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Author Instructions
5. Reviewers Exclusions

You are welcome to exclude a limited number of researchers as potential editors or reviewers of your manuscript. To
ensure a fair and rigorous peer review process, we ask that you keep your exclusions to a maximum of three people. If you
wish to exclude additional referees, please explain or justify your concerns—this information will be helpful for editors
when deciding whether to honor your request.

6. Editors and Journal Staff as Authors

Editorial independence is extremely important and OAE does not interfere with editorial decisions. Editorial staff or
editors shall not be involved in the processing their own academic work. Submissions authored by editorial staff/editors
will be assigned to at least two independent outside reviewers. Decisions will be made by other editorial board members
who do not have conflict of interests with the author. Journal staffs are not involved in the processing of their own work
submitted to any OAE journals.

7. Conflict of Interests
OAE journals require authors to declare any possible financial and/or non-financial conflicts of interest at the end of
their manuscript and in the cover letter, as well as confirm this point when submitting their manuscript in the submission
system. If no conflicts of interest exist, authors need to state “The authors declare no conflicts of interest”. We also
recognize that some authors may be bound by confidentiality agreements, in which cases authors need to sate “The
authors declare that they are bound by confidentiality agreements that prevent them from disclosing their competing
interests in this work”.

8. Editorial Process
8.1. Initial check
8.1.1. Initial manuscript check
New submissions are initially checked by the Managing Editor from the perspectives of originality, suitability, structure
and formatting, conflicts of interest, background of authors, etc. Poorly-prepared manuscripts may be rejected at this
stage. If your manuscript does not meet one or more of these requirements, we will return it for further revisions.

8.1.2. Publishing ethics
All manuscripts submitted to Mini-invasive Surgery are screened using iThenticate powered by CrossCheck to identify
any plagiarized content. Your study must also meet all ethical requirements as outlined in our Editorial Policies. If the
manuscript does not pass any of these checks, we may return it to you for further revisions or decline to consider your
study for publication.

8.2. Editorial assessment
Once your manuscript has passed the initial check, it will be assigned to the Editor from Journal Editorial Board (Editor-
in-Chief, Associate Editor, Editorial Board Member) who has no conflict of interest on this manuscript to review.
Regarding the Special Issue paper, after passing the initial check, the manuscript will be successively assigned to an
Assistant Editor, Guest Editor, and then to the Editor from Editorial Board in the case of conflict of interest for the Guest
Editor to review. The Academic Editors (EiC/AEs/EBMs/GEs) may reject manuscripts that they deem highly unlikely to
pass peer review without further consultation. Once your manuscript has passed the editorial assessment, the Assistant
Editor will start to organize peer-review.

8.3. Process
Mini-invasive Surgery operates a single-blind review process. The technical quality of the research described in the
manuscript is assessed by a minimum of two independent expert reviewers. The Academic Editor is responsible for the
final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of the manuscript. For controversial manuscripts, the Editor-in-Chief is
responsible for making the final decision.

8.4. Decisions
Your research will be judged on technical soundness only, not on its perceived impact as judged by editors or referees.
There are three possible decisions: Accept (your study satisfies all publication criteria), Invitation to Revise (more work
is required to satisfy all criteria), and Reject (your study fails to satisfy key criteria and it is highly unlikely that further
work can address its shortcomings).