Herpetological Conservation and Biology welcomes and encourages submissions by all authors regardless of ethnicity, gender identity or expression, national origin, or other characteristics.

Implicit biases exist in the peer-review process against certain groups of authors based on language, socioeconomics, gender, and other factors.  We strive for a more equitable peer-review process. 

We acknowledge that our governing and editorial boards need to have increased representation. To provide fair reviews and decisions to all authors, we commit to continue and expand our work to establish more diverse representation on both boards.

We also commit to develop and ensure an effective system to disseminate educational information to our editors and reviewers concerning evidence of the peer-review biases and ways to reduce them.

Herpetological Conservation and Biology does not subscribe to, participate in, or issue DOI numbers for published manuscripts.  The reasons are three-fold:

1. (1) To issue DOI numbers, a journal is required to pay a per-manuscript fee to a system put in place by large academic publishers.  As a non-profit publisher, we do not charge any fees whatsoever to authors or readers.

 

1. (2) The DOI system is administered in part by CrossRef.  CrossRef requires that member publishers process each manuscript through their software, which creates hyperlinks for cited manuscripts that were published previously in CrossRef member journals.  This adds a publishing step with little benefit because most of the hyperlinks created by CrossRef direct readers to webpages that require payment to view the actual PDF (i.e., a ‘paywall’).  The CrossRef hyperlink is only beneficial in cases where articles are open access. 
3. (3) The academic publishers that devised and manage the DOI system are for-profit businesses. Herpetological Conservation and Biology has chosen a model that is truly open access, yet with no fees to publish or read articles.

Herpetological Conservation and Biology (HCB) recognizes that authors may change their names for a variety of reasons (e.g., marital status change, religious conversion, gender identity change) and wish to have their name changed on previously published papers. We respect the need for this option.

Authors who wish to have their name, pronouns, name-based e-mail address, or any other identifier changed on a paper published by HCB must contact the relevant Section Editor or any member of the Board of Directors and clearly state exactly what change(s) they are requesting. They must also attest that they are requesting a change of their own name. Name changes will not be made based on requests from anyone other than the individual requesting the change.

HCB will maintain a record of name change requests and attestations to document that we are honoring requests that we receive in good faith based on the understanding that the request has been received by the author whose name is affected.

This process will be entirely confidential unless an author requests a formal reference to the change on the paper. There is no need to send notification to or to acquire approval by co-authors of the paper. Please note that HCB has no control over citations of HCB articles in other publications and websites.

Upon receiving a request of this nature, HCB will update the published paper and webpage listing promptly on the HCB website. Previous versions of the manuscript may remain available elsewhere.