Journal of Disability Research

JDR Editorial: A Journal Retrospective and Forward-Looking Review

Welcome to Volume 3 Issue 5 of the Journal of Disability Research (JDR). Let us start by emphasizing our continuing intention to publish innovative high impact insightful work, the output strongly connecting with prospects for improving the quality of life of those limited by disability. In the lead up to our first publication, just 20 months ago, we of course looked forward to receiving submissions from a wide variety of sources. We have not been disappointed. The highly multidisciplinary nature of the submissions has clearly given rise to challenges, not least that of seeking out those able and willing to evaluate the research quality. A strong corollary has been considerable enrichment in our pool of referees, with highly encouraging growth in this, leading to notable reduction in the average time taken in reaching a final decision. In line with the number of high impact manuscripts that we continue to receive, we have increased issue production, from four in 2023 to the present monthly rate, seeking to accommodate the clear desire for timely publication. Confidence increases as we have continued to observe a steep rise in attraction to the research contained within JDR, presently achieving some 50,000 views, also reflecting widespread global interest in JDR material (please see the figure below):

Located within the King Salman Centre for Disability Research (KSCDR), JDR makes its publications freely available, with publications also being free of publication charges, at least at this time. Not wishing to lose focus, it is of course our further intention to push for greater visibility, impact and recognition, moves that will inevitably lead to greater rates of rejection. The stimuli from this are intended to work to the benefit of all, anticipating not only the inclusion of one’s research in JDR but also that the work influences the world of disability research. JDR progress leads to our paying gratitude to all those who have made this possible. Nonetheless, the clear steer from KSCDR is towards our achieving greater prominence and impact upon those living with disability. We look forward to achieving such aims. Please work with us towards this.

I am very pleased to announce a new member of the Editorial Board of JDR, Prof. Dr. Peter V. Paul, The Ohio State University.

Peter V. Paul, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at The Ohio State University. He wears bilateral cochlear implants and has a son, who has Down syndrome and autism. One of Dr. Paul’s major professional responsibilities is the education of d/Deaf and hard of hearing students. His major research interests involve the areas of English language and literacy, and he has published extensively (over 270 publications), including eight different scholarly texts. Dr. Paul has received the College of Education 2000 Senior Research Award, the Richard and Laura Kretschmer National Leadership Award (2010), the Edward Fay Award (2022; Conference of Educational Administrators of Schools and Programs for the Deaf), the College of Education’s Faculty Impact Award (2022), and the King Salman International Award for Disability Research (2022). Dr. Paul has served on several editorial boards of journals and is the current editor of the American Annals of the Deaf. 

D A Bradley, 29^th May 2024

JDR - Editor in Chief

Editor in Chief:

Prof. David Bradley

Orcid ID:

David Bradley-0000-0001-9485-5242-Orcid.org

Affiliation:

Sunway University, Malaysia. University of Surrey, UK.

Area of Research Interests:

Applications in Biomedical, Industrial, and Environmental Areas.

Home Page:

Prof David Bradley | University of Surrey

Prof. David Andrew Bradley | Sunway University

Editors:

Aim & Scope

Title: Journal for Disability Research (JDR)

Print ISSN: 1658-9912

1. Publisher: King Salman Centre for Disability Research (KSCDR)
2. Editor-in-Chief (EiC): David A. Bradley
3. Frequency: Rolling issues online
4. Language: English
5. Peer review model: Single-blind

The Journal of Disability Research seeks to encourage greater understanding of the nature of disability, also in furthering ways and means to promote rehabilitation, identifying steps towards amelioration of the various many factors that can limit greater quality of life. The overarching aim of the journal is to provide an important communication channel in disseminating and exchanging ideas, reaching out to a global audience of interested parties, including, but not limited, to health practitioners and researchers. Accordingly, coverage will aim to include but not be limited to:

• Fundamental aspects of disability
• Research methodologies and theoretical perspectives
• Disability and rehabilitation practices and policy
• Assessment procedures
• Education and training

Empirical work and theoretical framing, both of which are welcome, should seek to contain discussion of the practical implications of the findings. The journal considers all original manuscripts that report scientifically sound research and provide a substantial amount of significant new information.

Coverage

Although not exhaustive some of the keywords covered by JDR are presented below. 

JDR – Humanities 

JDR – Medical 

JDR - Engineering and Technology

JDR – Education 

Publication types

JDR evaluates and publishes top-quality articles in the enumerated sections. These contributions are welcome in any of the following formats:

From time to time the Editorial Board will invite particular articles or editorials from experts in various parts of the world and consider the production of a supplement or special issue devoted to a particular subject or theme of major importance. Articles that help to promote education in all aspects of disability are encouraged.

JDR Word cloud

Submission Guidelines

The Journal of Disability Research seeks to encourage greater understanding of the nature of disability, also in furthering ways and means to promote rehabilitation, identifying steps towards amelioration of the various many factors that can limit greater quality of life. The overarching aim of the journal is to provide an important communication channel in disseminating and exchanging ideas, reaching out to a global audience of interested parties, including, but not limited, to health practitioners and researchers. Accordingly, coverage will aim to include but not be limited to:

• Fundamental aspects of disability
• Research methodologies and theoretical perspectives
• Disability and rehabilitation practices and policy
• Assessment procedures
• Education and training

Empirical work and theoretical framing, both of which are welcome, should seek to contain discussion of the practical implications of the findings.

The journal considers all original manuscripts that report scientifically sound research and provide a substantial amount of significant new information. All material presented must be acquired according to ethical standards and approved by legally appropriate ethical committee(s).

We encourage authors to be aware of standardised reporting guidelines when preparing their manuscripts:

• Case reports - CARE
• Diagnostic accuracy - STARD
• Observational studies - STROBE
• Randomized controlled trial - CONSORT
• Systematic reviews, meta-analyses - PRISMA
• Animal research / In vivo experiments - ARRIVE

How to submit a Manuscript 

Please check this short video that guides you on how to submit a manuscript to JDR.

Manuscript guidelines

Structure

The manuscript should include: Title page (title, authors, affiliations, contact, abstract, keywords (up to 10), conflict of interest statement); Main text (introduction, materials and methods, results, discussion, figures with captions, tables with captions) Acknowledgments (Funder), References.

There are no word limits for submissions but manuscripts should be concise and well-written.

Formatting

Manuscripts may be written in any standard program including Word and LaTeX. Authors will upload a pdf for peer review. Upon submission of revised manuscripts authors will also be requested to submit a pdf version with tracked changes. Only after final acceptance of a manuscript will the author be requested to submit Word or LaTeX files for typesetting.

There are no strict formatting requirements, but all manuscripts should follow the basic structure for reporting scientific research above.

References may be in any style, provided that formatting is consistent throughout. It is essential to include full author(s) name(s), journal or book title, article or chapter title, year of publication, volume and issue. DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) for each reference should be added wherever possible. They are not mandatory but strongly encouraged. Bibliography management tools such as EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley, Reference Manager are recommended.

Tables should be black and white/greyscale only and formatted as simply as possible for best accessibility. See some guidelines here: https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/tables/

Images should be submitted in high resolution for the typesetter after final acceptance of the manuscript.

Alt Text

To support the visually impaired, this journal includes Alt Text (alternative text), a short piece of text tagged to your figure to describe for readers contents of the image. This text can be used by screen readers to make the object accessible to people that cannot read or see the object.  Add Alt Text using Microsoft Word tools or as a separate figure caption. Further information on Alt Text for images can be found here: https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/ .

Data

Authors will be required to fill out a data availability statement when submitting their manuscript. Data should be made available for peer reviewers, preferably in an open repository. Data may be cited with a DOI (Digital Object Identifier) in the reference section of the article. See the Data Citation: Guide to Best Practice.

Data policy

By publishing in the journal authors are required to make research data available to editors and reviewers, and to readers upon request. For some research data, deposition in repositories is required and this is encouraged for all research data. For some papers, the decision to publish will be affected by whether or not authors share their research data.

Required

• Data sharing via repositories for some research data
• Data availability statements
• Data sharing on request

Optional / Encouraged

• Data citation
• Data sharing via repositories for all research data
• Prepare and share Data Management Plans

In all cases of publication ethics the journal will refer to the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines: https://publicationethics.org/

Reporting research that involves human subjects or data requires a declaration that the investigations were carried out following the rules of the Declaration of Helsinki (https://www.wma.net/what-we-do/medical-ethics/declaration-of-helsinki/). Approval from the institutional review board (IRB) or other appropriate ethics committee must be obtained before undertaking the research to confirm the study meets national and international guidelines. A statement including the project identification code, date of approval, and name of the ethics committee or institutional review board must be included as ‘Institutional Review Board Statement’ article. For example: "All subjects gave their informed consent for inclusion before they participated in the study. The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and the protocol was approved by the Ethics Committee of XXX (Project identification code)." The privacy rights of human subjects must always be observed.

The manuscript should follow the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals and aim for the inclusion of representative human populations (sex, age and ethnicity) according to those recommendations. The terms sex and gender should be used correctly. Additionally, when studies describe groups by race, ethnicity, gender, disability, disease, etc., explanation regarding why such categorization was needed should be clearly stated in the article.

Each manuscript submission will be undergo an automated check for plagiarism and will reviewed by a least two subject experts in a single-blind workflow. Manuscripts that have been previously posted as preprints may submit open reviews of the preprint for consideration by the editorial team. Reviewers have the option of posting their reviews publicly on the ScienceOpen platform after an article has been published. All public reviews will receive a Crossref peer-review DOI

Scientific Rigor Check

The Journal of Disability Research (JDR) collaborates with SciScore to further raise the scientific rigor of the journal. SciScore’s advanced scientific rigor and reproducibility checks is integrated into the manuscript submission workflow. SciScore, a product of SciCrunch, is a pioneering tool that automatically evaluates manuscripts for key indicators of scientific rigor, such as sample size calculation, blinding, randomization procedures, comprehensive data reporting, cell line authentication or validation, and verifies the identity of the antibodies used, among other areas. By integrating SciScore into the ScienceOpen platform, JDR ensures that all submitted research undergoes a rigorous assessment process, thereby promoting transparency and reliability in scientific publications. 

What is scientific rigor check?

The SciScore core report is an automated assessment of a research paper’s methodologies and reporting that combines criteria from a variety of NIH-supported principles and guidelines, such as ARRIVE, CONSORT, and MDAR. It includes three tables and a reporting score. The report primarily covers rigor adherence and key resource identification to help promote reproducibility in life science research.

The reporting score - a score out of 10 - is a number researchers, journal editors, and funders can use to help them decide how rigorous and transparent a research manuscript is. The score is based on both rigor adherence and key resource identification within the materials and methods sections. A good score is essential to help ensure that interested parties have enough information to accurately judge the reproducibility of a research article.

How to get a better score on this section:

• Ensure that each criterion that is expected is addressed in your manuscript (refer to what is expected in the rigor items list above). In general though, adding more rigor criteria will increase points for this section.
  • Pro Tip: If SciScore expects that a criterion should be filled, but you do not believe that this is relevant, address it using a negative statement. Examples:
    • No subjects were excluded from our study.
    • We did not assess whether subjects were male or female because embryos were not genotyped.
    • Experimental subjects were not randomized into groups because this was deemed irrelevant to this study.
    • Experimenters were not blinded to the subject's genotype because knockout mice were visibly different from controls.
    • We did not check for sample sizes using a power analysis because our study does not report statistics between groups or within group variables.
    • No technical replication was completed because the Sasquatch was visible only once.
  • Possible Problems: SciScore does not recognize my sentence as fulfilling the criterion. In some cases such as power analysis, there are a surprisingly small number of example sentences in the published literature. This is a serious problem for science, but also for SciScore because text mining analysis depends on seeing lots of syntax patterns. Take a look at the sentences above, these syntax patterns were tested and should be recognized. Writing similar sentences should enable SciScore to recognize your sentence.
  • Tip for reviewers: If you see the word Sasquatch in the manuscript, consider rejecting the paper.

For a short video explaining scientific rigor check, please visit here.

For more information, please consult here. 

Author agreement

Open Access Publishing Agreement

By submitting my manuscript to the Journal of Disability Research published by the King Salman Center for Disability Research (hereafter the ‘Publisher’), I herewith grant permission to the Publisher to publish my article upon editorial acceptance under the following publishing agreement.

I hereby confirm that this is my original work and that

• I own the sole copyright in this work
• And/or I have obtained permission from all other Authors to execute this Agreement on their behalf if necessary

And that the work

• Has never been published before.

I understand that in granting this consent I am granting to the Publisher the Rights to publish under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license the Contribution in the English language in digital form; moral rights will be retained by the original Author/s and copyright will be held by the Author.

I agree to this Publishing Agreement, consent to execution and delivery of the Publishing Agreement electronically, and agree that confirming my consent electronically during the manuscript submission process with an electronic signature shall be given the same legal force as a handwritten signature.

Terms of Use

1. The Contribution will be made Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY License) which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the Contribution is properly cited.
2. The Journal (and Publisher) reserves the right to require changes to the Contribution, including changes to the length of the Contribution, as a condition of its acceptance. The Journal (and Publisher) reserves the right, notwithstanding acceptance, not to publish the Contribution if for any reason such publication would in the reasonable judgment of the Journal (and Publisher), result in legal liability or violation of journal ethical practices. If the Journal (or Publisher) decides not to publish the Contribution, the Author is free to submit the Contribution to any other journal from any other publisher.
3. As above, the final Contribution will be made Open Access under the terms of the CC-BY license. Reproduction, posting, transmission, or other distribution or use of the final Contribution in whole or in part in any medium by the Author as permitted by this Agreement requires a citation to the Journal suitable in form and content as follows: (Title of Contribution, Author, Journal Title and Volume/issue, Digital Object Identifier (DOI), Date). Links to the final published Contribution should be provided following the guidance below on best practices.

Article Processing Charges (APC)

A fee of 1100 USD will be charged for all publications accepted to the journal to offset the costs of publication. This fee must be paid after final editorial approval and before the typesetting process.  Authors will be provided with a payment link and instructions after acceptance.

Retained Rights

The Author retains all proprietary rights in addition to copyright, such as patent rights in any process, procedure, or article of manufacture described in the Contribution.

Author's Representations

The Author(s) certify that they have participated sufficiently in the intellectual content, conception, and design of this work or the analysis and interpretation of the data (when applicable), as well as the writing of the manuscript, to take public responsibility for it and have agreed to have their name listed as a contributor. The Author(s) believe the manuscript represents valid work. Neither this manuscript nor one with substantially similar content under their authorship has been published or is being considered for publication elsewhere, except as described in the cover letter. The Author(s) certify that all the data collected during the study is presented in this manuscript and no data from the study has been or will be published separately. If requested by the editors, the Author(s) will provide the data/information or will cooperate fully in obtaining and providing the data/information on which the manuscript is based, for examination by the editors or their assignees. Financial interests, direct or indirect, that exist or may be perceived to exist for individual contributors in connection with the content of this paper have been disclosed in the cover letter. Sources of outside support for the project are named in the cover letter.

Use of Information

The Author(s) acknowledges that, during the term of this Agreement and thereafter (for as long as necessary), the Publisher and the Journal may process the Author’s data, including storing or transferring data outside of the country of the Contributor’s residence, to communicate with the Author(s) and that the Publisher has a legitimate interest in processing the Author(s)’ personal data. By entering into this Agreement, the Author(s) agree to the processing of personal data (and, where applicable, confirms that the Author has obtained permission from all other authors to process their data). The Publisher and the Journal shall comply with all applicable laws, statutes, and regulations relating to data protection and privacy and shall process such personal data.

Retraction Policy

Journal of Disability Research follows ScienceOpen's retraction policy. Please follow the link for details: https://about.scienceopen.com/scienceopens-retraction-policy/

Article Processing Charges (APC)

A fee of 1100 USD will be charged for all publications accepted to the journal to offset the costs of publication. This fee must be paid after final editorial approval and before the typesetting process.  Authors will be provided with a payment link and instructions after acceptance.