Terms & Conditions
Contents
Authorship
The decision on who to include as an author should be discussed and agreed upon prior to the initial submission. For guidelines regarding authorship, please see the ARVO Publications Ethics Statement. The full name of each author should be listed in the order of importance of their contribution to the study. If at any time during the peer review process there is a change to the authorship listing, then authors must download and complete a Change of Authorship form. When removing an author, only the author being removed can make this request and they should also submit a signed letter requesting removal along with this form. Authorship removal requests made by the corresponding author, or other coauthors on the manuscript, are not acceptable.
Copyright and Ethics
1. Prior Publication/Duplicate Submission
All submissions must be original. Manuscripts are subjected to iThenticate plagiarism detection analysis prior to review. Manuscripts will not be considered that have been previously published, in full, or in part, in any format, except as an abstract, academic thesis, or in draft form on a non-peer reviewed preprint server. Authors are required upon submission of their manuscript to disclose the existence of any such prior versions of their work, and to ensure that ARVO publishing policies are not in conflict with those of the repository of the original work. An author may submit a manuscript that is part of his or her published thesis, provided that it has been published only as a thesis, and not as part of another journal article. Manuscripts that are currently under review with other journals may not be submitted. Authors must update any postings to a preprint server with the journal published version, as soon as it is available, and provide an appropriate link on the archive site to the copy on the journal website. Authors further agree not to post further updated versions beyond the journal published version. Published conference proceedings articles are not suitable for republication in ARVO journals.
If a manuscript is suspected of being a duplicate submission, i.e., already under consideration at another journal, the review will be halted and the scientific editor of the other journal will be contacted. If it is confirmed that the manuscript is a duplicate submission, the manuscript will be rejected. Depending on the specific situation, the Editor-in-Chief may then refer the case to the ARVO Publications Committee to determine whether the corresponding author should be banned from submitting to the ARVO journals for two years (as either a corresponding author or a contributing author), and whether their institution should be contacted. Banned authors may appeal to the ARVO Board of Trustees.
2. License to Publish/Open Access
JOV is now open access, beginning with articles published Jan. 2016. Authors retain copyright of their articles instead of signing it over to ARVO. Each author must complete a License to Publish (a link to their individual form will be emailed to each author after submission). This license grants ARVO permission, among other things, to publish and distribute the article. Authors will also need to indicate on the form if they are making their article open access under the CC BY-NC-ND or the CC BY license. (We will consider the corresponding author's license selection the official choice if there are any discrepancies among the authors.) For more information about open access, click here.
The Wellcome Trust, as well as some other funders, require authors to select the CC BY license. Please check with your funder for any requirements regarding open access licenses.
Please note that only the CC BY-NC-ND license may be applied to Letters to the Editor and Author Responses, which currently do not have any publication fees. The CC BY license is not an option for Letters and Responses.
3. Permissions
If you plan to include figures, photographs, or tables from other publications, obtain written permission from the copyright holder to reprint such items, and submit this permission to the Editorial Office. This includes any images gathered from the internet that you used as stimuli and now plan to include in your article. If you used movies or TV shows as stimuli, you may not include clips or stills in your manuscript unless you have obtained permission from the copyright holder. You may scan the permission agreement and upload it as part of your manuscript. If you are including images of unobscured faces, you must contact the persons whose faces are shown and obtain written permission from them (or their guardians) to publish their images in your article. A form may be downloaded here.
4. Ethics
Click here for the ARVO Publications Ethics Statement. JOV is a member of, and subscribes to the principles of, the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Additionally, please note that submitted manuscripts are subject to be processed through iThenticate, a plagiarism detection software.
Policies
1. Human Subjects
For research involving human subjects, the ARVO journals require that authors state in the Methods section of their manuscript that their research was conducted in compliance with a suitable accredited Institutional Review Board (IRB) or its equivalent (such as a human ethics committee).
2. Statement for the Use of Animals in Ophthalmic and Vision Research
If experimental animals were used in the research, ARVO journals require that authors confirm adherence to the ARVO Statement for the Use of Animals in Ophthalmic and Vision Research in the Methods section of their manuscript.
3. ARVO Commercial Relationships Policy
It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to assure that each co-author is aware of the ARVO Commercial Relationships Policy. For each author, please list all organizations that they have a commercial relationship with, relevant to the current manuscript, and the codes that apply. If there are no commercial relationships, list "None."
Example
A.B Anderson, Alcon (C), Allergan (C, F), Optovue (F); J.R. Jones, None; C. Smith, Carl Zeiss Meditec (F), Heidelberg Engineering (F, R); A. Rodriguez, None
4. Clinical Trials Registration
Beginning Jul. 1, 2006, ARVO journals will no longer consider articles dealing with clinical trials that were not registered before the first subject was enrolled. Trials that began before this date and were not registered must be registered by Jul. 1, 2006. Please include the following information in a cover letter: (1) beginning date of the trial, (2) date of registration, (3) trial registration number, and (4) registration site. Registration must be done on a publicly available database. ICMJE-recognized registries as of Jun. 2007 are:
For the purposes of this policy, a "clinical trial" consists of any study involving a new therapy of any kind, whether medical, surgical, psychological or sociological, in which subjects are concurrently divided into one or more treatment or control groups. Several treatments may be compared simultaneously, or one or more treatment groups may be compared to a simultaneous, untreated control group. Although the division into such groups in most such trials is presently by random assignment, randomization is not a part of the requirement for registration but only the evaluation, in the trial, of concurrent control groups. The size of a clinical trial is not a relevant consideration as to whether it must be registered. This policy applies not only to large, multi-institutional clinical trials sponsored by pharmaceutical companies or other organizations, but also to individual investigators at a single institution who are conducting their own trials. The only consideration is whether the trial is comparing an experimental therapy, or therapies with a simultaneous control group, or groups.
Click here for more complete guidelines and here for FAQ.
5. ARVO Artificial Intelligence Policy
This policy covers the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies such as Large Language Models (e.g., ChatGPT, GPT-4, Dolly) and text-to-image generators (e.g., DALL-E 2, DeepAI) for manuscripts submitted to ARVO journals (IOVS, JOV, or TVST).
Use of AI by Authors
A generative AI technology cannot be listed as a co-author or author of any submitted manuscript.
If the author of a submitted manuscript has used any content (text or imagery) produced and/or edited with a generative AI technology, this must be disclosed (i.e., acknowledged in the acknowledgments section and/or the methods section as appropriate). The disclosure should include the name, version, model, and source of the generative AI technology as well as the date the content was created and/or edited. Additionally, the author is responsible for checking the accuracy of any content created by the generative AI technology (including references and any code). Authors are also responsible to check that any content produced and/or edited with a generative AI technology is free from plagiarism. Submission of work containing plagiarized content resulting from use of a generative AI technology is considered ethical misconduct and would subject the authors to the consequences outlined in the ARVO Publications Ethics Statement.
Use of AI by Reviewers and Editors
Consistent with NIH policy NOT-OD-23-149, reviewers and editors are prohibited from using AI tools when conducting peer review of unpublished work.
Billing
Although there are no costs for submission, the publication fee, charged only for accepted manuscripts, is $1,850. If the corresponding author is an ARVO member at the time of acceptance, a $350 discount will be applied. Amounts are in US dollars and were set by the ARVO Board of Trustees. ARVO sends out requests for payment of the fee (APC) after the manuscript is sent to the production team. In the very unlikely event that an accepted article does not end up getting published after payment was made, a full refund will be provided. The fee is not charged for Letters to the Editor or Author Responses to Letters.
Authors without funding may apply for financial assistance through the ARVO Publication Financial Assistance Program (PFAP), which covers the full cost of an article. For more information, please see the ARVO website. Authors must wait for notification of the outcome of their PFAP application before submitting an article to JOV. Articles already accepted for publication and in production are not eligible.
Permissions
To republish ARVO journal material in a non-ARVO journal
For articles published 2001-2015
If you would like to reuse a figure or table from an article that you previously published in JOV, you do not need written permission. When reprinting the JOV material, however, please include a full article citation and acknowledge the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (© ARVO) as the copyright holder.
If you would like to use material from an JOV article for which you were NOT an author, please obtain permission through the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC). When reprinting the JOV material, please include a full article citation and acknowledge the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (© ARVO) as the copyright holder.
If you have additional questions, e.g., regarding reuse of material online, please contact Debbie Chin at dchin@arvo.org. All companies, commercial and nonprofit, should contact ARVO directly for permission to reprint articles or parts thereof. Please e-mail your request to Debbie Chin at dchin@arvo.org.
For articles published 2016 and later
If you would like to reuse a figure or table from an article that you previously published in JOV, you do not need written permission. When reprinting the JOV material, however, please include a full article citation.
If you would like to use material from an JOV article for which you were NOT an author, you may do so in the manner specified by the Creative Commons license applied to the article (either the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs or the Creative Commons Attribution license). In the PDF of the article, the license type is listed at the bottom of the first page. Please note that if any material (e.g., a figure) was published previously, you will need to contact the copyright holder of that material to obtain permission to reuse it.
To republish ARVO journal material in an ARVO journal
If you would like to reuse original material from a published IOVS, JOV, or TVST article in a new paper you are writing for JOV (or IOVS or TVST), you don't need to obtain permission. ARVO will grant permission to reuse ARVO material in an ARVO publication. Please cite the original published article as the source. However, if the figure or table appearing in the ARVO journal article was originally published elsewhere, you will need to obtain permission from that original source.