exist, alternatively general repositories may be used if no community-specific resource is available such as Dryad or Figshare. Important features of a repository are that an identifier such as a digital object identifier (DOI) is used to make the data persistent, unique and citable and that a repository recognises a long-term preservation plan. re3data is a global registry that may help authors to find appropriate repositories for the storage of research data and can be searched for at DataCite Repository Selector.

What is a data availability statement?
A Data Availability Statement states whether data are available and, if so, where to access them. A Data Availability Statement must be included in a manuscript and will be published with the paper if accepted for publication. To assist authors, CSIRO Publishing provides a number of template data availability statements that may be selected and used if applicable:

Citing research data
Authors can get credit for their work by citing their research data in the reference list of their article. Details on how to cite data can be found in the references section in the Author Instructions of the journal of interest.

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Scientific misconduct, expressions of concern, and retractions
Scientific misconduct includes but is not necessarily limited to data fabrication, data falsification including deceptive manipulation of images, duplicate publication (repeated publication of data or ideas) and plagiarism (see our policy below). When scientific misconduct is alleged, or concerns are otherwise raised about the conduct or integrity of work described in submitted or published papers, appropriate procedures will be initiated. CSIRO Publishing is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and supports the recommendations of the COPE Core Practices in our policies and procedures. Our journal editors are expected to work within the framework of the Core Practices. When there are allegations of misconduct, CSIRO Publishing follows the COPE Best Practice Guidelines and the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).

Plagiarism policy
Plagiarism is the unattributed appropriation of someone else’s published work as an author’s own, or more commonly, the re-use of chunks of text from published papers by the same author(s) (self-plagiarism). Plagiarism is not acceptable in CSIRO Publishing journals.

Plagiarism screening is an established part of the editorial process for all journals published by CSIRO Publishing. To support this policy, all manuscripts will be screened using the iThenticate software.

CSIRO Publishing uses a threshold level of 30% – that is, if a manuscript returns an overall similarity index of more than 30%, the iThenticate report will be manually checked, and if necessary further action taken. iThenticate has ‘exclude bibliography’ and ‘exclude quotation’ features to reduce the frequency of false alarms for review papers.

If plagiarism is detected before acceptance, the author(s) will be asked to rewrite the content and / or to cite the references from where the content has been taken. In some cases the paper may be rejected.

If plagiarism is detected after a paper is published, the journal will conduct an investigation following COPE guidelines, and appropriate procedures will be initiated. If plagiarism is found, a Corrigendum may be published. In some cases the paper may be formally retracted.

Corrigenda
CSIRO Publishing will consider issuing a corrigendum to correct errors of fact to ensure an accurate publication record. A corrigendum will not usually be published for spelling or grammatical errors. A published corrigendum will be linked to the article of record that it corrects. The ‘Online Early’ version of a paper is considered the version of record and is not an opportunity to make further changes prior to inclusion in an issue.

Please contact the Journal Publisher from the Journal’s homepage (via Contacts) for Corrigenda or Retraction requests.

Retractions
A formal retraction will be considered after careful investigation if it is found that a published paper contains errors serious enough to invalidate its results and conclusions. CSIRO Publishing follows the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines for retracting articles. The author(s) will be encouraged to assist in the investigation.

If a retraction is published, it will officially replace the original publication on the website. A 'RETRACTED' watermark will be added to the original paper. The retraction will be published in the current issue of the journal to be picked up by indexing and abstracting services, and will be linked to the article of record that it retracts.

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Non-peer reviewed material

Preprints
A preprint is a draft version of a paper that has not undergone peer review and is made available online before (or simultaneous with) submission to a journal. CSIRO Publishing does not consider posting on a preprint server as duplicate publication, and as such will consider articles for publication that have previously been made available as preprints. Please include a link to the preprint in your cover letter.

For transparency and to ensure that readers are aware of the latest status of the work reported, there are benefits to linking the published article to the preprint version, and vice versa. CSIRO Publishing requires that the preprint of your paper must be referred to and linked to in a footnote. If accepted for publication, CSIRO Publishing requires authors to provide a link from the preprint to the final published article via its Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

Authors may also post the submitted version and (unedited) accepted version of a manuscript to a preprint server at any time.

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Metrics
CSIRO Publishing is committed to providing clarity and transparency around metrics at both the journal and article levels. This commitment is achieved by providing a wide variety of metrics along with their sources and definitions. The metrics presented centre on citation, attention, and usage. All metrics data are collected for calendar years and updated annually.

This is in line with our support of principles of the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). Furthermore, CSIRO Publishing is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), an organization that has identified Principles of Transparency & Best Practice for Scholarly Publications in collaboration with Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and World Association of Medical Editors (WAME).

Journal-level metrics are available on the Journal Flyer, located on the homepage of each individual journal. Article-level metrics are available on the CSIRO Publishing html page for individual articles.

Journal-level metrics

Speed

Days from manuscript submission to first decision
Source: Data from Scholar One Manuscripts
Definition: Average time (in calendar days) taken from submission of a paper to receipt of the first post-review decision.

Days from manuscript acceptance to publication
Source: Data from CSIRO Publishing production system
Definition: Average time (in working days) from editorial acceptance to publication of a manuscript.

Usage

Downloads
Source: COUNTER
Definition: COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of NeTworked Electronic Resources) is an international initiative that sets standards for the recording and reporting of online usage statistics. CSIRO Publishing is bound by its Code of Practice and is COUNTER compliant. Downloads include access to both HTML and PDF versions. (Definition available at COUNTER)

Impact

Ranking in area (quartile)
Source: Clarivate Analytics
Definition: The Journal Impact Factor Percentile transforms the rank in category by Journal Impact Factor into a percentile value, allowing more meaningful cross-category comparison. (Definition available at Clarivate Analytics)

Two-Year Impact Factor
Source: Clarivate Analytics
Definition: The Journal Impact Factor is defined as all citations to the journal in the current Journal Citation Report (JCR) year to items published in the previous two years, divided by the total number of scholarly items (these comprise articles, reviews, and proceedings papers) published in the journal in the previous two years. (Courtesy of Clarivate Analytics)

Five-Year Impact Factor
Source: Clarivate Analytics
Definition: The 5-year journal Impact Factor, available from 2007 onward, is the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past five years have been cited in the JCR year. It is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the JCR year by the total number of articles published in the five previous years. (Courtesy of Clarivate Analytics)

Total Citations
Source: Clarivate Analytics
Definition: The total number of times that a journal has been cited by all journals included in the database in the JCR year. (Courtesy of Clarivate Analytics)

CiteScore
Source: SCOPUS
Definition: CiteScore calculates the average number of citations received in a calendar year by all items published in that journal in the preceding three years. The calendar year to which a serial title’s issues are assigned is determined by their cover dates, and not the dates that the serial issues were made available online. (Courtesy of SCOPUS)

CiteScore highest percentile and ranking in category
Source: SCOPUS
Definition: CiteScore Percentile indicates the relative standing of a serial title in its subject field. The Percentile and Ranking are relative to a specific Subject Area. (Courtesy of SCOPUS)

SNIP (Source Normalised Impact per Paper)
Source: SCOPUS
Definition: SNIP measures a source’s contextual citation impact by weighting citations based on the total number of citations in a subject field. It helps you make a direct comparison of sources in different subject fields. (Courtesy of SCOPUS)

SJR (SCImago Journal Rank)
Source: SCOPUS
Definition: SJR is weighted by the prestige of a journal. Subject field, quality, and reputation of the journal have a direct effect on the value of a citation. SJR assigns relative scores to all of the sources in a citation network. Its methodology is inspired by the Google PageRank algorithm, in that not all citations are equal. A source transfers its own 'prestige', or status, to another source through the act of citing it. A citation from a source with a relatively high SJR is worth more than a citation from a source with a lower SJR. (Courtesy of SCOPUS)

h5-index (Google Scholar index for papers published in the last 5 years)
Source: Google Scholar
Definition: The h-index of a publication is the largest number h such that at least h articles in that publication were cited at least h times each. (Courtesy of Google Scholar)

Article-level metrics:

View Dimensions 
Source: Dimensions
Definition: Dimensions is a research insights platform that brings together information about funding, publications, policy, patents, and grants. The Dimensions Badge provides a free and easy way to showcase the number of citations that publications have received. (Courtesy of Dimensions)

View Altmetrics
Source: Altmetric
Definition: Altmetrics are metrics and qualitative data that are complementary to traditional, citation-based metrics. They can include (but are not limited to) citations in public policy documents, discussions on research blogs, mainstream media coverage and mentions on social networks such as Twitter. (Definition available at Altmetric)

Cited By
Source: Crossref database
Definition: A listing of individual citations found in the Crossref database. Crossref makes research outputs easy to find, cite, link, and assess. (Courtesy of Crossref)

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