Policies

OSR uses double-anonymous peer review: authors and reviewers do not know each other's identities during the process. The editorial workflow follows these steps:

1. Editorial screening — the editor checks fit with the scope, compliance with the guidelines, anonymization of the manuscript and similarity with previously published texts. Unsuitable manuscripts may be declined at this stage.
2. Peer review — manuscripts that pass screening are sent to at least two expert reviewers with no ties to the authors. The reference deadline for completing a review is four weeks.
3. Editorial decision — based on the reviews, the editor decides to accept, request revisions, request a new review round or reject. Reviews are sent to the authors anonymously.
4. Revisions — authors submit the revised version together with a point-by-point response letter. Further review rounds may be required.
5. Copyediting and production — accepted manuscripts undergo copyediting, formatting and typesetting. Authors approve the proofs before publication.

Reviewers assess originality, relevance, methodological rigor, appropriateness of the analysis, clarity of writing and consistency between results and conclusions. The final decision rests with the editor-in-chief or the assigned editor.

Type: Double-anonymous review.

We thank our reviewers for their collaboration, which is essential to the quality of the journal. When accepting a review invitation, we ask reviewers to:

• declare any conflict of interest and decline the invitation if they recognize the authors or cannot review impartially;
• treat the manuscript as a confidential document, without sharing it or using it for their own benefit;
• not upload the manuscript to artificial intelligence tools, as this would breach confidentiality;
• assess originality, relevance, study design, methods, statistical analysis, ethics, clarity and the soundness of the conclusions;
• write constructive, specific and respectful comments to the authors, keeping confidential remarks to the editor separate;
• provide a recommendation (accept, revisions required, resubmit for review or decline) and meet the agreed deadline, notifying the editor of any delay.

OSR provides immediate, free open access to all of its content, based on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Readers may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search and link to the full texts, without registration or payment, provided that the authors and the original source are properly cited.

Authors retain copyright of their work and grant the journal the right of first publication. Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits sharing and adaptation of the work for any purpose, provided that the authorship and initial publication in this journal are properly acknowledged.

Authors may enter into separate, additional agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the published version (for example, in institutional repositories or as book chapters), with acknowledgment of its initial publication in OSR.

License: CC BY 4.0.

OSR follows the recommendations of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) for the ethical conduct of authors, editors and reviewers.

Research involving human participants. Studies involving human participants must comply with the Declaration of Helsinki and must have been approved by a research ethics committee or institutional review board in the authors' country. For studies conducted in Brazil, approval must follow National Health Council (CNS) Resolutions No. 466/2012 and No. 510/2016, and the CAAE number must be reported. The approval number and a statement on informed consent must be included in the manuscript.

Clinical trials. Trials must have been registered in a recognized registry (for example, ClinicalTrials.gov, the Brazilian Registry of Clinical Trials — ReBEC, or another primary registry of the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform — ICTRP), and the registration number must be reported in the abstract.

Case reports. Written consent for publication must be obtained from the patient or their legal guardian, and any information that could identify the patient must be removed.

Animal research. Studies must comply with applicable national legislation (in Brazil, Law No. 11,794/2008), be approved by an animal ethics committee and be reported according to the ARRIVE guidelines.

Authorship. Only those who meet the ICMJE criteria qualify as authors: substantial contribution to the study, drafting or critical revision of the work, approval of the final version and accountability for its content. Contributions must be described using the CRediT taxonomy. Changes to the author list after submission require justification and the agreement of all authors.

Misconduct. Fabrication, falsification, plagiarism, simultaneous submission, redundant publication and citation manipulation are considered misconduct. Suspected cases are investigated following the COPE flowcharts and may lead to rejection, retraction and notification of the authors' institutions.

Authors, reviewers and editors must disclose any financial, professional or personal relationship that could influence, or appear to influence, their work. Authors report competing interests and funding sources in the manuscript; when there are none, they must state "The authors declare no competing interests."

Reviewers disclose conflicts when accepting an invitation and must decline the review when they have ties to the authors. Editors with a conflict regarding a manuscript do not take part in handling it, which is transferred to another member of the editorial team. Manuscripts by members of the editorial team follow the same process, and the author-editor takes no part in the decisions.

Manuscripts undergo a similarity check during editorial screening. Substantial similarity without proper citation — including with the authors' own previous work (self-plagiarism or text recycling) — leads to the manuscript being returned to the authors or rejected. Cases identified after publication are handled in accordance with the corrections and retractions policy.

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools cannot be listed as authors, as they cannot take responsibility for the work. Any use of generative AI in the research or in the writing must be disclosed in the methods section or in the acknowledgments, stating the tool, its version and its purpose. Authors remain fully responsible for the accuracy, originality and integrity of the content.

AI must not be used to generate or alter data, images or results. Reviewers and editors must not upload manuscripts to AI tools, in order to preserve confidentiality.

OSR encourages authors to share the data, code and materials that underlie their findings in public repositories, subject to ethical and legal restrictions. Articles must include a data availability statement indicating where and how the data can be accessed, or the reason for any restriction.

Authors should follow the EQUATOR Network reporting guideline appropriate to their study design: CONSORT (randomized trials), STROBE (observational studies), PRISMA (systematic reviews), STARD (diagnostic accuracy studies), CARE (case reports) and COSMIN (measurement properties of instruments).

OSR accepts manuscripts previously posted on preprint servers (for example, medRxiv, bioRxiv, SciELO Preprints or OSF Preprints). Authors must disclose the preprint and its DOI at submission. After publication, authors are encouraged to update the preprint record with a link to the published article. Abstracts presented at scientific meetings do not preclude submission.

Errors identified after publication are handled transparently, following the COPE guidelines:

• Erratum (correction) — corrects errors that do not affect the conclusions; it is published and linked to the original article.
• New version — the journal keeps the version history of the article, and previous versions remain accessible.
• Expression of concern — published when there is evidence of a problem that is still under investigation.
• Retraction — applied in cases of serious error that invalidates the conclusions, proven misconduct or redundant publication. The article remains available, clearly marked as retracted, together with an explanatory notice.

Authors may appeal an editorial decision by sending the editor-in-chief, through the journal's email, a reasoned justification with a point-by-point response to the reviews. The appeal is assessed by an editor who was not involved in the original decision, and the new decision is final.

Complaints about the editorial process, the conduct of editors or reviewers, or ethical issues may be sent through the same channel and are answered within 30 days.

Oxton Sleep Research follows the diamond open access model: it charges no fees for submission, peer review, article processing (APC) or publication. Authors do not pay to publish, and readers do not pay to access content.

Editorial costs are covered by Oxton Education. The absence of fees does not affect the rigor of the review process: all manuscripts follow the same screening and peer review workflow.

Published content is preserved on servers with regular backups. Metadata are made available via OAI-PMH for harvesting by indexing services and repositories, and articles with a DOI have persistent identifiers that ensure the full text can always be located.

The names, email addresses and other personal data provided to this journal are used exclusively for the services provided by this publication — submission management, editorial communication and peer review — and are not made available for any other purpose or to any other party. Personal data are processed in accordance with the Brazilian General Data Protection Law (LGPD, Law No. 13,709/2018), and the journal follows practices compatible with the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) for international authors, reviewers and readers.

Data subjects may request access to, correction of or deletion of their personal data at any time by writing to the journal's contact email. The names and affiliations of authors of published articles become a permanent part of the scholarly record.