Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease

The Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease, the official journal of the Canadian Society of Nephrology, is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal. We encourage high quality submissions in the field of kidney health, from basic scientists, clinical and health services delivery researchers; we cover acute or chronic kidney diseases, dialysis, kidney transplantation and organ donation. Our open-access policy maximizes the dissemination (SH) of the work, and its potential for citation. We do not focus on whether results support hypotheses or their potential impact in the field, but rather the quality of the work and its thoughtful interpretation. Our supportive peer-review process aims to improve the work in a collegial and timely way. We promote and advocate for kidney health as it impacts national and international communities.

Many of these principles were included in our inaugural editorial. We write specifically about supportive peer review in a 2021 editorial, Can peer review be kinder? Supportive peer review: a re-commitment to kindness and a call to action.

The journal logo, a variation on the tree of knowledge and of life, is symbolic of the ethos of the journal. Through a philosophy of thoughtful, constructive, and timely reviews of publications, we hope to foster the growth in knowledge, and thus in wellness of patients living with kidney disease.

Philosophy and Policies

1. Land acknowledgement. The editor-in-chief lives and works in the city of Hamilton, situated upon the traditional territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. This land is covered by the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, which was an agreement between the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabek to share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes. She further acknowledges that this land is covered by the Between the Lakes Purchase, 1792, between the Crown and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Our editors, many of our reviewers and some of our authors live across Turtle Island (North America). We recognize that we must do more to learn about the rich history of this land so that we can better understand our roles as residents, neighbours, partners, and caretakers. We offer our gratitude to the First Nations for their care for, and teachings about, our earth and our relations. In our work, we honour the Indigenous teachings of leading, learning, looking and listening. Our purpose is to promote the clear communication of facts that are true and ideas that are wise to improve the health and well being of all people. By improving, publishing and disseminating the work of others, we seek to promote kidney health, prevent kidney disease, and to help people with kidney disease to lead their most fulfilled lives. We acknowledge and implement the seven teachings: wisdom, love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility and truth. May we honour those teachings in all our work.

2. Equity, diversity and inclusion. CJKHD minimizes racism and gender bias by maintaining an editorial team and editorial board that includes a high proportion of women and men from various ethnicities. Our team is explicitly committed to respect, equity, diversity and inclusion in all our activities. Notably, the two editors-in-chief (founding and current) are both women. (SH) As the journal of the Canadian Society of Nephrology|Société canadienne de néphrology we aim to reflect the multiple perspectives and inclusiveness of our national society. For feasibility and to aid dissemination, our publications and peer-review processes are conducted in English. Staff and editors at the journal will provide a French abstract for most publications. We explicitly strive for gender and geographic balance in the selection of associate editors, in the editorial board and among reviewers. We acknowledge the importance of relationships in all our work. We seek to treat all equally, all kindly, and all with the respect that they deserve.

3. Supportive review. Manuscripts selected for peer review are reviewed by at least two peer reviewers, and by an associate editor and deputy editor. We select reviewers whom we expect to write kindly and constructively. If the reviewer is new to reviewing for our journal, we provide them with information on this policy and suggestions for implementation. We write reviews and editorial comments as we would wish to be written to ourselves, ‘as if we were writing to a treasured mentor or most junior trainee’. We reserve the right to remove sentences from reviews that are written harshly or unkindly, or to withhold a review completely if it is thought to be unhelpful. When reviewers’ suggestions are difficult to reconcile, or if reviewers request additional work that the editors believe to be outside the scope of the original submission, we use editorial comments to provide guidance. We consider our role as offering suggestions for improvement, rather than criticism. We honour the principles of wisdom, love and respect in this policy.

4. Clear and rigorous review. Our associate editors will clearly indicate the major obstacles to publication. We expect authors will respond with openness to feedback, integrity, and clarity, so that most publications will require a single round of scientific revision. Our editors will work to improve the clarity of the peer-review process by identifying additional issues, reconciling conflicting opinions, and highlighting the issues that are most important. Acknowledgement of the limitations of the work in the body of the work and in the abstract is critically important. We honour the principles of bravery, honesty, humility and truth in this policy.

5. Explicit recognition of inter-expert variation in design and analysis choices. Because experts often disagree on the optimal design or analysis for a study, we take a pragmatic approach in terms of what we require of authors. Even if we ourselves, or our peer reviewers, would have conceived a plan differently, we generally do not suggest a complete change, unless the original plan is likely to give misleading results. We recognize that for most clinical work, a change in design at a late stage in a project is impossible and that having to change an analysis plan often changes every table and every figure in a manuscript. We use editorial comments to provide perspective and emphasis and to suggest approaches when reviewers disagree. We honour the principles of respect, honesty, humility, truth in this policy.

6. Timely review. We aim to provide authors with a review within 4 weeks of receiving a manuscript, or to notify authors of the delay and the proposed timeline if we cannot. We honour the principles of respect, honesty and humility in this policy.

7. Avoiding publication bias. We aim to publish work that is good, even if it is not high-impact, and even if the results are what are sometimes called 'negative'. We pay a great deal of attention to the language used in interpretation and we check that authors do not overstate the importance of their work. If the work is done and internally valid, we believe it should be published, with clear statement of all its limitations. We include a statement on limitations in the abstract of all primary research. We honour the principles of respect, humility and truth in this policy.

8. Community of science. We explicitly recognise the difficult path that many manuscripts take towards publication, that many manuscripts are not published in the first journal to which they are submitted, and that these realities are part of the nature of the scientific and publishing communities. We recognize that the community of peer reviewers is effectively the same for each journal and is a limited resource. Furthermore, peer reviewers are also investigators whose primary work is the generation of new knowledge; there is an opportunity cost to every additional peer review obtained. This informs our portable review policy, our easy formatting policy, and our editorial review of revisions policy. We honour the principle of respect and the importance of relationships in this policy.

9. Portable review. Many manuscripts undergo multiple rounds of submission and rejection in different journals during the peer review process before publication. Added to the substantive time commitment required to perform peer review is the time authors must wait for reviews, at times only to have the paper rejected. By expediting the review process, portable review salvages the collective value of time already spent by authors, reviewers, and editors - vital members of the single scientific community to which we all belong. Our portable review policy enables authors to transfer to us their manuscript along with previous peer review reports from other journals whose impact factor is 4 and above. Respected journals in fields with lower citation numbers and lower impact factors (eg, pediatrics, transplantation and fundamental science) will be considered on a case-by-case basis; in this setting please contact us, provide the name of the journal and the peer review, before responding to it.Authors with peer review from a journal with an impact factor of 4 or above; and authors whose journal and peer review has been pre-reviewed by the editors should respond to the peer review as if they had received it from us. Authors should submit both a clean and redline draft, as well as a point-by-point response to previous reviews. Authors should also include a copy of the original emailed decision from the original journal, created using an email to pdf function (eg ‘convert to pdf’ in Outlook), and showing the journal name, all editorial and reviewer comments, and the date. An editorial team consisting of the editor-in-chief, all deputy editors and an assigned associate editor will review the peer review, the source of the peer review (as a surrogate for knowing the identities of the reviewers), the response to the peer review, as well as the clean submitted manuscript. . The editorial team will determine whether a manuscript may be accepted as is or with editorial suggestions only, or, whether further peer review is warranted. 
To facilitate this process, at the top of the response to reviews the submitting authors should attest:

a. The journal which arranged the peer review
b. The date on which they originally received the peer review
c. A statement that the review as replicated below is the whole review, without omissions or editing, and including all reviewer and editorial comments.
We honour the principles of wisdom and respect, and the importance of relationships and responsibility in this policy.

10. Parallel review. Because we recognize that we are one community, we explicitly recognize the importance of peer-reviewers’ time, and that the body of people with expertise to review any particular manuscript is a limited resource. For this reason, for guidelines that have already been through external peer review, and for study protocols that have already undergone external peer review, we do not always conduct independent peer review. Instead, we ask that previous peer review which has already shaped the manuscript be submitted along with the manuscript, along with evidence of response to peer review. We critically appraise the processes submitted for completeness and integrity to inform our decision about the need for further peer review. We don’t consider research ethics approval alone to meet this criterion. Some work may be accepted in this stream without further peer review. We honour the principles of wisdom and respect, and the importance of relationships and responsibility in this policy.

11. Easy formatting. Given the high rejection rates of many print journals, we explicitly recognize that many manuscripts are submitted to more than one journal at different times in the process of attempting to publish scientific work. We regard the time spent in complying in detail with each journal’s formatting requirements prior to peer review to be an inefficiency and an unnecessary burden on the research community. For most original research publication types, we are therefore prepared to review work that is submitted in any standard scientific format. Formatting changes to comply with our house style are instead requested at time of response to peer review. We honour the principles of respect and humility, and the importance of relationships and responsibility in this policy.

12. Editorial review of revisions. Rather than sending back to the original peer reviewers, our editors review revised manuscripts in detail and determine whether the authors have responded to peer review. The original peer reviewers will be consulted selectively on issues that the editor does not feel qualified to judge. This reduces the burden on reviewers, who are not asked to look at revised manuscripts months after they made their initial decisions, and improves turn-around time for authors. We honour the principles of wisdom and respect, and the importance of relationships and responsibility in this policy.

13. Timely publication. Delay in author submission of revisions is one of the major obstacles to timely publication. When authors receive supportive feedback within 4 weeks of submission, we anticipate that it will be cognitively easier for them to respond: immediately in many cases. If additional experimental work or complex re-analyses are necessary, there will be an inevitable lapse of time, but we encourage all authors to respond as soon as they are able. Once accepted, work can be published in PDF within 4 - 6 weeks. We honour the principles of wisdom and respect, and the importance of relationships and responsibility in this policy.

14. Recognition of limitations. All scientific work is limited. We challenge authors to explicitly recognise the limitations of their own work without fear that it will reduce the likelihood of publication. We will acknowledge limitations in full text and abstracts, and will work with authors to highlight the importance of their findings without overstating them. We recognize also that authors, reviewers and we ourselves as an editorial team may make mistakes. When we realise we have made a mistake, we will work to correct it. We honour the principles of bravery, honesty, humility and truth in this policy.

15. Openness to creativity and innovation. We would like to hear from authors and others working in kidney health and disease what they would like to read or to write. Authors with an idea for an unusual publication type or work of art that would interest our readership should contact the editors. We honour the principle of respect in this policy.

16. Open access publication. We want our work to be available, in full text, to anyone with internet access worldwide. This is critical to the dissemination of findings to inform kidney care and research internationally, and particularly important for those working in resource-limited environments. Authors retain the copyright to their published content with full rights to reproduce and reuse provided correct attribution is given. Our article processing charge compares favourably with those of other open-access journals and with colour charges and page charges levied by print journals. An article processing charge paid by the authors renders us independent of the pressures of support by advertising and by pharmaceutical multinationals. Reduced article processing charges are offered to members of the Canadian Society of Nephrology|Société canadienne de nephrology. We waive the article processing charge completely for commissioned work and for work that is particularly important to the mandate of the Canadian Society of Nephrology|Société canadienne de néphrology or the International Society of Nephrology. Our publisher, SAGE, waives the article processing charge for articles where the corresponding author comes from a country designated as Group A or B by Research4Life². We are most grateful that our journal is subsidized at arms’ length by our society, the Canadian Society of Nephrology|Société canadienne de néphrology, and recognize and honour our relationship with our society.

17. Dissemination. We send monthly summaries of content to all members of the Canadian Society of Nephrology|Société canadienne de néphrology and to all registrants at our website. Our active publicity campaign reaches out through meetings of societies of nephrology, dialysis, hypertension, and transplantation worldwide to increase the readership of the journal. Those who wish can additionally subscribe to RSS feeds that will push each article as published. At the time of writing in 2022, our twitter account @CanJKHD has >3,200 followers.

1. Levin A, Clase CM, Sood MM, et al. Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease: A Unique Launch of a Unique Journal. Canadian journal of kidney health and disease 2014; 1: 1. DOI: 10.1186/2054-3581-1-1.

2. Research4life. Eligibility for access to Research4Life, https://www.research4life.org/access/eligibility/ (2021, accessed last accessed 2021-11-22).