Details of Oxford University Press’s editorial policies are available.

Manuscripts may also be screened, including with services provided by third parties, to help detect integrity issues such as inappropriate image alteration and papermill activity.

Peer Review

This journal operates single-anonymised peer review, meaning that the Authors identity is known to the Editor and to the Reviewers, but that the Reviewers’ identities are known only to the Editor and are hidden from the Authors. For full details about the peer review process, see Fair editing and peer review.

All submissions to the journal are initially reviewed by one of the Editors. At this stage manuscripts may be rejected without peer review if it is felt that they are not of high enough priority or not relevant to the journal. This fast rejection process means that authors are given a quick decision and do not need to wait for the review process.

Manuscripts that are not instantly rejected are sent out for single blind peer review, usually to at least two independent reviewers. Based on the feedback from these reviewers and the Editors' judgment a decision is given on the manuscript. The average time from submission to first decision is four weeks.

If a paper is not acceptable in its present form, we will pass on suggestions for revisions to the author.

If one of the authors of a manuscript is an editor of the journal, that editor will be blinded from the whole editorial process for the manuscript, and this will be acknowledged in the conflict of interest statement of the published paper.

Preprint Policy

Authors retain the right to make an Author’s Original Version (preprint) available through various channels, and this does not prevent submission to the journal. For further information see our Online Licensing, Copyright and Permissions policies. If accepted, the authors are required to update the status of any preprint, including your published paper’s DOI, as described on our Author Self-Archiving policy page.

Self-Archiving Policy

You may self-archive versions of your work on your own webpages, on institutional webpages, and in other repositories. If you want more information about the reuse rights you retain if you publish with us, please visit our Author Self Archiving Policy page.

Conflict of Interest

When submitting a paper, you and your co-authors must declare any potential conflicts of interest. You must do this by including a Conflict of Interest statement in your submitted manuscript.

A detailed definition of conflicts of interest is available.

Members of the editorial staff of the journal should include the following COI disclosure in their article:  '[Author initial] holds the position of [Editor-in-Chief/Deputy Editor-in-Chief/Assistant Editor/Editorial Board Member] for Life Medicine and is blinded from reviewing or making decisions for the manuscript'.

CRediT 

The Journal uses the contributor roles taxonomy (CRediT), which allows authors to describe the contributor roles in a standardized, transparent, and accurate way. Authors should choose from the contributor roles outlined on the CRediT website and supply this information upon submission. You may choose multiple contributor roles per author. Any other individuals who do not meet authorship criteria and made less substantive contributions should be listed in your manuscript as non-author contributors with their contributions clearly described. 

Availability of Data and Materials 

Where ethically feasible, Life Medicine strongly encourages authors to make all data and software code on which the conclusions of the paper rely available to readers. We suggest that data be presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files, or deposited in a public repository whenever possible. Information on general repositories for all data types, and a list of recommended repositories by subject area, is available here.

Data and Software Citation 

Life Medicine supports the Force 11 Data Citation Principles and the recommendations of the FORCE11 Software Citation Implementation Group. When data and software underlying the research article are available in an online source, authors should include a full citation in their reference list.

For details of the minimum information to be included in data and software citations see the guidance on Citing research data and software.