The publisher-wide ethical and editorial standards that govern every journal, author, reviewer, and editor at Directive Publications.
Directive Publications is an international open-access publisher of peer-reviewed journals across medicine, the life sciences, and public health. These Editorial Policies set out the standards that govern every manuscript we consider and every article we publish. They are designed to protect the integrity of the scholarly record, to treat authors, reviewers, and editors fairly, and to give readers full confidence in the trustworthiness of what appears under our imprint.
Our policies follow the COPE Core Practices and principles of the Committee on Publication Ethics and the ICMJE Recommendations for the conduct, reporting, editing, and publication of scholarly work. This page is the publisher-wide baseline; each journal applies these standards to its own field and may add discipline-specific guidance on its journal page. Where a topic has a dedicated page, this document summarises the essentials and links to the dedicated page for the full policy — see our Publication Ethics, Peer Review, Copyright & Licensing, Plagiarism, and Corrections & Retractions policies.
Editorial decisions are based solely on the scholarly merit, validity, clarity, and relevance of a manuscript to the journal's scope — never on the authors' nationality, gender, ethnicity, religion, institution, seniority, or funding source. Handling editors have full authority over the acceptance or rejection of manuscripts. Editorial content is kept strictly separate from any commercial, advertising, or sponsorship interest, and no external party may influence a decision on a specific submission.
All research articles undergo double-blind peer review: the identities of authors and reviewers are concealed from one another. Authors are asked to prepare an anonymized manuscript with identifying details — names, affiliations, funding acknowledgements, and self-identifying references — removed from the main file and placed on a separate title page. Each submission is normally assessed by at least two independent expert reviewers. Reviewers advise; the handling editor makes the decision.
Reviewers must treat every manuscript as a confidential document, must not share or retain it, and must not upload manuscripts or any part of them to external or generative-AI tools, which would breach confidentiality. Reviewers are required to declare any competing interest and to recuse themselves where one exists. Full details appear in our Peer Review Policy; researchers wishing to serve can apply through Become a Reviewer.
Authorship is based on the four ICMJE criteria, all of which must be met: (1) substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; (2) drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; (3) final approval of the version to be published; and (4) agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work. Contributors who do not meet all four criteria must instead be named in the Acknowledgements. We encourage use of the CRediT contributor-role taxonomy and encourage an ORCID for every author.
Ghost, guest, and gift (honorary) authorship are prohibited, as is any use of paper mills or undisclosed third-party manuscript generation. The corresponding author acts as guarantor for the submission, confirms that all listed authors qualify and have approved the final version, and serves as the point of contact before and after publication. See our Author Guidelines for full details.
Any addition, removal, or reordering of authors after submission requires the written agreement of all authors (including the person being added or removed) and the approval of the handling editor, accompanied by a clear stated reason. Requests to change authorship after publication are handled under our Corrections Policy.
Authors, reviewers, and editors must disclose all financial and non-financial competing interests that could be perceived to influence the work — including employment, consultancies, honoraria, patents, stock, grants, and personal or professional relationships. Every article carries a competing-interests statement. Editors recuse themselves from handling their own submissions or those of close collaborators, family members, or others where a conflict exists, and such manuscripts are reassigned to an independent editor.
Authors must declare all sources of funding and describe the role, if any, of the funder in the study's design, conduct, analysis, interpretation, or the decision to publish. Funder identifiers are captured in the article metadata to support transparency and discoverability.
Studies involving human participants must have received prospective approval from an appropriate ethics committee or institutional review board (IRB) and must adhere to the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Documented informed consent is required, and separate consent to publish must be obtained for any identifiable patient data or images. Research involving animals must comply with relevant institutional and national regulations and follow the ARRIVE guidelines. The publisher requires authors to hold these approvals; we do not ourselves hold ethics-board accreditation.
Every article must include a data-availability statement. We encourage authors to deposit underlying data, code, and materials in recognised public repositories and to cite them with persistent identifiers so that findings can be reproduced and reused. Where data are legitimately restricted — for reasons of participant privacy, consent, or law — the statement must explain the restriction and the conditions of access.
Authors should follow the reporting guideline appropriate to their study design as catalogued by the EQUATOR Network — including CONSORT (trials), PRISMA (systematic reviews), STROBE (observational studies), ARRIVE (animal research), and CARE (case reports). Clinical trials must be prospectively registered in a publicly accessible registry before enrolment of the first participant, and the registration number and registry must be reported in the manuscript.
AI and large language models cannot be listed as authors, because they cannot take responsibility for the work. Any use of AI or generative tools in preparing a manuscript — for drafting, analysis, or image generation — must be disclosed and described in the methods or acknowledgements. Authors remain fully accountable for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of all content, including any produced with AI assistance. Editors and reviewers must not enter confidential manuscript content into AI tools.
Posting a manuscript to a recognised preprint server is permitted and must be disclosed and linked at submission. Redundant, duplicate, and "salami" publication are prohibited: authors may not submit work that substantially overlaps with material already published or under consideration elsewhere. Acceptable secondary publication (for example, translation into another language for a different audience) is permitted only with full disclosure, editor approval, and a clear citation of the primary source.
All submissions are screened with plagiarism/similarity-detection software. Manuscripts found to contain plagiarism, self-plagiarism, or improperly attributed text may be rejected or, if already published, corrected or retracted. Details are set out in our Plagiarism Policy.
We investigate allegations of misconduct in line with COPE guidance. This includes fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, inappropriate image manipulation, citation manipulation, and duplicate submission. On receiving a credible concern, the editor conducts a confidential assessment, gives the authors an opportunity to respond, and — where appropriate — cooperates with the authors' institutions. Outcomes range from correction to retraction, and, in serious cases, notification of institutions and a decline of future submissions.
The published version of record is never deleted. When post-publication changes are warranted we issue a linked, freely available notice cross-referenced through Crossref: a corrigendum for a significant author error, an erratum for a publisher error, an expression of concern where an unresolved integrity question exists, or a retraction where findings are seriously unreliable or the work is unethical. See our Corrections & Retractions Policy.
Authors may appeal an editorial decision by writing to [email protected] with a point-by-point response to the reviewers and editor. Appeals and complaints are handled by an editor not involved in the original decision; unresolved matters may be escalated to the publisher. We aim to acknowledge complaints promptly and to resolve them fairly and transparently.
Authors retain copyright in their work. All articles are published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0) license, which allows anyone to share and adapt the work for any purpose, including commercially, provided the original authors and source are credited. We do not require any transfer of copyright to the publisher. See our Copyright & Licensing page.
Every article is immediately and freely available to read on publication, with no subscription or paywall. Publication is supported by transparent article processing charges; current fees, together with available waivers and discounts, are published on our Publication Charges page. See also our Open Access statement.
Content is maintained on secure off-site backups, and the publisher is pursuing a formal digital-archiving arrangement to safeguard long-term availability. Persistent Crossref DOIs ensure that links to our articles remain durable and resolvable over time.
Directive Publications is a Crossref member (DOI prefix 10.52338); every published article is assigned and registered with a Crossref DOI. Article metadata is openly available for harvesting via OAI-PMH and in JATS XML, supporting indexing and discovery services. We are actively working toward inclusion in leading scholarly databases and apply the standards those services expect.
Any advertising or sponsorship is kept entirely separate from editorial decision-making, is clearly distinguishable from scholarly content, and never targets individuals based on the content they view. We do not engage in direct-marketing practices that misrepresent our journals, our editors, or the peer-review process, and we do not send unsolicited invitations that guarantee acceptance or set fixed publication timelines. Communications about a manuscript are limited to what is necessary for its handling and publication.
These policies are maintained by the publisher and reviewed periodically to keep pace with evolving best practice, including updates to the COPE Core Practices and the ICMJE Recommendations. They apply to every one of our journals and to everyone involved in the publication process. Authors preparing a submission should read them alongside our Author Guidelines before they submit a manuscript.
Questions about these Editorial Policies, or reports of a possible ethical concern, may be directed to [email protected], or by post to Directive Publications, 30 N Gould St, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA. All concerns are treated confidentially and assessed in line with COPE guidance.