About the Journal
Peer Review
The Editors aim to provide prompt reviews to optimise the quality of the published papers. All submissions are reviewed by an editorial advisory group, who will check for scope, fit, quality, originality, interest for the readership, etc., and recommend acceptance, rejection or referral for review. Submissions sent for review include Research, Reviews, Guidelines, In Practice and Clinical Trials. Editorials, CME, Book reviews, Obituaries and Correspondence do not go through peer review. Once an article has been accepted for peer review, it is assigned to an Associate Editor who will manage it through the peer review process.
A double blind review process is followed, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from each other throughout the review process. A majority of manuscripts will be sent to one or two reviewers, under the management of an editor assigned to the submission. Reviewers as experts in the field provide comments to authors and editors on the importance, originality and scientific merit of the manuscript and suggest changes which may improve the quality and validity of the manuscript. The review process itself takes approximately 4 – 6 weeks to complete but can change depending upon the quality of the manuscript submitted, reviewer’s response and time taken by the authors to submit the revised manuscript.
If the decision is for revision, the author is requested to address each comment by the reviewers, and submit a letter outlining their responses accompanying their revised manuscript. The assigned editor will re-evaluate the revisions and will either make a decision or send the manuscript for a second round of review, usually to the original set of reviewers. Reviewers will be informed of the outcome of manuscripts which they have reviewed.
The Editor-in-Chief has the final decision on any submitted manuscript.
Publication Scheduling
Monthly (12 issues per annum). Journals are published on the first day of every month. Journal items are published as part of an issue with its own Table of Contents.
General
Publication fees
All articles published in the South African Medical Journal are open access and freely available online upon publication. This is made possible by applying a business model to offset the costs of peer review management, copyediting, design and production, by charging a publication fee of
R7 900 (VAT incl.) for research and In Practice articles. The publication fee is standard and does not vary based on length, colour, figures, or other elements.
The publication fee is payable when your manuscript is editorially accepted and before production commences for publication. The submitting author will be notified that payment is due and given details on the available methods of payment. Prompt payment is advised; the article will not enter into production until payment is received.
Peer Review
https://samajournals.co.za/
Licensing Information
The SAMJ is published under an Attribution-Non Commercial International Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY-NC 4.0) License. Under this license, authors agree to make articles available to users, without permission or fees, for any lawful, non-commercial purpose. Users may read, copy, or re-use published content as long as the author and original place of publication are properly cited.
Exceptions to this license model is allowed for UKRI and research funded by organisations requiring that research be published open-access without embargo, under a CC-BY licence. As per the journals archiving policy, authors are permitted to self-archive the author-accepted manuscript (AAM) in a repository.
