Selecting a journal for publication is done by Dr. Sebastiaan Bol in close consultation with the first author. CCR Feline Research Center prefers to submit manuscripts to open access journals from not-for-profit publishers. We believe that the quality and impact of a scientific article is not necessarily determined by the journal in which it is published. Criteria we use to evaluate a journal are reputation, the journal’s audience, publication fees, word limit, format-free submission, time to first decision, publication time, manuscript transfer service, indexing, and copyright. 

We support double-blind, transparent peer-review (publishing reviewer reports anonymously alongside the published article) and platforms such as Review Commons. Have a look at this video to see how Review Commons works.

These are some of the journals we prefer to consider for publication:

Journal (publisher) SJR (2023) Publication fee/APC (2024)

eLife (independent) 1 3.9 $2,000 2
PLOS Biology (PLOS) 1 3.8 $5,500 2
Biology Open (Company of Biologists) 1 0.8 $1,995 3
PLOS ONE (PLOS) 1 0.8 $2.290 2
Animal Welfare (Cambridge Press) 0.3 $3,450 3

1 Journal affiliated with Review Commons,  2 Waiver possible, 3 Part of the University of Texas Health Science Center's Read & Publish agreement: APC's waived at 100% if first or corresponding author is affiliated with UTHSCSA.

We will never consider the journal Animals or other journals from predatory publisher MDPI. They are a fraud as can be read here.

A few things everyone should know about academic publishing. 

• Publishing a scientific article can be extremely expensive. As of February 2024, publishing one article open access in the journal Nature costs $12,290 (that's not a typo!). See this video.

• Scientists do not get paid when they publish their research results. Instead, we have to pay the publishing company. See this video.

• What's wrong with commercial academic publishing companies? See this video.

Anybody who made a substantial contribution to the research or the preparation of a manuscript will be included as an author on the resulting manuscript. Whether or not work done qualifies as a (substantial) contribution will be determined by Dr. Sebastiaan Bol.

The responsibilities of authorship include approval of the submitted version of the manuscript (and any substantially modified version) and agreeing to be personally accountable for your own contribution as well as ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work, even those in which you were not personally involved, are appropriately investigated and resolved.

CCR Feline Research Center uses the common first-last-author-emphasis norm to assign the order of authorship. The order depends on the contribution of the author while simultaneously valuing the first and last position of the authorship order most. The first author is the person who contributed most to the work (experiments and writing) and who is expected to draft the first version of the manuscript. The last author is the person who conceptualized and supervised the work. 

The order of authors between the first and last position is determined by contribution in a descending order. Having additional “first” authors (“co-first authors”) is possible when two (or more) authors contributed equally. The author who was most involved in conceptualization or did most experiments will be listed first on a manuscript with co-first authors. If these contributions are equal, priority will be given to those who wish to pursue a career in academia. As a last resort, order will be decided by a coin toss. 

When collaborating with colleagues outside of CCR Feline Research Center, having multiple “last” authors is possible as well.

Author contributions will be specified in the manuscript. The following contributor roles (adapted from Contributor Roles Taxonomy or CReDiT) are used: conceptualization, funding acquisition, performing experiments, data visualization, statistical analysis, writing the original draft, editing the manuscript, project administration, providing resources, programming or software development, and supervision.

All authors are required to use the ORCID persistent digital identifier. ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. It is a free, open digital identifier that uniquely identifies authors and connects to their contributions.