Article Processing Charges and Open Access

Manuscript Length. Authors who wish to exceed this limit will be charged $750, with a maximum acceptable word count of 1000 words above the set limit for the type of article. If you would like to accept this fee, please include a note in your cover letter stating your acceptance in order to avoid having your manuscript unsubmitted for exceeding the word count limitations

Open Access. Authors of all accepted articles have the opportunity to pay a $2500 immediate open access fee. This charge ensures that such articles will be freely available to all readers from the time of electronic publication, approximately 4-6 weeks after acceptance.

Author Policies

All authors should read the following instructions before submitting a manuscript to assure timely handling and review of their material. Authors should strive to present their manuscripts in a clear and logical manner. Authors are responsible for all statements made in the text.

These instructions are based in part on recommendations as set forth in the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors' Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals and the AMA Manual of Style. Authors are encouraged to consult both of these publications, which contain helpful details on the construction and writing of scientific manuscripts. Variations from guidelines in those publications reflect the individual style of the AJNR.

Author Responsibilities

Ethical Protection of Research Participants

All investigators should ensure that the planning conduct and reporting of human research are in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration as revised in 2013. All authors should seek approval to conduct research from an independent local, regional, or national review body (e.g., ethics committee, institutional review board). If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the Helsinki Declaration, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach and demonstrate that the local, regional, or national review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. Approval by a responsible review body does not preclude Editors from forming their own judgment whether the conduct of the research was appropriate.

Patients have a right to privacy that should not be violated without informed consent. Identifying information, including names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, or pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent for this purpose requires that an identifiable patient be shown the manuscript to be published. Authors should disclose to these patients whether any potential identifiable material might be available via the Internet as well as in print after publication. Patient consent should be written and archived with the journal, the authors, or both, as dictated by local regulations or laws.

Nonessential identifying details should be omitted. Informed consent should be obtained if there is any doubt that anonymity can be maintained. For example, masking the eye region in photographs of patients is inadequate protection of anonymity. If identifying characteristics are de-identified, authors should provide assurance, and Editors should so note, that such changes do not distort scientific meaning.

When reporting experiments on animals, authors should indicate whether institutional and national standards for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed. Further guidance on animal research ethics is available from the International Association of Veterinary Editors’ Consensus Author Guidelines on Animal Ethics and Welfare.

Authorship

The AJNR follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) guidelines on authorship. An author should have made substantial contributions to all the categories established by the ICMJE:

1. "conception and design, or acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation of data,"
2. "drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content,"
3. "final approval of the version to be published,"
4. "agreement 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."

Honorary authorship is to be avoided. The ICMJE states that contributions solely in the areas of acquisition of funding, general supervision of a research group or general administrative support, writing assistance, technical editing, language editing, and proofreading are NOT sufficient for authorship.

When a large, multicenter group has conducted a study, the group should identify the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript. At least one person's name must accompany a group name (e.g., H.J. Cloft, for the HEAL Investigators). These individuals should fully meet the criteria for authorship defined above. When submitting a group author manuscript, the corresponding author should clearly indicate the preferred citation and identify all individual authors as well as the group name. Groups of persons who have contributed materially to the paper but whose contributions do not justify authorship may be listed under a heading such as "Clinical Investigators" and their function or contribution should be described (e.g., "served as scientific advisors," "collected data," or "provided and cared for study patients"). The National Library of Medicine indexes the group name and the names of individuals the group has identified as being directly responsible for the manuscript.

For articles that have 25 or more authors, it is recommended to list the lead authors individually and then include a collective group name for any additional authors. Although the group name will be included at the end of the author list, every author's name will still be individually indexed, displayed, and made searchable in bibliographic databases such as PubMed. As a reference, please see this example.

Large Language Models 

As of now, please note that programs such as ChatGPT do not satisfy authorship criteria, and cannot be listed as an author of a manuscript, commentary, or letter. Attribution of authorship implies accountability for the work, which cannot be applied to LLMs. Use of an LLM must be documented in the Methods section or as an acknowledgment at the end of the manuscript. This information must include a description of the content that was created or edited, the name of the language model or tool, version number, and manufacturer/developer. The manuscript authors accept full responsibility for the text’s factual and citation accuracy; mathematical, logical, and commonsense reasoning; and originality.

Disclosure of Potential Conflicts of Interest

It is very important for the peer-review process and also for our readers that authors report any potential conflict of interest. A conflict of interest exists when professional judgment concerning a primary interest (such as patients' welfare or the validity of research) may be influenced by a secondary interest (such as financial gain). Perceptions of conflict of interest are as important as actual conflicts of interest. Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, speaker engagement, stock ownership or options, honoraria, patents, and paid expert testimony) are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and of science itself.

Disclosures should include any conflict that is related, even remotely, to the topic of the article. Please visit the Office of Research Integrity's website for additional information. Also, please consult the CMS Open Payment website that discloses financial relationships that drug and medical device companies have with doctors and other healthcare providers.

At the time when a manuscript has undergone peer review and is being sent for revision or acceptable for publication, we will ask for all the authors to complete formal ICMJE electronic disclosures forms. We are not asking for these forms upfront in order to avoid unnecessary burden for authors whose manuscript will be ultimately rejected.

However, editors and reviewers need to be aware of conflicts in order to ensure a rigorous peer-review process. We therefore ask that, when submitting your manuscript, you please disclose any potential conflicts of interest within the main manuscript, not on the title page, which is a separate file from the main manuscript.

Here are some examples:

"Author [insert full name] has been the recipient of research funding from Company XYZ."

"Author [insert full name] has been awarded a speaking compensation by Company XZ."

"Author [insert full name] holds shares or options in Company YK."

If there are no conflicts, include the statement, "The authors declare no conflicts of interest related to the content of this article."

A field in the manuscript submission website will ask for the same information.

All authors listed on the manuscript must complete both the electronic copyright agreement (in the case of acceptance) in Manuscript Central and ICMJE disclosure form in Convey.

Duplicate/Redundant Publication

The Council of Science Editors defines redundant publication as "reporting (publishing or attempting to publish) substantially the same work more than once, without attribution of the original source(s)" (CBE Views 1996;19 (4):76-77). Characteristics of reports that are substantially similar include (a) "at least one of the authors must be common to all reports; (b) "the subject or study populations are often the same or similar"; (c) "the methodology is typically identical or nearly so"; and (d) "the results and their interpretation generally vary little, if at all."

Should any member of the Editorial Board of AJNR become aware of the possibility of redundant/duplicate publication, the Editor-in-Chief will:

1. If the article is still in the process of peer review, suspend it until final determination is made. A determination of redundant/duplicate publication will result in immediate rejection of the article and notification of the Editor(s) of other journals involved.
2. If the article(s) in question has already been published by AJNR:
   1. Compare and study both publications to determine their content.
   2. Ask one or more Senior Editors and/or a member(s) of the Editorial Board to determine if the article in question falls into the category of redundant/duplicate publication.
   3. If the article is considered as redundant/duplicate, retract it from publication in AJNR and PubMed and notify the author(s).
   4. Publish a notification of the retraction in AJNR and give authors(s) involved the opportunity to respond.
   5. Further sanctions to be considered by the Editor-in-Chief and Senior Editors on an individual basis include:
      1. A flexible time ban for material by any of the authors.
      2. Notification of the authors' department chairs and other authorities of their respective universities.
   6. If redundancy, duplication, or plagiarism occurs in an article(s) arising from research funded by a government means, the Office of Research Integrity from Department of Health and Human Services will be notified.

Authors should be advised that AJNR uses the iThenticate system to scan all accepted articles for duplication of text from previously published sources. Reviewers and Senior Editors may also initiate a scan of any submitted manuscript during the review process. Any article displaying an unusually high level of duplication (excluding references) will be investigated and further action will be decided upon by the Editor-in-Chief on a case-by-case basis. 

If the submitted manuscript builds on previously published articles, authors are encouraged to enclose copies of those articles with the new submission. The Editors reserve the right to request the original data obtained in the investigation.

Content Previously Published in Open Access Journals under Creative Commons Licensing
Authors may intend to use portions of their own work for which they retain copyright following publication in an open access journal that operates under Creative Commons Licensing. In this case, any portions they intend to reproduce in AJNR (data, art, tables) should be acknowledged in the form of a footnote on the title page. The intention to reuse material should also be included in the cover letter when submitting the manuscript so that the total level of duplication can be assessed prior to peer review. The previous publication should be included in the reference list as well.

Preprint Archives

AJNR offers its own service for preprints of accepted manuscripts, with the final version of the paper typically published 4–6 weeks following acceptance. Our goal is to post preprints 3 business days after acceptance, with indexing that makes them discoverable and citable.

The AJNR discourages the use of preprint archives other than its own. Such non-peer-reviewed preprint archives create copyright issues that may interfere with the publication of the same articles in AJNR. These archives may not allow authors to remove an article from their servers to publish it in AJNR.

The journal asks authors to disclose where and when earlier version(s) of a submitted manuscript were uploaded to a preprint archive and to provide access to those version(s). If a substantial portion of the submitted work has been published previously on such a website, the authors should include a detailed description of how the present work differs from the prior version so that the Editorial Office can determine if the article can be considered for publication in AJNR.

ORCID

AJNR participates in the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) program. This is a non-profit organization dedicated to solving the long-standing name ambiguity problem in scholarly communication by creating a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers and an open, transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other current author identifier schemes. We encourage all authors to associate an ORCID iD with their Manuscript Central account. This for the benefit of the authors and can only be done at the time of the initial submission. If the authors elect not to submit their ORCID number during the initial submission, they will not be able to add it at later stages of the manuscript processing. To add an ORCID iD, please go to the Corresponding Author Center and use the drop-down menu under your name at the upper right to select “Email/Name.” This will show you links you can follow to register with ORCID, add your existing identifier, or read more about the program.

Government-Funded Research

AJNR welcomes government-funded research.  AJNR is archived in PubMed Central.

We comply fully with the open access requirements of UKRI, Wellcome, and NIHR. Where required by their funder, authors retain the right to distribute their author accepted manuscript (AAM), such as via an institutional and/or subject repository (e.g., EuropePMC), under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license for release no later than the date of first online publication.

Manuscript Editing

If believed to be of value, we encourage authors to seek assistance from a colleague experienced in medical terminology and translation or a technical manuscript editor/service to ensure that the words used both accurately and clearly convey the intended meaning. Language and grammar issues could potentially affect the overall assessment of the submission. For more information on this topic and a list of resources, read English as an International Language: Web-Based Help or consult a service such as the American Journal Experts, Editage, Charlesworth Author Services, Enago, American Manuscript Editors, Wordvice, or Eloquenti. Because understanding and correctly displaying non-English names can be complicated, we urge our authors to review the Title Page instructions below carefully.