Policies
Editorial Policy
S&S does not accept submissions that include human subjects research that involves the administration of novel drug or medical therapies.
IF accepted into S&S authors retain ownership of their article, but S&S reserves the right to remove publications from its catalog if an article is later discovered to contain erroneous findings, defamatory claims, or for any other reason that is relevant to the standing of the journal.
Ethics (COPE-aligned)
Conflicts of interest
Data availability
Human subjects statement
Preprints allowed (recommend OSF/ArXiv/SSRN)
S&S accepts articles that have appeared as pre-prints under the following conditions:
- The submitted draft has substantial revisions that make it distinct from the pre-print edition
- The corresponding author provides an explanation of how the submitted version of the paper differs from the pre-print
AI-use disclosure in methods
AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements.
Authors who use AI tools in the writing of a manuscript, production of images or graphical elements of the paper, or in the collection and analysis of data, must be transparent in disclosing in the Materials and Methods (or similar section) of the paper how the AI tool was used and which tool was used. Authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics.
See “COPE Council. COPE position - Authorship and AI - English.” https://doi.org/10.24318/cCVRZBms for more information
Authorship (CRediT taxonomy)
Authorship should be determined according to the CRediT taxonomy see below:
Conceptualization — Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims.
Data curation — Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later re-use.
Formal analysis — Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data.
Funding acquisition — Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication.
Investigation — Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection.
Methodology — Development or design of methodology; creation of models. Project administration — Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution.
Resources — Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools.
Software — Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components.
Supervision — Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team.
Validation — Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs.
Visualization — Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation.
Writing — original draft — Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation).
Writing - review & editing — Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision — including pre- or post-publication stages.