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 fundamental scientists, clinical and health services delivery researchers, epidemiologists and policy researchers; we cover acute and chronic kidney diseases, dialysis, kidney transplantation and organ donation. Our open-access policy maximizes the dissemination 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, to avoid research and review waste and to publish work that has been authentically undertaken, recognizing any unalterable flaws and rejecting over interpretation. We live and work on Turtle Island and are acutely aware of the effects of colonisation around the world on people’s health and kidney health. We are founded on principles of equity, diversity and inclusion, and welcome submissions in the field of kidney health from people of all nations. We specifically welcome, and waive article processing charges for, international submissions from lower income countries, from or with indigenous people around the world, and work which seeks to promote justice and reduce inequity.

Many of these principles were included in our inaugural editorial, and we recommitted to kindness (explicit concern for our authors and reviewers) and justice (intellectual rigor) in our 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 review of manuscripts, we hope to foster not just data and information, but the growth in knowledge and wisdom needed to improve kidney health around the world.

Philosophy and Policies

1. Land acknowledgement. The editor-in-chief lives and works in the city of Charlottetown, Epekwitk (Prince Edward Island), situated in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people. The Epekwitnewaq Mi’kmaq first signed Treaties of Peace and Friendship in 1725. Those treaties did not deal with the surrender of lands and resources, but instead recognized Mi’kmaq title and rights, and negotiated a path toward an ongoing relationship between nations. 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. The first three editors-in-chief were all women. 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 and right action in all our work. We welcome work from researchers of all nations, particularly work from or with indigenous peoples around the world, and work that seeks to improve justice and equity around the world. We treat all equally, all kindly, and all with the respect that they deserve. In this we honour the principles of wisdom, truth, respect, and love.

3. Portable review. Because we recognize that we are one community, and because we do not think it reflects badly on the quality of our journal or scientists’ work to openly acknowledge that many manuscripts are seen by more than one journal before publication, we will accept peer review 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. We do this to prevent review waste and research waste. Please contact us before responding to peer review from another journal, providing the names of the journal(s) that arranged the peer review, certifying that the reviews attached (PDFs please) are complete, unedited and dated. We use the source of the peer review as a surrogate for knowing the credibility of the reviewers.

The senior editorial team will recommend for or against submission as a revised manuscript, and if against, whether we would welcome the submission as a new manuscript. If we are proceeding with the submission as a revised manuscript, authors should submit a clean and redline draft, and a point-by-point response to reviews, and should contact the editorial team to alert them of the submission. The senior editorial team will review the manuscript as if it were a first resubmission. A manuscript may be accepted at this point, sometimes with editorial suggestions; or further peer review may be requested.

In this policy we honour the principles of humility and respect.

4. 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. 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 or paraphrase a review completely if it is unhelpfully written. 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 humility, honesty, wisdom, truth, respect, and love in this policy.

5. Clear, fair, 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.

6. 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. This is a senior editorial team decision. We honour the principles of wisdom and respect, and the importance of relationships and responsibility in this policy.

7. 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: research waste. For most 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 requested, instead, at time of response to peer review. (Note that case reports are highly structured to facilitate brevity with completeness: these must be submitted in keeping with our template, and will be unsubmitted if incorrectly formatted). We honour the principles of respect and humility in this policy.

8. Editorial review of revisions. Rather than sending back to the original peer reviewers, our editors review revised manuscripts and response-to-review and determine whether the authors have fairly and completely responded to peer review, and that appropriate revisions appear in the manuscript. 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 in this policy.

9. 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, and truth in this policy.

10. Explicit 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.

11. Timely review. We aim to provide authors with a review within 8 weeks of receiving a manuscript. We ask that authors recognize the difficulties in obtaining peer review, and would like them to be aware that multiple cycles of multiple invitations are necessary to provide assessments of some manuscripts. We honour the principles of respect, truth and humility in this policy.

12. Timely publication. Delay in author submission of revisions is one of the major obstacles to timely publication. When authors receive supportive feedback within 8 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.

13. Avoiding publication bias. We aim to publish work that is good, even if it is not high-impact, and even if the results are not in keeping with the author’s hypothesis. We attend 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.

14. 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 abhor research waste and review waste. We honour the principle of respect 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, and for articles where the corresponding author comes from a country designated as Group A by Research4Life (Group B counties receive a 50% discount). 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, and our independence from it.

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 2024, our Twitter account @CanJKHD has >4,200 followers and our Bluesky account @CJKHD has >450 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.  Clase CM, Dicks E, Holden R, et al. Can Peer Review Be Kinder? Supportive Peer Review: A Re-Commitment to Kindness and a Call to Action. Canadian Journal of Kidney Health and Disease. 2022;9. doi:10.1177/20543581221080327