˜The œJournal of venomous animals and toxins including tropical diseases

About ˜The œJournal of venomous animals and toxins including tropical diseases

Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases — Full Profile

The Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases, usually shortened to JVATiTD and cited as J Venom Anim Toxins incl Trop Dis, is an open access, peer-reviewed journal devoted to toxinology and tropical diseases. It is the official publication of the Center for the Study of Venoms and Venomous Animals, known in Portuguese as CEVAP, at São Paulo State University, UNESP, in Botucatu, São Paulo State, Brazil. That institutional origin matters for understanding the journal. It did not begin as a general commercial title looking for a niche. It grew out of a specialist research centre that studies venoms, venomous animals and the clinical and public-health problems they cause, and it still speaks first to the community that works on those problems: toxinologists, herpetologists, arachnologists, clinicians who treat envenomation, parasitologists, infectious-disease researchers, pharmacologists searching venoms for drug leads, and public-health workers in regions where snakebite, scorpion sting and neglected tropical diseases remain a daily burden.

On Journals World this record carries ISSN 1678-9180 and 1678-9199. The Directory of Open Access Journals, DOAJ, lists the journal under its online ISSN 1678-9199, records that it began publishing in open access in 2003, uses a Creative Commons Attribution, CC BY, licence, allows authors to retain unrestricted copyright and publishing rights, charges up to 500 US dollars as a publication fee with a waiver policy, checks submissions for plagiarism, uses double-anonymous peer review, and reports an average of about fifteen weeks from submission to publication. Articles are digitally archived in PubMed Central and Portico and carry a DOI as their permanent identifier. Where this profile and a live publisher page ever differ on a fee, a licence detail or a timetable, the live journal site and the DOAJ record should be treated as the controlling sources, because fees and workflows can change between volumes.

At a Glance

A note on the publisher line on this Journals World record is useful for readers comparing sources. The thin template that this profile replaces described the publisher simply as BioMed Central, in Brazil. That shorthand reflects a period in the journal's distribution history when its articles were hosted on a large commercial open access platform. The fuller picture, supported by DOAJ and by the journal's own institutional history, is that ownership and editorial identity sit with CEVAP at UNESP, with SciELO as a central publishing and dissemination channel in Brazil. Authors should therefore follow the submission route given on the journal's current official site rather than assuming a generic publisher portal workflow, and they should cite the journal by its title and ISSN, not by a platform name.

History and Identity

The journal presents itself as the first Brazilian electronic journal, a claim that places its origins in the early period when scholarly publishing on the web was still experimental in Latin America. Its predecessor title covered venomous animals and toxins, and in 2003 the title was broadened to include tropical diseases — the same year DOAJ records for the start of its open access publishing under the present title. The broadening was not cosmetic. Toxinology and tropical medicine overlap in the field and in the clinic: the same rural and peri-urban communities exposed to snakebite and scorpion sting are often exposed to leishmaniasis, dengue, malaria, Chagas disease and other conditions shaped by ecology, housing, occupation and access to care. A journal based in Botucatu, serving a readership across Brazil and other tropical regions, had good reason to hold those literatures together instead of forcing authors to split closely related work between a zoology title, a pharmacology title and a tropical medicine title.

Frequency has also changed over the journal's life. Institutional descriptions have described publication four times a year, in March, June, September and December, while more recent platform descriptions describe continuous publication, in which accepted articles appear when ready and are then gathered into a volume. Authors and readers should not rely on an issue calendar remembered from an older volume. The practical meaning of continuous publication is that submission is not tied to a quarterly deadline for regular articles, that early online appearance can precede issue assembly, and that citation should use the article's DOI and its electronic article number rather than a traditional page range alone. Several recent articles in the journal illustrate that pattern, carrying identifiers in the form of a year plus a sequential electronic number and a DOI built on the journal's SciELO prefix.

CEVAP itself is worth understanding because it shapes the journal's editorial judgement. A centre dedicated to venoms and venomous animals combines laboratory work on venom composition, work on antivenom production and quality, clinical observation, and outreach to health services that must actually treat a bitten farmer, child or snake handler, often far from a tertiary hospital. A journal edited from that environment tends to value work that is useful at more than one of those levels. A purely descriptive toxin characterisation can be at home here if it is rigorous. So can a clinical case series, an epidemiological study of sting incidence, a study of antivenom access, or a pharmacological investigation of a toxin-derived peptide as a candidate analgesic or anticancer agent — provided each paper explains, in its own terms, why it matters to toxinology or to tropical disease practice.

Scope in Depth

Toxins and venom biology

The core of the journal is the study of toxins themselves: their isolation, purification, sequencing and structural characterisation; their biochemical and pharmacological actions; their effects on ion channels, coagulation, complement, pain pathways and cell signalling; and the variation in venom composition within and between species, across geography, age, sex and diet. Work on snakes, scorpions, spiders, ticks, cnidarians, venomous fish and other venomous or poisonous animals all falls inside this core, as does work on toxin derivatives and engineered analogues. A strong submission in this area does more than report that a fraction was active in a single assay. It identifies the animal and the venom source precisely, describes collection and ethical approvals, gives reproducible methods, quantifies activity, and discusses what the result adds to what is already known about that venom system.

Envenomation: clinical, epidemiological and public-health work

The second pillar is envenomation as a health problem. That includes clinical descriptions of bites and stings, evaluation of first aid and hospital treatment, studies of antivenom efficacy, safety, dosing and availability, health-systems research on referral and delay, and epidemiology that maps who is bitten or stung, where, in what season and with what outcome. Snakebite envenoming is recognised internationally as a neglected tropical condition, and papers that document its burden in an under-reported region, or that test a practical improvement in care, speak directly to this journal's mission. Authors should be careful with clinical claims: case reports need consent and a clear teaching point, case series need denominator information where it exists, and treatment comparisons need to acknowledge confounding rather than presenting observational data as if it were a trial.

Tropical and neglected diseases

The third pillar is tropical diseases more broadly, especially neglected diseases. Recent volumes show work on leishmaniasis, on vectors and parasites, on fungal and other infections relevant to tropical settings, and on the social and health-system dimensions of care in low-resource settings. The fit test is not whether a disease occurs in the tropics in a loose geographic sense, but whether the paper engages with the disease as a tropical or neglected problem: its vectors and reservoirs, its ecology, its diagnosis under field conditions, its treatment access, or its interaction with poverty and health-system capacity. A laboratory paper on a parasite mechanism can fit when that framing is explicit. A generic infectious-disease paper with no tropical or neglected-disease connection is likely to be a better fit elsewhere.

Venomous animals: biology, taxonomy and ecology

The fourth pillar is the animals themselves. Taxonomic revisions, distribution records, behaviour, ecology and conservation of venomous animals support every other pillar, because a toxin study is only as reliable as the identification of the animal that produced the venom, and an epidemiological study is only as useful as its account of where the animal lives and when people encounter it. Spider taxonomy, scorpion systematics and snake ecology have all appeared in the journal's scope as described on this record, and that breadth is deliberate. Authors in this area should deposit voucher information where applicable, give precise locality data subject to conservation sensitivity, and connect a faunistic finding to medical, ecological or toxinological significance rather than leaving the reader to guess why it matters here.

Article Types and What Editors Look For

The journal publishes original research articles, reviews, short communications and case-oriented material in line with its official instructions for authors, which authors must consult for current article categories, word limits and formatting. Across categories, three editorial expectations recur. First, fit must be argued, not assumed: a short paragraph in the introduction and cover material should place the work in toxinology or tropical disease research. Second, methods must be reproducible by a competent group elsewhere, including animal ethics approvals, patient consent where relevant, venom source and pooling details, and statistical choices. Third, claims must be proportionate. Venom-derived drug discovery is an exciting field precisely because most candidate molecules do not become medicines; a paper that reports an interesting in vitro effect serves readers best by saying so plainly and by identifying the distance still to travel toward any therapeutic use.

Review articles work best in this journal when they synthesise a contested or fast-moving area — for example access to antivenoms, the management of a particular envenomation syndrome, or the evidence for a toxin family as drug leads — rather than summarising a single group's output. Case reports work best when the case is genuinely instructive: an unusual presentation, a diagnostic trap, a treatment complication, or a first well-documented record for a region. Letters and commentaries, where the current instructions allow them, should engage a paper the journal has published or a live policy question in toxinology, with evidence rather than opinion alone.

Peer Review, Ethics and Integrity

DOAJ records double-anonymous peer review and plagiarism checking for this journal. In a double-anonymous process, authors should prepare an anonymised manuscript file as the current instructions require, keeping names, affiliations, acknowledgements and identifying grant details in the separate places the submission system provides. Research on animals must report the ethics committee that approved the work and the protocol reference where the journal asks for it; venom collection and animal experimentation are areas where reviewers will expect that information without having to ask. Human research, including clinical studies of envenomation and studies using patient samples or images, must report consent and ethics approval in the form the journal requires. Clinical photographs of bite or sting injuries are common in this field and are publishable only with appropriate consent and de-identification.

Authorship should follow contribution, data should be retained and made accessible in line with the journal's data policy, and conflicts of interest — including work funded by an antivenom producer or a company developing a toxin-derived product — should be disclosed rather than left for readers to discover. Corrections and expressions of concern in a clinical field protect patients as well as the record, and authors who find an error in a published dosage, identification or locality should notify the editor promptly.

Indexing, Metrics and How to Read Them

The journal is listed in DOAJ, disseminated through SciELO, archived in PubMed Central and Portico as recorded by DOAJ, and covered by Scopus-based rankings. SCImago, drawing on Scopus, has categorised it in Animal Science and Zoology and in Parasitology at a stronger quartile level, and in Infectious Diseases and Toxicology at a lower quartile level, with an SJR in the region of 0.52 in the data consulted for this profile and a Scopus-based h-index lower than the figure produced by other databases. This record's own template previously reported an h-index of 59 and citation totals drawn from OpenAlex. Those numbers are not in conflict in any mysterious way: different databases count different document sets over different windows, so their h-index and citation totals differ. Readers comparing journals should compare like with like — the same database, the same year — and should treat any single metric as a rough guide to visibility, not as a verdict on the quality of an individual paper. For a specialist field such as toxinology, a journal's real standing is also visible in who cites it, who edits and reviews for it, and whether clinicians and antivenom producers actually read it.

Citation practice deserves a sentence of its own. Cite the journal with its full title or its standard abbreviation, its year, volume and electronic article number, and its DOI. Because the journal moved through platform changes in its history, older web addresses for it can still circulate; the DOI and the SciELO record are the stable routes to the version of record, and authors checking a reference should follow those rather than a copied platform link.

Open Access, Fees and Rights

As recorded by DOAJ, the journal has published in open access since 2003 under a CC BY licence, authors retain unrestricted copyright and publishing rights, the publication charge is up to 500 US dollars, and a waiver policy exists. Each element has a practical consequence. CC BY means readers may reuse material with attribution, which suits a journal whose clinical and public-health content may be needed by health workers and trainers far from a subscribing library. Author-retained copyright means authors should still read the publishing agreement they sign, to confirm the licence and any funder requirements are recorded correctly. A fee with a waiver policy means authors without grant support should ask about waiver eligibility before submission rather than withdrawing after acceptance; the amount and the waiver criteria that apply are those on the live journal and DOAJ pages at the time of submission, since this profile cannot freeze them. No reader should pay a fee to read this journal's articles, and no author should pay a fee to any account other than one named in the journal's own instructions — a basic precaution in an era of imitation journal websites.

Submitting: A Practical Guide

Begin on the journal's official site, linked from this record and from its DOAJ and SciELO pages, and read the current instructions for authors in full. Prepare the manuscript in English, structure it as the instructions require for its article type, and anonymise it for double-anonymous review. Report ethics approvals, consent, funding and conflicts in their designated places. Identify every organism to species level where the science depends on it, state where venom or specimens came from, and give accession or voucher information where relevant. Choose keywords that a toxinologist or tropical medicine reader would actually search — the journal's own DOAJ keywords, toxins, antivenoms, toxin derivatives, tropical diseases, neglected diseases and venomous animals, are a good model. Expect, as a planning figure only, the average submission-to-publication period DOAJ records, about fifteen weeks, while recognising that revision rounds move individual papers faster or slower. If a paper is declined for fit, that is information, not a quality verdict: a toxin characterisation declined here for lack of tropical or clinical framing may still be strong work for a biochemistry title, and a tropical disease paper declined for lack of toxinology connection may belong in a dedicated tropical medicine journal.

Who Should Read and Cite It

For toxinologists, this is a home journal whose backfile is a working library of venom characterisations and toxin pharmacology. For clinicians in tropical regions, its case and health-systems literature addresses problems that large general medical journals cover only occasionally. For parasitologists and infectious-disease researchers working on neglected diseases, it offers a readership that understands field conditions. For pharmacologists, its toxin-derived lead literature is a reminder that venoms remain one of nature's most productive libraries of selective molecules. For students, it is an unusually accessible entry point into an interdisciplinary field, because open access removes the paywall between a curious reader in Botucatu, Bangkok or Bamako and the primary literature.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the journal open access? Yes. DOAJ records open access publishing since 2003, a CC BY licence and author-retained copyright.

Is there a publication fee? DOAJ records a charge of up to 500 US dollars and a waiver policy. Verify the current amount and waiver route on the official site before submitting.

Is it peer-reviewed? Yes, with double-anonymous peer review and plagiarism checking as recorded by DOAJ.

What ISSN should I cite? This record carries 1678-9180 and 1678-9199; DOAJ lists 1678-9199 as the online ISSN.

Who is behind the journal? CEVAP, the Center for the Study of Venoms and Venomous Animals at São Paulo State University, UNESP, Botucatu, Brazil, with SciELO listed by DOAJ as publisher in Brazil. The earlier shorthand naming a commercial platform alone does not capture that ownership.

How long does publication take? DOAJ records an average of about fifteen weeks from submission to publication; individual papers vary with review and revision.

Does it publish work from outside Brazil? Yes. Its subject is global wherever venomous animals and tropical diseases are studied, though its institutional home and much of its community are Brazilian and Latin American.

Verification Notes for This Record

This profile was built from the journal's own institutional description, its DOAJ record, its SciELO presence and Scopus-based SCImago categorisation, checked against the identifiers on this Journals World record. Two cautions are recorded for editors. First, the publisher should be understood as CEVAP/UNESP with SciELO dissemination, not as a commercial platform alone. Second, metric values differ by source and year; the h-index and citation counts in the previous template were OpenAlex-derived and should not be compared directly with Scopus-derived figures. No acceptance rate is stated in this profile because a current, officially published acceptance rate could not be verified, and no editor-in-chief is named because the current holder of that role should be taken from the live journal masthead at the time of reading rather than from a name carried in older volumes.