2020 Changes to the Journal of Veterinary Science

The Journal of Veterinary Science is an open-access journal published bimonthly. The articles in the journal are available free from the journal's website (www.vetsci.org) and from PubMed Central (http://pubmedcentral.gov). In 2019, the journal published 88 online articles. In 2020, the journal is making the following changes in order to better serve its contributors and readers.

Launching new online submission and review system: Last year, we decided to switch the journal's online submission and peer-review system to that powered by the Editorial Manager (Aries Systems Co., USA). The journal's current online submission system will be replaced with that of the Editorial Manager on March 1, 2020. From that date, the online submission system of INFOrang (INFOrang Ltd., Korea) will be closed and authors should submit their manuscripts through the Editorial Manager's online system. Manuscripts submitted before March 1, 2020, will be processed through the online review system of INFOrang.

Re-classification of submission sections: The new online submission system of the journal comprises the following 5 major sections: 1) Veterinary Biomedical Sciences, 2) Veterinary Pathology, Microbiology and Preventive Medicine, 3) Veterinary Public Health, 4) Veterinary Clinical Sciences, and 5) Veterinary Humanities and Social Sciences. Each major section has several subsections, and the total number of subsections is more than 40. Authors are expected to select a section and subsection that are appropriate to their manuscript.

Introducing a new article category: We decided to add the article category Guidelines and Recommendations to introduce articles presenting consensual or official statements of various organizations involved in veterinary health care and disease control. This type of article is normally solicited by the editors, but unsolicited submissions will be considered. Any such manuscript will undergo the same peer-review process as that for Original Articles.

Inviting statistical editor: Proper application of statistical analyses is critical in the interpretation of data and development of conclusions. To ensure that correct statistical analyses are used in the papers published in the journal, we invited Dr. Woncheol Jang (Professor, Department of Statistics, Seoul National University, Korea) and Dr. Dongseok Choi (Professor, OHSU-PSU School of Public Health, USA). We appreciate their service to the journal and thank Dr. Jang and Dr. Choi in advance for their help. In addition, we newly added recommendations on the use and presentation of statistical analysis in the journal to the Author Instructions section (https://www.vetsci.org/index.php?body=instructions).

Changing unstructured to structured Abstract: To better help readers comprehend the contents of the Abstract, we decided to change the Abstract format from unstructured to structured in all original articles submitted from February 2020. The four required sections of a structured Abstract are Background and Objective, Methods, Results, and Conclusions.

These abovementioned changes are parts of our continuing efforts to improve the quality of service to the contributors to and the audience of the journal, and we will keep working to meet the high expectations of readers of the journal.