AALAS Journal Updates for Authors

As we approach the end of 2024, we would like to briefly summarize recent and forthcoming efforts to streamline the submission and review processes for authors while ensuring that AALAS journals continue to reflect and promote excellence in the ethical conduct of animal research. In addition, we will touch on the important issues of open access and public access, which will require some changes in AALAS policies no later than October 2025 when NIH is expected to require immediate public access to NIH-funded articles accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science (JAALAS).¹⁰

Merger of Comparative Medicine (CM) into JAALAS

As first announced by editorial in the July 2024 issue of JAALAS¹³ (repeated in the August 2024 issue of CM), no new submissions to CM were accepted after August 15, 2024. All comparative medicine content submitted after August 15 will appear in a dedicated section of JAALAS starting with the January 2025 issue. The last issue of CM will be the December 2024 issue. Authors with CM manuscripts submitted before August 15 that are still in the review stage can continue to use the CM ScholarOne site (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aalas-cm) to interact with reviewers and editorial staff. All new manuscripts are now submitted through the JAALAS ScholarOne site (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aalas-jaalas).

Full Adoption of ARRIVE 2.0 Guidelines

Based on a survey and as announced in another editorial published in the September 2024 issue of JAALAS¹⁴ (repeated in the October 2024 issue of CM), starting January 1, 2025, all manuscripts submitted to JAALAS must address the ARRIVE 2.0 guidelines. For the benefit of both authors and reviewers, a template for hypothesis-driven manuscripts that addresses all ARRIVE items is available on the JAALAS ScholarOne site via the “Instructions and Forms” drop-down menu at the top right of each web page. Also available in the same drop-down menu is a document with additional information about JAALAS submissions and author policies. A manuscript template is already available at the same location listing the currently required and optional (until January 1, 2025) ARRIVE items. JAALAS will not be publishing the ARRIVE checklist³ completed by authors as supplemental article materials online because the items are all addressed within the manuscript template.

Note that JAALAS is not requiring authors to conduct their research any differently as part of the full adoption of the ARRIVE guidelines, but the ARRIVE items must be addressed. That is, details relevant to the specific ARRIVE items must be provided, regardless of the specific methods used. For instance, animals are not required to be assigned to groups randomly, but the fact that randomization was not used must be reported. This allows both the reviewers and readers to better evaluate the data and conclusions in the context of the experimental methods used. In addition, the added information will aid efforts toward research reproducibility.

Utilization of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Reference Style

As of December 1, 2024, JAALAS will require authors to format references using the JAMA (sometimes referred to as “AMA”) reference style⁷ instead of the current custom JAALAS/CM reference style. This will be a welcome change for those of you who use a reference manager such as EndNote™ (Clarivate; endnote.com), which allows direct selection of JAMA reference style and automatic manuscript formatting as new citations are added. Other reference managers such as Paperpile (©Paperpile LLC; paperpile.com), Mendelay (©Elsevier Ltd; mendelay.com), Zotero (Corporation for Digital Scholarship, zotero.org), and Papers (©Digital Science Research and Solutions; papersapp.com) also support JAMA reference style. Table 1 briefly compares the 2 reference styles.

Table 1.

JAMA compared with JAALAS/CM reference styles

Style	How are references ordered in the reference section?	Advantages	Disadvantages
JAMA	By order of appearance in the manuscript	A change in the wording (or format) of a reference does not change the number of the reference Widely used and available in reference manager applications	None significant
JAALAS/CM	Alphabetically by the first letter of the first author’s last name	It is relatively easy to determine if an article by a specific author is cited due to alphabetized list of references by last name of first author	Not available as a standard style in reference manager applications Difficult to format nonarticle references (for example, web sites, web documents, and regulatory documents) Changes in the reference format often lead to realphabetization of the reference list and the need to renumber references by hand in the manuscript body

Because the proofing platform now in use can automatically reformat references in proofs using JAMA style, this single change will reduce the postacceptance proofing time needed for many manuscripts by days, reducing author labor and time from submission to publication. A notice of this impending change has been posted on the JAALAS ScholarOne home and new manuscript submission pages.

Authors are encouraged to immediately begin using the JAMA reference style.

During the transition to JAMA reference style from JAALAS/CM reference style, articles with both types of reference styles will appear in JAALAS issues (note: manuscripts are generally termed “articles” once they are published).

Upcoming Issues-Open Access and Public Access

As background to article access issues, the term “embargo period” refers to the period of time a published article remains behind a pay wall before the public can obtain full access to it. Embargo periods vary by publisher (currently 6 mo for JAALAS and CM), but payments made to access articles behind paywalls or subscription fees based upon paywall access represent a significant source of financial support for scientific journals. As we will discuss, the loss of paywall income in the coming year will be a challenge for publishers.

Simply defined, Open Access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers.² The drive toward open access to scientific literature has its roots in several broad movements going back over 50 y,⁶ but in recent years the open access discussion has been on fair access to the scientific literature to scientists and medical personnel in countries throughout the world.⁵ There are different types of OA strategies employed by journals using multiple licensing models, but discussion of those topics is beyond the scope of this editorial.

A related concept is Public Access (PA), which is the term used by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal agencies to describe their mandates to make the results of their supported research available to the public.¹² Some differences between QA and PA are below, taken from information presented at https://ospo.gwu.edu/overview-us-policy-open-access-and-open-data:

Public Access

• Research outputs are freely available to read

• May have restrictions on reuse and redistribution

• Typically hosted in specific repositories such as PubMed and NSF-PAR (National Science Foundation-Public Access Repository)

• Under new policies, no embargo period for federally funded research will be allowed

Open Access

• Research outputs are freely available to read, reuse, and redistribute

• Typically uses open licenses (e.g., Creative Commons)

• Can be published in various venues, including open access journals and repositories

Because PA is currently driving changes in the journal publishing community, we will further focus on it compared with OA.

Public access mandates.

The primary mandates to provide wider access to federally funded research is found in an August 2022 Memorandum released by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OTSP).^4,12 Its contents have immense importance to authors and publishers. There are a number of requirements (for example, use of digital unique identifiers for published articles), but a key requirement is that by the end of 2025, all federal agencies must “[u]pdate their public access policies as soon as possible, and no later than December 31, 2025, to make publications and their supporting data resulting from federally funded research publicly accessible without an embargo on their free and public release.” This requirement applies to all agencies with more than $100 million in annual research and development expenditures and requires an agency plan by the end of 2024 that must implement a no-embargo requirement by the end of 2025.

NSF released its OSTP-mandated PA plan in 2023 and will implement it no later than January 31, 2025.¹¹ More importantly for many JAALAS authors, NIH has not yet released its new policy but implementation is expected on October 1, 2025, based upon a draft NIH Public Access Policy released for public comment on June 18, 2024 (the comment period closed in August).¹⁰ Relevant details of this policy will be covered in another editorial once the final version is released by the end of 2024, but as published in draft form, the policy is expected to apply to:

“…any manuscript accepted for publication in a journal, on or after October 1, 2025, that is the result of funding by NIH in whole or in part through:

• A grant or cooperative agreement, including training grants

• A contract,

• An Other Transaction,

• NIH intramural research, or

• The official work of an NIH employee.”

The NIH policy will apply whether the NIH-funded principal investigator or project director is an author and regardless of whether non-NIH funds contributed to developing or writing the manuscript.

When released, the new policy will replace an existing 2008 policy.⁸ To comply, since 2008 both JAALAS and CM have used NIH “Submission Method A” to ensure that federally funded authors are compliant with federal requirements by 1) submitting the final published version of the article to PubMed Central and 2) making those articles publicly available after 6 mo embargo behind the AALAS membership paywall.

Impact on AALAS journals.

A critical question is how AALAS will comply with the “no-embargo” requirement. As a member organization, AALAS supports its journals primarily with general funds from membership fees and meeting proceeds but also receives income from library subscriptions and single article purchases from non-AALAS members who do not have immediate access to published articles on the new AALAS KnowledgeWorks Global PubFactory website (aalas.kglmeridian.com as of October 15, 2024), which has replaced the previous Ingenta archiving website. Like all publishers, AALAS stands to lose much of the library subscription and article purchase revenue. An informal review by the editors of the most recent 99 JAALAS and CM scientific articles disclosed that about half of the articles would have to be published with no embargo in 2025, 40% were partially or fully funded by U.S. federal funds, and an additional 10% were partially or fully funded by federal funds provided by other countries. However, AALAS is in a much better financial position than many journals that rely heavily on library subscriptions and article fees.

When AALAS makes federally funded articles immediately available as required in 2025 with no embargo, to replace revenue responsibly it may follow a model in which authors of such public access articles (for example, those based on research that was supported by federal funds) are charged a fee called an “article processing charge” or APC. This is a typical feature of journals that follow a “hybrid” open access model; that is, one in which some articles are public or open access (for example, federally funded) and some are not (not federally funded).¹ Another option is to use a consistent approach and publish all articles open access with APCs, regardless of funding source. Based on informal research by the editors of JAALAS, the amount of the APC varies widely from journal to journal.

AALAS is actively discussing many options and will share more information in future editorials. A related issue, mandated data sharing,⁹ will also be covered in a future editorial. As we navigate these disruptors in science publishing, both AALAS leadership and journal editors are committed to ensuring that JAALAS will remain an affordable outlet for publishing high quality research while ensuring compliance with all federal mandates.

Conflict of Interest

The author(s) have no conflict(s) of interest to declare.

Funding

This work was internally funded.