Complaints and Appeals

We value your feedback on everything we do, and that includes complaints and appeals. These should be addressed to the [email protected], and a member of the team will respond as quickly as possible.

Authors have the right to appeal an Editor’s decision on their article. If you wish to appeal a decision, you need to email the journal explaining why you think the decision should be overturned. If reviewer reports were included with the previous rejection letter, then these criticisms should also be responded. All appeals are sent to the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, who will assess your article and the details of the peer review process before the final decision. We try to manage appeals as quickly as possible, but they can be complex, so we request authors to be patient and cooperate. As with any complaint, we will, of course, acknowledge receipt and keep you informed during the appeals process.

Post-Publication Issues

While we strive to ensure that every article published in our journals is entirely accurate, there are instances where problems are raised after publication. These fall into different categories and result in different responses:

  • Where the production process has introduced an error in the article, we will publish an Erratum.
  • Where the authors notice a mistake that has not been introduced by us, we will publish a Corrigendum.
  • Where there are issues which may affect the validity of the scientific record, such as suspected image manipulation, but the authors are not willing to publish a Corrigendum, we will publish an Expression of Concern.
  • Where major issues are affecting the validity of the scientific record, such as duplicates publication or proven plagiarism, we will publish a Retraction.

In all such cases, we work in collaboration with the authors as well as the Editor who managed the article’s peer review, and the Editor-in-Chief, to determine the best option from our available responses. If the issue was raised by a third party, they are also kept informed.

All Errata, Corrigenda, Expressions of Concern, and Retractions are free to view and digitally linked to the original published article both on our site and on third-party websites that collect our metadata (e.g., PubMed, ASCI Database, IndexONE, ADL, and Google Scholar).

If anyone suspects a post-publication issue, we request them to contact the journal team immediately, providing sufficient detail for us to undertake an investigation.