Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases (JVATiTD) is an open access interdisciplinary publication dedicated to publish research on all aspects of toxins, venomous animals and their derivative products. It also welcomes topics in tropical medicine with a focus on infectious diseases, parasitology and immunology.

The journal adopts the continuous publication model. This means that as soon as a manuscript is prepared it will be released online, creating a rapid flow of quality articles.

Submission of a paper to JVATiTD implies that all authors have read and agreed to its content, that the manuscript conforms to the journal’s policies, and that it has not previously been published or is not currently being considered for publication elsewhere.

It is also worth considering that JVATiTD supports the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.

All submitted manuscripts must be in English. To facilitate proper peer-reviewing, it is essential that the text is submitted in grammatically correct English.

Articles in Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. Because articles are not printed, they do not have page numbers; instead, they have an elocation-id. Article citations follow this format: Authors. Title. J Venom Anim Toxins incl Trop Dis. [date];[volume number]:[elocation-id]. doi. PMID; PMCID.

JVATiTD is published by the Center for the Study of Venoms and Venomous Animals (CEVAP), a unit of the São Paulo State University (UNESP) whose main research field is toxinology.

All articles published by JVATiTD are open access and freely available online. This is made possible by an article-processing charge (APC) that covers the publishing services including provision of online tools for editors and authors, article production and hosting, and liaison with abstracting and indexing services. Therefore, an APC of USD 800 (American dollar) applies to papers accepted for publication after peer review. Authors based in Brazil have a discount and pay BRL 1650 (Brazilian real) per accepted manuscript. Authors (first, last or corresponding) affiliated with São Paulo State University (Universidade Estadual Paulista – UNESP), Brazil, will receive a full article-processing charge waiver upon request.

Effective March 1, 2025, new article processing charges will apply. The APC will be USD 900 for articles accepted for publication. The discounted charge for authors based in Brazil will be BRL 2750. 

All articles published in JVATiTD are included in: Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS, CABI, CAS, CSA, DOAJ, EBSCO, Embase, Europe PubMed, Global Health, Google Scholar, ProQuest, PubMed Central, SciELO, Scopus – SCImago, Web of Science – Science Citation Index Expanded, Zoological Record.

The full text of all articles is deposited in digital archives to guarantee long-term digital preservation. You can access all articles published by JVATiTD in SciELO library.

All content of the journal, except where identified, is licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0.

• Rui Seabra Ferreira Junior – São Paulo State University (UNESP); Botucatu, SP, Brazil.

• Benedito Barraviera – São Paulo State University (UNESP); Botucatu, SP, Brazil.

• Daniel Carvalho Pimenta – Butantan Institute, São Paulo, SP, Brazil.
• Jean-Philippe Chippaux – L'Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD); Paris, France.
• Maria Elena de Lima – Instituto de Ensino e Pesquisa, Santa Casa de Belo Horizonte; Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil.

• Abdulrazaq G Habib – Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital; Kano, Nigeria.
• Adolfo Borges – Central University of Venezuela; Caracas, Venezuela.
• Anamaria Mello Miranda Paniago – Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul; Pioneiros, MS, Brazil.
• Anna Nekaris – Oxford Brookes University; Oxford, United Kingdom.
• Carlos Alvarez – University of Havana; Havana, Cuba.
• Eliane Candiani Arantes – University of São Paulo (FCFRP/USP); Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil.
• Fatima Laraba-Djebari – University of Sciences and Technology Houari Boumediene; Bab Ezzouar, Algiers, Algeria.
• Heloisa Sobreiro Selistre-de-Araujo – Federal University of São Carlos (UFScar); São Carlos, SP, Brazil.
• Jan Tytgat – KU Leuven; Leuven, Belgium.
• Lourival Domingos Possani – Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico; Ciudad del Mexico, Mexico.
• Luis Alberto Ponce-Soto – State University of Campinas (Unicamp); Campinas, SP, Brazil.
• Luis Fernando García Hernández – Universidad de la República de Uruguay; Maldonado, Uruguay.
• Mohamed Abdel-Rahman – Suez Canal University; Ismailia, Egypt.
• Pascal Mansuelle – Institut de Microbiologie de la Méditerranée, CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université; Marseille, France.
• Sakda Daduang – Khon Kaen University; Khon Kaen, Thailand.
• Suely Vilela Sampaio – University of São Paulo (FCFRP/USP); Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil.
• Wilson Lourenço – National Museum of Natural History; Paris, France.

Managing Editor:

Juliana Siani Simionato, São Paulo State University (UNESP); Botucatu, SP, Brazil – editorial.jvatitd@unesp.br

Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases (JVATiTD) is an open access publication dedicated to publish research on all aspects of toxins, venomous animals and tropical diseases. Its interdisciplinary content includes original scientific articles covering research on toxins derived from animals, plants and microorganisms. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• systematics and morphology of venomous animals
• physiology, biochemistry, pharmacology and immunology of toxins
• epidemiology, clinical aspects and treatment of envenoming by different animals, plants and microorganisms
• development and evaluation of antivenoms and toxin-derivative products
• epidemiology, clinical aspects and treatment of tropical diseases (caused by virus, bacteria, algae, fungi and parasites) including the neglected diseases defined by the World Health Organization.

Language

All submitted manuscripts must be in English. To facilitate proper peer reviewing, it is essential that the text is submitted in grammatically correct English. If the authors are not native English speakers, we recommend that you have your manuscript professionally edited before submission or read by a native English-speaking colleague.

Open access

All articles published by JVATiTD are made immediately available worldwide, which means that: everyone has free and unlimited access to the full text of all articles published; everyone is free to re-use the published material if proper accreditation/citation of the original publication is given; and open access publication is supported by the authors’ institutes or research funding agencies by payment of an article processing charge (APC) for accepted articles.

Authorship

Authors are expected to fulfil the four criteria established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE): (1) contribution to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; (2) drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; (3) final approval of the version to be published; and (4) to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. Contributors that do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the ‘Acknowledgements’ section. Each author must describe his/her role in the manuscript. The corresponding author is responsible for ensuring that all authors have agreed to the submission of the manuscript, but all of them should take responsibility for its content. The list of authors should be carefully analyzed when submitting the manuscript. Any change (addition or removal of authors) during the evaluation process must have a reasonable and strong explanation in addition to a signed agreement of all authors. Authorship changes are not allowed after acceptance of the article.

Peer-review policy

Peer review is the system used to evaluate the quality of a manuscript before its publication. Independent researchers in the research area assess submitted manuscripts for originality, validity and significance to help editors determine whether the manuscript should be published. JVATiTD operates using a double-blind peer-review system, where the reviewers do not know the names or affiliations of the authors and the reviewer reports provided to the authors are anonymous. The suitability of a manuscript for publication will be assessed solely on criteria of scientific excellence. Final decisions will be made by the editor-in-chief.

Copyright and licensing

For all articles published in JVATiTD copyright is retained by the authors. Articles are licensed under an open access Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, meaning that anyone may download and read the paper at no cost. Moreover, the article may be reused and quoted provided that the original published version is cited. These conditions allow for maximum use and exposure of the study, while ensuring that the authors receive proper credit.

Ethical guidelines and research integrity

When reporting on research that involves human subjects or human material, authors must declare that an approval from an ethics committee should have been obtained before undertaking the research. A statement including the project identification code, date of approval, and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board should be cited in the article. Clinical trials or randomized controlled trials must have been registered in a primary register of the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform.

Any experimental work using animals must conform the principles of animal welfare in experimental science. Reference must be made to principles of laboratory animal care or similar regulations. Approval by a properly constituted research ethics committee must be included containing the following data: project identification code, date of approval and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board. Authors must ensure that the reported research is not the result of misconduct such as data fabrication, falsification, plagiarism or duplication. In case of confirmed misconduct, the journal will issue a retraction notice to correct the scientific record. All manuscripts are submitted to a plagiarism detection software to prevent misconduct and to ensure the originality of written work.

JVATiTD has no restrictions on the length of articles; however, the text is expected to be concise and complete. Manuscripts submitted to the journal should be in English and neither been published before nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Full experimental details must be provided so that the results can be reproduced. Authors should publish all experimental controls and make full datasets available where possible. Articles must be submitted through our online submission system.

JVATiTD uses double-blind review, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from each other throughout the review process. Because of this, authors need to ensure that their manuscripts are prepared in a way that does not give away their identity. Therefore, it is necessary to remove names and affiliations of authors from the main manuscript file. Such information as well as all authors’ declarations must be included in the first cover letter.

The article-processing charge (APC) is payable when the manuscript is editorially accepted and before publication.

Article types

JVATiTD publishes the following article types:

• Letter to the editor: a letter to the editor may contain a re-analysis of a previously published article; a study that may not cover ‘standard research’ but that is of general interest to the journal; or a brief report of research findings adequate for the journal’s scope.
• Review: review articles provide concise and precise updates on the latest progress made in specific research areas within the scope of JVATiTD.
• Research: articles containing the results of original research (work reporting scientifically sound experiments and providing a substantial amount of new information).
• Short report: studies on important preliminary research findings, ongoing research projects or results of limited significance.
• Case report: a detailed report of the diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up of an individual patient.

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted through our online submission system. The submitting author is responsible for the manuscript during the submission and peer-review process. He/she must ensure that all eligible co-authors have been included in the author list and that they have all read and approved the submitted manuscript.

In order to submit a manuscript, the following files are required:

• The main manuscript file that must not include the names of authors or co-authors (an anonymous file, since the journal uses double-blind peer review). References and smaller tables should be included in this file.
• A title page that must contain the names of all authors and co-authors, their affiliations, their e-mails as well as all authors’ declarations (see item 3.2 below).
• A cover letter.
• Figure files.
• Any additional files as supplemental material to the manuscript.

Title page

Since JVATiTD operates double-blind peer review, please include in the title page the following information:

• Personal information of all authors and their institutions such as names, affiliations and e-mails.
• The journal encourages that the ORCID number of all authors is provided.
• A list of statements must be included in the manuscript (item 3.2, authors’ declarations). These declarations should be provided in the title page. The topics are: ‘Acknowledgments’ (if applicable), ‘Availability of data and materials’, ‘Funding’, ‘Competing interests’, ‘Authors’ contributions’, ‘Ethics approval/Ethics approval and consent to participate’, ‘Consent for publication’.

Cover letter

The following information is expected to be included in the cover letter:

• An explanation of why your manuscript is suitable for publishing in JVATiTD.
• Confirmation that the content of the manuscript is original and has not been published nor is being considered for publication elsewhere.
• If you are submitting a manuscript to a particular special issue please refer to its specific name in the cover letter.
• If your article reports the results of a health care intervention on human participants, JVATiTD strongly recommends the registration in an appropriate registry. The registration number and date of registration should be in stated in this letter.

Peer-review is the system used to assess the quality of a manuscript before it is published. Independent researchers in the relevant research area assess submitted manuscripts for originality, validity and significance to help editors determine whether the manuscript should be published in their journal.
JVATiTD operates using a double-blind peer-review system, where the reviewers do not know the names or affiliations of the authors and the reviewer reports provided to the authors are anonymous.
The suitability of a manuscript for publication will be assessed solely on criteria of scientific excellence. Final decisions will be made by the editor-in-chief.

To find out more about the process of preparing your manuscript and submitting it to JVATiTD, please refer to our “Guide for Authors” (“Formatting guidelines”) at www.jvat.org.

If you wish to make a presubmission enquiry about the suitability of your manuscript, please email the editors (editorial.jvatitd@unesp.br) who will respond to your enquiry as soon as possible.

All articles published by JVATiTD are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication (www.jvat.org), without subscription charges or registration barriers.