The Journal recommends that authors follow the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals formulated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE).

Internaional Open Medial Journal  invites original, high-quality submissions that contribute meaningfully to the fields of medicine, pharmacy, biology, and public health. In order to maintain the quality and consistency of publications, authors must adhere strictly to the following submission guidelines. These comprehensive instructions are designed to support authors at everystage of manuscript preparation, submission, and post-submission processing.

Key information

Access: Open Access
APC: Free
Accepts preprints? Yes
Identity transparency: All identities visible

Please note that this journal is online-only and does not offer print copies.

Article types

Original Research articles

Description: Original, in-depth, research articles must follow the Aims & Scope of IOMJ . Research articles must have the potential for clinical application. Case studies will not be considered, however case series with an in-depth literature review will be considered. For in silico studies using public databases (bioinformatics, prediction, SEER, etc.), external biological or clinical validation is required. Studies conducted solely in in vitro models will not be considered. If presenting in vitro data, these must be validated in vivo or in clinical samples/patients. IOMJ does not impose word or figure limits but does reserve the right to ask for manuscripts to be edited and/or shortened.

Abstract structure: Structured abstract is required.

Minimum number of peer reviewers: 2

Notes:All research involving animals must be approved by an ethics committee with oversight of the facility in which the study was conducted. Submissions including animal studies must adhere to the ARRIVE reporting guidelines and include a completed ARRIVE checklist submitted as a supplementary file not for review. Medical research involving human subjects must be conducted according to the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki. Submitted manuscripts should conform to the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals. All papers reporting animal and/or human studies must state in the title page the name(s) of the ethics committee(s), institution(s), approval number(s), and approval date(s) for each animal or human study. An anonymized version of each statement must be included in the methods section. For human studies, there must be a patient consent statement in the methods and it should include whether the consent was written or verbal. Clinical studies must follow the relevant reporting guidelines based on the study type as indicated by the EQUATOR Network. Randomized controlled trials must be registered prior to the study start date and registration information (including a link and the registration number), must be included in the submission title page.

Review articles

Description: Review Articles are narrative or literature reviews that report on the existing state of understanding in a specific research area and/or topic. Reviews should be recognized as scholarly by specialists in the covered field, but should also be written with a view to informing readers who are not specialized in that particular field, and should be presented using simple prose. Excessive jargon and technical details should be avoided. IOMJ does not impose word or figure limits but does reserve the right to ask for manuscripts to be edited and/or shortened.

Abstract structure: Unstructured

Minimum number of peer reviewers: 2

Notes:This article type also includes systematic reviews. Systematic reviews must be reported according to PRISMA guidelines and a PRISMA checklist and flowchart must be included as part of the submission. The PRISMA flowchart must be a cited figure in the manuscript. The checklist must be included as a supplementary file not for review. Systematic reviews should be registered with PROSPERO OR INPLASY and the registration information (including a link and registration number) must be included as part of submission in the title page.

Correspondences

Description: Letters to the editor are short articles that make corrections, provide alternative viewpoints or offer counter-arguments about published research. Letters to the Editor should consist of one or two paragraphs totaling no more than 500 words, no abstract, no subheadings and fewer than 5 references. If an abstract is included, it will automatically be made the first paragraph. Letters should not include figures or research material. It must be written in a professional tone and include references to support all claims if appropriate.

Abstract structure: No abstract. If an abstract is included, it will automatically be made the first paragraph.

Minimum number of peer reviewers: 1

Editorials

Description: Editorials are short articles invited by journal Editors and are intended to provide a brief overview of the latest research in the field. These key opinion pieces are peer reviewed and are aimed at steering discussion about the recent exciting developments . The word limit for editorial articles is maximum 2,000 words and up to 20 references. In the context of a Special Collection, Editorials also involve a Guest Editor introducing the collection topic and offering a concise overview of the articles published within it.

Abstract structure: Unstructured

Standard APC for Gold OA: No charge.

Minimum number of peer reviewers: 1

Notes:Ad hoc Editorials will not be considered. However, they may be considered as a different article type, which is at the discretion of the journal Editors.

Accepted file types

The preferred format for your manuscript is Word. You do not need to follow a template, but please ensure your heading levels are clear, and the sections clearly defined.

The LaTeX files are also accepted. 

Your article title, keywords, and abstract all contribute to its position in search engine results, directly affecting the number of people who see your work. 

Title

Your manuscript’s title should be concise, descriptive, unambiguous, accurate, and reflect the precise contents of the manuscript. A descriptive title that includes the topic of the manuscript makes an article more findable in the major indexing services.

Abstract

The journal requires a structured abstract of no more than 300 words for Original Research, Systematic Review, Study Protocol, Brief Report, Research Note, and Technical Note article types. All other article types require an unstructured abstract. The abstract must be between the title and main body of your manuscript and concisely state the purpose of research, major findings, and conclusions. For structured abstracts, please ensure that the abstract has the following headings: Introduction, Methods, Results, and Conclusion. If your research includes clinical trials, the trial registry name, URL, and registration number must be included at the end of the abstract. Submissions that do not meet this requirement will not be considered.

Keywords

Please include a minimum of 5 keywords, listed after the abstract. Keywords should be as specific as possible to the research topic.

Title page

To ensure fair and anonymous peer review, your manuscript must be fully anonymized. Please ensure any identifying information is removed from the main manuscript document and included on the Title Page instead. Do not include any author names in the manuscript file name and remove names from headers and footers. This version of the manuscript will be sent to the peer reviewers. The Title Page will not be sent to peer reviewers. 

The Title Page should include:

  • Article title
  • The full list of authors including names and affiliations of each
  • The listed affiliation should be the institution where the research was conducted. If an author has moved to a new institution since completing the research, the new affiliation can be included in a note at the end of the manuscript – please indicate this on the title page
  • All persons eligible for authorship must be included at the time of submission
  • Contact information for the corresponding author: name, institutional address, phone, email
  • Acknowledgments section
  • Declaration of conflicting interest
  • Funding statement
  • Ethical approval and informed consent statements
  • Data availability statement
  • Any other identifying information related to the authors and/or their institutions, funders, approval committees, etc, that might compromise anonymity.
Acknowledgments

If you are including an Acknowledgements section, this will be published at the end of your article. The Acknowledgments section should include all contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship. 

Writing assistance and third party submissions: if you have received any writing or editing assistance from a third-party, for example a specialist communications company, this must be clearly stated in the Acknowledgements section and in the covering letter. If your submission is being made on your behalf by someone who is not listed as an author, for example the third-party who provided writing/editing assistance, you must state this in the Acknowledgements and also in your covering letter. Please note that the journal editor reserves the right to not consider submissions made by a third party rather than by the author/s themselves.

Author contributions

You will be asked to list the contribution of each author as part of the submission process. Please include the Author Contributions heading within your submission after the Acknowledgements section. The information you give on submission will then show under the Author Contributions heading later at the proofing stage.

Statements and declarations

Please include a section with the heading ‘Statements and Declarations’ at the end of your submitted article, after the Acknowledgements section [and Author Contributions section if applicable] including each of the sub-headings listed below. If a declaration is not applicable to your submission, you must still include the heading and state ‘Not applicable’ underneath. Please note that you may be asked to justify why a declaration was not applicable to your submission by the Editorial Office.

Ethical considerations

Please include your ethics approval statements under this heading, even if you have already included ethics approval information in your methods section. If ethical approval was not required, you need to explicitly state this. 

All papers reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must state that the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board approved the study, or waived the requirement for approval, providing the full name and institution of the review committee in addition to the approval number. If applicable, please also include this information in the Methods section of your manuscript.

Please include any participant consent information under this heading and state whether informed consent to participate was written or verbal. If the requirement for informed consent to participate has been waived by the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board (i.e. where it has been deemed that consent would be impossible or impracticable to obtain), please state this. If this is not applicable to your manuscript, please state ‘Not applicable’ in this section. 

Submissions containing any data from an individual person (including individual details, images or videos) must include a statement confirming that informed consent for publication was provided by the participant(s) or a legally authorized representative. Non-essential identifying details should be omitted. Please do not submit the participant’s actual written informed consent with your article, as this in itself breaches the patient’s confidentiality. The Journal requests that you confirm to us, in writing, that you have obtained written informed consent to publish but the written consent itself should be held by the authors/investigators themselves, for example in a patient’s hospital record. The confirmatory letter may be uploaded with your submission as a separate file in addition to the statement confirming that consent to publish was obtained within the manuscript text. If this is not applicable to your manuscript, please state ‘Not applicable’ in this section.

Declaration of conflicting interest

The journal requires a declaration of conflicting interests from all authors so that a statement can be included in your article. 

If no conflict exists, your statement should read: ‘The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article’.

Funding statement

All articles need to include a funding statement, under a separate heading, even if you did not receive funding. 

Data availability

The Journal is committed to facilitating openness, transparency and reproducibility of research, and has the following research data sharing policy. 

Subject to appropriate ethical and legal considerations, authors are encouraged to:

  • Share your research data in a relevant public data repository
  • Include a data availability statement linking to your data. If it is not possible to share your data, use the statement to confirm why it cannot be shared.
  • Cite this data in your research
Reference style and citations

The journal follows the AMA Manual of Style. 

Every in-text citation must have a corresponding citation in the reference list and vice versa. Corresponding citations must have identical spelling and year.

Authors should update any references to preprints when a peer reviewed version is made available, to cite the published research. Citations to preprints are otherwise discouraged.

Supplemental material

This Journal can host additional materials online (e.g. datasets, podcasts, videos, images etc.) alongside the full text of the article. Your supplemental material must be one of our accepted file types. 

As part of the submission process you will need to confirm that this is your original work, that you have the rights in the work, that this is for first publication in this Journal, that it is not being considered for/has not already been published elsewhere, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you.

Preprints

The journal will consider submissions of manuscripts that have been posted on preprint servers.

Please enter the preprint DOI in the designated field when submitting your manuscript. We advise that you inform the Journal Editorial office about your posted preprint at submission.

Note that you should not post an updated version of your manuscript on a preprint server while it is being peer reviewed.

Authorship

Please note that AI chatbots, for example ChatGPT, should not be listed as authors.

Files

  • Cover letter. To help the Editor in their preliminary evaluation, please indicate why you think the manuscript is suitable for the journal readership. The Cover Letter is also the place to indicate any special circumstances the Editor should be aware of. Examples include: submitting to a Special Collection, invited to submit an article, or editorial assistance provided to prepare and/or submit the manuscript
  • Title Page with all required identifying information as laid out in Preparing your manuscript for submission (above). This will not be sent to the peer reviewers.
  • Your manuscript, properly formatted and anonymized according to all stipulations above, and within the scope of the journal. Any information that compromises the anonymity of the author(s) should be removed or anonymized and included on the Title Page instead. See above for more information on anonymization. This version will be sent to the peer reviewers.
  • Figures and images.
    • All figures must be numbered consecutively in the order in which they appear in the text – they will appear in the published article in the order they are numbered.
    • Figure resolution is 300dpi.
  • Supplemental material. This journal can host additional materials online (e.g. datasets, podcasts, videos, images, etc) alongside the full-text of the article. Your supplemental material must be one of our accepted file types. 
  • Supplemental material not for review and not for publication: Any material that you would like to provide to the editor, but not be published as Supplemental material. This includes materials like raw data and ethics approval forms.
  • Author Contribution: The submitting author must complete and sign this form and include it as part of the submission process.

Other information required for submission

  • ORCID ID of the submitting author.
    • It is strongly encouraged that all co-authors ensure their ORCID IDs are linked to their accounts in the submission system prior to article acceptance, as this is the only way to have their ORCID ID present on the published article. ORCID IDs cannot be added to manuscripts after acceptance/publication. Please note that each co-author must log in to the submission system to add their own ORCID ID to their account. To add an ORCID ID, edit your account, click the link when prompted, and sign into your ORCID account to validate your ID. You will then be redirected back to the submission system and your ORCID ID will become part of your accepted publication’s metadata.
    • Please create an ORCID ID .
  • Complete list of authors, with their institutional affiliations.
    • The author information you enter at submission must exactly match what is included on your manuscript and/or title page, including full names, academic affiliations, and corresponding author contact details.
    • The listed affiliation should be the institution where the research was conducted. If an author has moved to a new institution since completing the research, the new affiliation can be included in a note at the end of the manuscript.
    • All listed authors must meet the criteria for authorship (above).
    • All persons eligible for authorship must be included at the time of submission.
    • All authors must have given consent for the manuscript to be submitted in its current form.
  • Keywords: During submission, you may be asked to select or enter keywords for your manuscript. These keywords are used to match appropriate reviewers to your manuscript.
  • The number of figures, tables, and words in your manuscript.
  • Funder information: Name, grant/award number.
  • You may be required to enter your declaration of conflicting interest as part of the submission process, in addition to listing it on your manuscript and/or title page. Please have it on hand.
  • If you have posted your manuscript to a preprint server, you will be asked to supply the DOI (this does not prohibit submission, but no changes should be made to the preprint version while your manuscript is under evaluation in this journal).  If the article is accepted for publication, the author may re-use their work according to the journal’s author archiving policy. If your manuscript is accepted, you must include a link in your preprint to the final version of your published article.

The following summary describes the peer review process for this journal:
Identity transparency:Double-anonymized
Reviewer interacts with: Executive Editor, Deputy Editor, Managing Editors, Section Editors
Review information published:

  1. Review reports (author opt in)
  2. Review reports (reviewer opt in)
  3. Author/editor communication
  4. Reviewer identities (reviewer opt in)

Your manuscript will undergo an initial evaluation. If it does not conform to the requirements laid out in these guidelines, it will be returned to you for amendments prior to peer review. Manuscripts may be desk rejected without peer review at this point if they are out of scope for the journal or otherwise unsuitable.

After passing the initial evaluation, your manuscript will then be peer reviewed. You can log in at any time to check the status of your manuscript. We will notify you when a decision has been reached.

IOMJ adheres to a rigorous double-anonymized reviewing policy in which the identity of both the reviewer and author are always concealed from both parties.

The following manuscript types may not require two independent reviews to be accepted: Commentaries, Editorials, Correspondences.

To ensure the integrity of the peer review process we assign reviewers and cannot accept author recommendations.

All manuscripts are reviewed as rapidly as possible, while maintaining rigor. Reviewers make comments to the author and recommendations to the Editor who then makes the final decision on all manuscripts, including those appearing in a special issue or special collection. The Editor or members of the Editorial Board may occasionally submit their own manuscripts for possible publication in the Journal. In these cases, the peer review process will be managed by alternative members of the Board and the submitting Editor/Board member will have no involvement in the decision-making process.

Plagiarism

The journal take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. 

After acceptance you will receive instructions via email inviting you to complete the Open Access process. This will include signing the appropriate Creative Commons license and, where applicable, paying the Article Processing Charge (APC) or assigning a bill payer. Once the APC has been processed, your article will be prepared for publication and can appear online within an average of 30 days. Please note that, where an APC is applicable, production work cannot be completed on your manuscript until payment has been received.

Contributor’s Publishing Agreement

Before publication we require the author as the rights holder to sign a Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement. The journal publishes manuscripts under Creative Commons licenses. The standard license for the journal is Creative Commons by Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC), which allows others to re-use the work without permission as long as the work is properly referenced and the use is non-commercial.  Alternative license arrangements are available at the author’s request (e.g. to meet particular funder mandates).

Preprints

If your manuscript was posted on a preprint server prior to acceptance, you must include a link in your preprint to the final published version of your published article.

Production

Your Production Editor will keep you informed as to your article’s progress throughout the production process. Proofs will be made available to the corresponding author via our editing portal or by email, and should be returned promptly to avoid delaying publication. Authors are reminded to check their proofs carefully to confirm that all author information, including names, affiliations, sequence, and contact details are correct, and that Funding and Conflict of Interest statements, if any, are accurate. This is the final opportunity to make changes to your manuscript. Further corrections will not be possible after publication. Changes to the author list are not permitted at this stage.

Publication

One of the many benefits of publishing your research in an open access journal is the speed to publication. With no page count constraints, your article will be published online in a fully citable form with a DOI number as soon as it has completed the production process. At this time it will be completely free to view and download for all.

Promoting your article

Publication is not the end of the process. Between us, we can ensure that your article is found, read, downloaded and cited as widely as possible. Many of the most effective tactics are those you can do quickly and easily to your network of contacts and peers.

Contact us

Questions about peer review can be sent to iomj@ngoima.org. 

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