Selecting a journal for publication is done by 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. Additional 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 transparent peer-review where the review reports are published together with the article and the names of the reviewers are disclosed. We also support platforms such as Review Commons. Have a look at this video to see how Review Commons works.

The following are some of the journals we will consider for publication (in alphabetical order):
Animal Welfare (Cambridge University Press), Biology Open (Company of Biologists), BMC Biology, BMC Veterinary Research, eLife, F1000Research, Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine (Oxford University Press), PLOS Biology, and PLOS One.

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 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 are or 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.