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About the Journal of the South African Veterinary Association

This page includes information on the focus and scope of the Journal of the South African Veterinary Associationas well as the policies and publication procedures. For details on how to prepare and submit a manuscript via the online manuscript submission system, please see the instructions for authors.

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Focus and scope ↑

The Journal of the South African Veterinary Association is a contemporary multi-disciplinary scientific mouthpiece for Veterinary Science in South Africa and abroad. It provides veterinarians in South Africa and elsewhere in the world with current scientific information across the full spectrum of veterinary science. Its content therefore includes reviews on various topics, clinical and non-clinical articles, research articles and short communications as well as case reports and letters.

Historic overview of the Journal of the South African Veterinary Association ↑

The Journal of the South African Veterinary Association has been in existence for 75 years. The first issue of the Journal was published in August 1927. However, the volume number for 2002 is only 72 due to the fact that the first volume was published over a period of 3 years. Since 1931 the volume numbers changed with each calendar year.

The Journal is now well established as a contemporary multi-disciplinary scientific mouthpiece for Veterinary Science in South Africa and abroad.

Open Access ↑

Open Access refers to free and unrestricted access via the Internet to articles published in the Journal of the South African Veterinary Association. This free access has usage limitations as stipulated in the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) usage license. The license allows redistribution and reuse of all articles on the condition that jsava is appropriately credited.

Peer review policy ↑

The Journal of the South African Veterinary Association has a double-blinded peer review process. Manuscripts are initially examined by editorial staff and are sent by the Editor-in-Chief to two expert independent reviewers, either directly or by a Section Editor. The editors do not inform the reviewers of the identity of the author(s). The reviewers’ identities are not disclosed to the authors either. The reviewers’ comments as well as recommendations regarding an article’s form may be passed on to the corresponding author and may also include suggested revisions. Manuscripts that are not approved for publication will not be returned to the submitting author in any format. Please note that AOSIS OpenJournals do not retain copies of rejected articles.

The peer review process aims to ensure that all published articles:

  • present the results of primary scientific research
  • report results that have not been published elsewhere
  • are scientifically sound
  • provide new scientific knowledge where experiments, statistics and other analyses are performed to a high technical standard and are described in sufficient detail so that another researcher will be able to reproduce the experiments described
  • provide conclusions that are presented in an appropriate manner and are supported by the data
  • are presented in an intelligible and logic manner and are written in clear and unambiguous English
  • meet all applicable research standards with regard to the ethics of experimentation and research integrity
  • adhere to appropriate reporting guidelines and community standards for data availability.

The journal publisher, AOSIS OpenJournals, is a member of the CrossCheck plagiarism detection initiative. In the event of suspected plagiarism in submitted works CrossCheck is available to the editors of the  Journal of the South African Veterinary Association to detect instances of overlapping and similar text. AOSIS OpenJournals endorses and applies the standards of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), which promotes integrity in peer-reviewed research publications.

Publication frequency ↑

The Journal of the South African Veterinary Association publishes one issue per year. Individual articles are published as soon as they are ready for publication by adding them to the table of contents of the 'current' volume and issue. In this way, the Journal of the South African Veterinary Association aims to speed up the process of manuscript publication from submission to becoming available on the website. Special issues may be added on an ad hoc basis to the journal throughout a particular year and will form part of consecutive issues thereafter.

Authors will be able to check the progress of their manuscript via the submission system at any time by logging into the journal website’s personalised section.

Indexing ↑

After publication in the Journal of the South African Veterinary Association, the complete text of each article is deposited immediately and permanently archived in major bibliographic databases:

Additionally, the Journal of the South African Veterinary Association uses the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) system to create a distributed archiving system amongst participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

The journal is always seeking to establish a LOCKSS-compliant archive with university libraries. The URL to the LOCKSS Publisher Manifest for the Journal of the South African Veterinary Association is: http://www.jsava.co.za/index.php/jsava/gateway/lockss 

Please inform us if you are using our manifest as we would like to add your name to the list above.

DoHET accreditation ↑

The following lists are regarded as accredited journals by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DoHET):

Journals appearing on the IBSS:

Journals appearing on the three indices of Thomson Reuters products:

List of approved South African journals: Journals that do not appear in the abovementioned international indices but are published in South Africa and meet specific criteria may be included in this list.

In conclusion: The Journal of the South African Veterinary Association meets the criteria of the DoHET (see List of approved South African journals as maintained by the DoHET and Science Citation Index). It is therefore accredited and approved by the DoHET for its inclusion in the subsidy system for being a research publication for South Africa.



ISSN: 1019-9128 (print) | ISSN: 2224-9435 (online)Follow us on:

All articles published in this journal are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

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