Editors of Acute and Critical Care journal have responsibilities to the authors who provide the Journal’s content, peer reviewers who comment on the suitability of articles for publication, the Journal’s readers, the scientific community, and the public as a whole.

The editor must not be involved in decisions about papers which s/he has written him/herself or have been written by family members or colleagues or which relate to products or services in which the editor has an interest. Further, any such submission must be subject to all of the journal’s usual procedures, peer review must be handled independently of the relevant author/editor and their research groups, and there must be a clear statement to this effect on any such paper that is published.

1. Editors’ responsibilities to authors

• • Providing guidelines to authors for preparing and submitting manuscripts
• • Providing a clear statement of the Journal’s policies on authorship criteria
• • Treating all authors with fairness, courtesy, objectivity, honesty, and transparency
• • Establishing and defining policies on conflicts of interest for all involved in the publication process, including editors, editorial staff, authors, and reviewers
• • Protecting the confidentiality of authors’ work
• • Establishing a system for effective and rapid peer review
• • Making editorial decisions with reasonable speed and communicating them in a clear and constructive manner
• • Being vigilant in avoiding the possibility of editors and/or referees delaying a manuscript for suspect reasons
• • Establishing clear guidelines for authors regarding acceptable practices for sharing experimental materials and information, particularly those required to replicate the research, before and after publication
• • Establishing a procedure for reconsidering editorial decisions
• • Describing, implementing, and regularly reviewing policies for handling ethical issues and allegations or findings of misconduct by authors and anyone involved in the peer-review process
• • Informing authors of solicited manuscripts that the submission will be evaluated according to the Journal’s standard procedures or outlining the decision-making process if it differs from those procedures
• • Developing mechanisms, in cooperation with the publisher, to ensure the timely publication of accepted manuscripts
• • Clearly communication all other editorial policies and standards

2. Editors and peer review

• •Monitoring and ensuring the fairness, timeliness, thoroughness, and courtesy of the peer-review editorial process
• • Ensuring manuscript quality through peer review by external judges with the proper expertise
• • Sometimes rejecting manuscripts without external peer review because the manuscript is outside the scope of the Journal, does not meet the Journal’s quality standards, is of limited scientific merit, or lacks originality or novel information
• • Masking the identities of both the authors and reviewers (double blind) in the Acute and Critical Care journal

3. Editors’ responsibilities toward reviewers

• • Assigning papers for review appropriate to each reviewer’s area of interest and expertise
• • Establishing a process for reviewers to ensure that they treat the manuscript as a confidential document and complete the review promptly
• • Informing reviewers that they are not allowed to make any use of the work described in the manuscript or to take advantage of the knowledge they gained by reviewing it before publication
• • Providing reviewers with written, explicit instructions on the Journal’s expectations for the scope, content, quality, and timeliness of their reviews to promote thoughtful, fair, constructive, and informative critique of the submitted work
• • Requesting that reviewers identify any potential conflicts of interest and asking that they recuse themselves if they cannot provide an unbiased review
• • Allowing reviewers appropriate time to complete their reviews
• • Requesting reviews at a reasonable frequency that does not exhaust any one reviewer
  Finding ways to recognize the contributions of reviewers, for example, by publicly thanking them in the Journal; providing letters that might be used in applications for academic promotion; offering professional education credits; or inviting them to serve on the Editorial Board of the Journal