• Open access
• Data protection
• Confidentiality of editorial processes
• Copyright
• Crossmark policy
• Corrections and Retractions
• Appeals and complaints
• Authorship changes
• Depositing sequence data
• Ethical issues
• Diversity and inclusion
• AI policy
• Sex and gender equity

Open access

Eurosurveillance is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) as diamond open access. All content is free of charge for both readers and authors and complies with the open access standards required by international and national funders such as the European Commission (FP7 and Horizon 2020), the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the Wellcome Trust. Our site does not host commercials.

Data protection

The personal information collected by Eurosurveillance will be processed in line with Regulation (EC) No 45/2001 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2000 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data by the Community institutions and bodies and on the free movement of such data.

Pursuant to art. 11 of the Regulation, the following information is given to the data subjects: the data controller is Editor in chief of Eurosurveillance ([email protected]).

Purpose of the processing is to distribute the journal to interested receivers and where appropriate to communicate important information directly related to Eurosurveillance. Data is stored in cloud services hosted with Amazon Web Services managed by the company Ingenta. The servers are located in the European Union.

To register to the Eurosurveillance website, family name, first name, country and email address are mandatory. Once registered, data subjects are able to set up alerts to receive the weekly Eurosurveillance table of contents, and further customised alerts according to their preferences. Through the website, data subjects can exercise their right to access and rectify their personal data, including to unsubscribe. To erase the data, data subjects shall make formal request to the data controller.

Data will be stored until the data subject requests the erasure, or as long as Amazon Web Services is hosting the service on behalf of ECDC.

The data subject has the right of recourse at any time to the European Data Protection Supervisor ([email protected])

Our data protection notice can be found here (Data protection notice).

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Confidentiality of editorial processes

The peer review process of submitted manuscripts and all related material is confidential. Eurosurveillance does not make public details about the processing of submitted manuscripts, including the identity of authors and peer reviewers and correspondence with them. This applies to manuscripts under consideration and also those for which a decision has been reached. Editors, peer reviewers and authors shall not share any documents relating to manuscripts under consideration nor to those that have been rejected or accepted.

When editorial board members are authors of a submitted manuscript, they are not involved in any stage of the peer review or the editorial decision-making, nor do they have access to confidential information related to the decision-making process.

Copyright

Except where otherwise stated, all manuscripts published after 1 January 2016 are published under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. The Authors or their affiliated institutions retain ownership of the copyright for their manuscript, but allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute and/or copy the content as long as the Authors and source are cited in accordance with the detailed information provided in the licence.

Eurosurveillance allows pre- and postprint archiving.  It is listed in the Sherpa/Romeo database as a journal that allows pre- and postprint archiving.

Manuscripts should preferably be deposited in a preprint server ahead or at the point of submission to Eurosurveillance. 

The preprint server should offer a licence that is compatible with the Eurosurveillance CC-BY licence. It should further well visibly state that the deposited manuscript is a version that has not been peer-reviewed and that should not be used for decision making. It should have sections that detail (possible) conflicts of interest and adherence to patient consent and confidentiality and ethical standards. All published articles are automatically deposited in PubMedCentral.

When submitting an article, authors are requested to send a signed agreement with authors for each article, signed by the corresponding author on behalf of all authors. It should be scanned and sent to the Eurosurveillance office as part of the submission process using our online submission system.

As many other journals and institutions, we use plagiarism detection software (iThenticate) to routinely check incoming submissions for overlap with published material. We make a case-by-case decision on whether the similarities represent a reason for us not to accept the paper for publication. If we identify text recycling to an extent that we consider critical, we inform the authors of this and attach the similarity report, which in our opinion is a useful tool that can help the authors to improve their manuscript. We emphasise here that this measure does not imply an accusation of fraud. However, even if cited correctly, verbatim copies of full sentences or paragraphs from published material including that of authors themselves, can constitute a breach of copyright, for which we as a journal can be held responsible. Our policy follows the opinion of the committee on publication ethics (COPE).

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Crossmark policy

Crossmark is a multi-publisher initiative from Crossref to provide a standard way for readers to locate the current version of a piece of content. By applying the Crossmark logo, Eurosurveillance commits to maintaining the content it publishes, and to alerting readers to changes if and when they occur.

Clicking on the Crossmark logo will tell you the current status of a document, and may also give you additional publication record information about the document. The Crossmark logo is restricted to current and future journal content.

Corrections and Retractions

Corrections, Errata and Addenda are published as appropriate for articles altered after publication. They link to the altered article. Should an Expression of Concern or Retraction Notice need to be published, this is done in accordance with the COPE guidelines. Such notices will be linked to the original article.

Appeals and complaints

Eurosurveillance has a procedure for handling appeals and complaints. All appeals and complaints should be sent the editorial office ([email protected]).

For appeals against our decision on a manuscript, we involve two associate editors, who assess the appeal. Under exceptional circumstances, an editorial advisor with relevant expertise may be involved.

Allegations related to research integrity or plagiarism, such as double publication, theft or misuse of data, or disputed authorship, are dealt with by the Editor-in-chief in accordance with COPE flowcharts and guidelines, involving the relevant persons or institutions as needed.

Complaints about the length of time taken in processing a manuscript, our behaviour, etc. are dealt with by the editorial team. Final evaluation – if escalation to a higher authority for individual instances is necessary – is made by the Editor-in-chief, who will provide an annual report about major complaints to the associate editors and the publisher.

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Authorship changes

Eurosurveillance has a policy for changes in authorship i.e. adding or removing authors. This policy reflects the stage of the publication process at which such changes are made/requested.

Adding authors after submission before publication of the article

In cases where during the processing of a manuscript, after submission and before publication of an article, editors notice an additional author’s name on the author list or if the corresponding author requests addition of a new author, the editorial team will ask the corresponding author to send an email to [email protected] in which they explain why the author should be added, state that the new author fulfils ICMJE authorship criteria and describe their detailed contributions; all co-authors should be in Cc of this email to ensure that they are informed ahead of publication.

Adding authors after publication of the article

In cases where the corresponding author requests the addition of a new author within a reasonable time after publication of the article, we proceed as above. In addition, co-authors should be asked by the corresponding author to actively confirm their consent to the author being added, in an email to [email protected].

Once confirmation has been obtained and consensus has been reached, changes will be made online and an author correction will be published in the next Eurosurveillance issue. In case of differing opinions we will follow the approach suggested in respective COPE flowcharts.

Removing authors after submission before publication of the article

In cases where editors notice an author’s name has been removed or if the corresponding author requests an author to be removed before publication, the Editor-in-chief will evaluate the request and explanation why they should be removed. The author concerned should be informed about the request by the editorial team or the corresponding author and should actively agree to be removed from the author list in an email to [email protected]. All co-authors should be in Cc of the email exchange to ensure that they are informed.

Removing authors after publication of the article

In cases where an author requests to be removed from article after its publication, the Editor-in-chief will evaluate the request and explanation why they wish to be removed. Hereafter, the editorial team informs the corresponding author about the request and asks for active consent by them and all co-authors in individual emails to [email protected] with the requesting author and all co-authors in copy.

Once consent has been obtained by all parties for removing the author, changes will be made online and an author correction will be published in the next Eurosurveillance issue. In case of differing opinions we will follow approach suggested in respective COPE flowcharts.

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Depositing sequence data

Prior to submission of regular articles, nucleic acid sequence data found and presented in the studies reported should have been deposited in sustainable, public, and open access, databases. The deposited sequences should not only include assemblies, but also the raw sequence data. For next generation sequencing, it is important that the FASTQ files are deposited. In regular manuscripts submitted to Eurosurveillance, authors should refer to the location of the sequences/sequence data in the appropriate database of their choice. If this is in the form of accession numbers, these should be available in regular manuscripts upon submission to Eurosurveillance.

For rapid communications, nucleotide acid and protein sequence data should be deposited, as for regular articles. If the accession numbers of the sequences are not yet available upon submission of the rapid communication to Eurosurveillance, proof of submission to an appropriate sequence database is required.

Databases that are suitable for depositing sequence data include, but are not limited to: the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA), GenBank, DNA DataBank of Japan (DDBJ), Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) and Measles Nucleotide Surveillance (MeaNS) databases for nucleotide sequences. Protein sequences can, for example, be deposited to UniProt.

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Ethical issues

The ECDC grants editorial freedom to the editorial team of Eurosurveillance.

Eurosurveillance follows guidelines on editorial independence produced by the World Association of Medical Editors (see Relationship between Editors and Owners) and the Code of Conduct produced by the Committee on Publication Ethics.

Eurosurveillance follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals.

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Diversity and inclusion

Eurosurveillance encourages interdisciplinary collaboration, diversity and inclusion and supports the principles of fairness and equity and we encourage our authors to recognise the important contributions of various actors.

Authors who intend to submit articles on outbreaks, especially rapid communications, are strongly encouraged to involve as co-authors those colleagues from (national or local) public health authorities and other health organisations who are actively involved in investigating the outbreak.

As public health journal aiming to assist the prevention and control infectious diseases by providing evidence for public health action and policy, Eurosurveillance will have a low threshold for rejecting articles on ongoing or emerging outbreaks that do not cover aspects relevant for public health action.

Eurosurveillance is a fully open access journal, published under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence. The journal does not charge article processing charges and supports the principles of open science, data sharing and reuse.

Authors using open data (available in the public domain) in their analysis, are strongly encouraged to establish contact with experts who collected and curated these data. This should be done especially when the data are from a country which is different from that of the authors, and authors may thus lack insight into the context of data collection and validation.

The originators of the data should either be given the possibility to be co-authors or be acknowledged as contributors to the article. For anyone to qualify as co-author, all four ICMJE authorship criteria criteria should be fulfilled.

If all authors of an article are not from the country where the data were collected as part of a research project, Eurosurveillance may reject such articles, unless authors provide to the editorial team a valid explanation for the exclusion of local collaborators. This explanation will be included in the Acknowledgements section of the published article.

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Responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools

Eurosurveillance follows the general recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) [version May 2023; accessed 24 July 2023] and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) [revised version 31 May 2023; accessed on 24 July 2023] and encourages authors to use artificial intelligence (AI) tools responsibly in scholarly publishing.

Authors should be transparent and disclose at submission in both the cover letter and the submitted work if generative AI tools such as Large Language Models (LLMs), chatbots (such as ChatGPT), and image-generating algorithms were used in the production and writing of the submitted manuscript.

WAME recommendations explicitly state where an AI tool is used to carry out or generate analytical work, help report results (e.g. generating tables or figures), or write computer codes, this should be stated in the body of the paper, in both the Abstract and the Methods section. The use of an AI tool in drafting the new text should be noted in the acknowledgments.

Authors should state the name, version, model, source of the tool and specify the method of application such as query structure and syntax in the paper they are submitting, they should also disclose the underlying databases used for the training as far as possible.

Of note, a Chatbot or other AI tool must not be an author of a manuscript. An AI cannot take the responsibility and cannot be held accountable for the accuracy, correctness, and compliance with ethical standards of a manuscript’s content and its generation. These are important responsibilities that rest with the authors as outlined principles of the ICMJE authorship criteria also applied by Eurosurveillance.

Ultimately, as per the ICMJE recommendations "... humans are responsible for any submitted material that included the use of AI-assisted technologies. Authors should carefully review and edit the result because AI can generate authoritative-sounding output that can be incorrect, incomplete, or biased. [...] Authors should be able to assert that there is no plagiarism in their paper, including in text and images produced by the AI. Humans must ensure there is appropriate attribution of all quoted material, including full citations."

In manuscripts where AI has been used, or thought to have been used, in any way not included in the above paragraphs, the editor reserves the right to consult with the editorial board to decide on whether or not peer review will be undertaken.

In case of any doubt, it is the author's responsibility to contact the editorial team to clarify whether any use of AI tools should be appropriately disclosed.

Reviewers should declare if they used a chatbot or LLM AI tool (which one and how) in the generation of their review or in their correspondence, to the author and the editor. They also need to keep in mind that chatbots may retain the information fed to them, including the content of a whole manuscript or parts of it.

Of note, entering any part of a submitted, unpublished manuscript under confidential review to a chatbot that retains this information, breaches confidentiality of the submitted manuscript. Reviewers should not enter parts of the manuscript in a chatbot, since confidentiality is central to the journal’s peer review policy.

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Sex and gender equity in research

We encourage our authors to follow the Sex and Gender Equity in Research (SAGER) guidelines and to take into account sex and gender considerations where relevant. Authors should use the terms sex (biological attribute) and gender (shaped by social and cultural circumstances) carefully in order to avoid confusing both terms.

Article titles and/or abstracts should indicate clearly what sex(es) the study applies to. Authors should also describe in the background, (deleted where relevant here) whether sex and/or gender differences may be expected; report how sex and/or gender were accounted for in the design of the study; provide disaggregated data by sex and/or gender, where appropriate; and discuss respective results. If a sex and/or gender analysis was not conducted, the rationale should be given in the Discussion.

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Contacting the editorial team

If you have any questions about Eurosurveillance, please contact our editorial team at [email protected]

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