Editorial policies
Editorial Policies
The rules under which manuscripts are assessed, decisions are made and the published record is corrected.
- Journal
- Journal of Colon And Rectal Cancer
- ISSN
- 2471-7061
- Access
- Open access, CC BY 4.0
- Review
- Independent peer review
Review and decision
How manuscripts are assessed
01
Screening
All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal's scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review.
02
Independent review
Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts.
Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request.
03
The basis of a decision
Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal.
04
Editorial independence
Decisions remain independent of fees, membership, editorial roles and paid services.
Editors recuse themselves from decisions on their own submissions; those manuscripts are handled independently.
Where double-blind review is requested, the handling rules for authors, editors and reviewers are set out on the Instructions for Authors, For Editors and For Reviewers pages.
Ethics and integrity
What the journal requires of a manuscript
- Authorship
- Authorship follows the ICMJE criteria. Every listed author must have contributed substantively and must approve the submitted version; contributors who do not meet the criteria are acknowledged rather than listed.
- Competing interests
- All authors, editors and reviewers declare financial and non-financial interests relevant to the work. A declaration is required whether or not an interest exists, and editors with a competing interest are replaced on that manuscript.
- Ethics approval and consent
- Research involving people, human material or animals must report the approving committee and the consent procedure, or the basis on which consent was waived. Identifiable patient material requires documented consent to publish.
- 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.
- Data availability
- Every empirical research manuscript must include a data-availability statement.
- Originality and overlap
- Manuscripts must be original and not under consideration elsewhere. Submissions are screened with Crossref Similarity Check, powered by iThenticate; a similarity report is read in context by an editor and is never applied as an automatic threshold.
- Artificial intelligence
- Any use of generative AI in preparing a manuscript must be disclosed in the methods or acknowledgments. AI tools cannot be listed as authors, because they cannot take responsibility for the work.
The published record
Correcting what has been published
The journal follows COPE guidance when a concern is raised about a published article. Corrections, expressions of concern and retractions are published as citable notices, linked to the original article, and the original article remains available so the record stays complete.
- A correction is published where an error affects the record but not the conclusions.
- An expression of concern is published while an unresolved question is being investigated.
- A retraction is published where the findings are no longer reliable.
- Notices state what changed and remain permanently linked to the article they concern.
Concerns about a published article, including authorship disputes and suspected misconduct, should be sent to the editorial office at [email protected]. Appeals against an editorial decision are considered once, on the record before the editors at the time of the decision.
Terms and rights
The terms an accepted article is published under
Open access and licensing
Articles are published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Authors retain copyright; readers may use and build on an article provided the authors and the source are credited.
Article processing charge
The article processing charge is USD 2,400, charged only after a manuscript has been accepted. Decisions remain independent of fees, membership, editorial roles and paid services. The complete withdrawal terms are set out on the Article Processing Charges page.
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.
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