PROJECT & ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This CRICKETT non-profit journal is an ongoing spin-off project rooting from academic research, clinical practice, and the related intellectual as well as pragmatic needs. Gratitude is hereby expressed to sponsors / grant agencies for their support of the accompanying satellite studies during the early startup stages: Grant No. 2007/65-UPJŠ-02, from Ministry of Health Care of the Slovak Republic (GEMIN - Genomic data mining on birth defects); Grant No. 1/0131/09, from VEGA (Methods of analysis of structured and/or unstructured data with uncertainty and their use in intelligent search); Grant No. MVTS 40/2007 Fr/ČR/SR/TUKE07, from Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic (Eco-Net - Information extraction and knowledge discovery for support of hereditary diseases research). The current project "Reproducibility, reusability, and sustained impact of published research - Developing new methodologies for assessment and improvements (CRICKETT)" is a prospective statistical study combined with retrospective meta-analysis and milestone-driven implementation research, publicly accessible and unlocked for community collaboration at Open Science Framework (OSF Project Page). ■

AIMS & SCOPE

CRICKETT is an official journal of the Slovak Histochemical Society. Originally an intramural institutional newsletter, it is systematically evolving to a full-featured international scientific journal with publicly accessible articles. The primary focus is on medicine, life sciences, and biomedical research in all living systems - including the corresponding computational tools and technical solutions. CRICKETT can also consider publishing important news and articles from any other field or discipline, which are meaningfully related to the main journal focus or to the betterment of science, technology, society, or life in general. Preference is given to contributions enhancing further utilization of medical research results - especially by improving their practical applicability in everyday health care, ecology, policy-making, or industries (i.e., catalyzing the technology transfers "from bench to bedside", or facilitating other enterprise-level adoptions of scientific knowledge). ■

IMPROVING INTELLECTUAL EXPERIENCE

"Standing on the shoulders of giants" is an invaluable privilege created by a civilized human society. Appreciation of this tradition is especially prominent in sciences. It also creates a great opportunity for progress. CRICKETT aims at multiple minor and major improvements in the world of reputable science publishing.

Reproducibility crisis
For a scientific work to be truly scientific, it must be conducted and recorded in a way that allows others to repeat all steps and verify the results or other findings. Unfortunately, in real life, it is not always so - serious shortcomings were detected even in the highest-ranking journals and in articles coming from prominent laboratories. As a partial remedy, CRICKETT offers the possibility of continuous retrospective peer-review: In CRICKETT's Addenda appended to individual articles, every Reader can learn about strengths and weaknesses of each paper that were discovered by other Readers. Everything is collected in one place, constantly and for unlimited time, properly organized and commented, with the included feedback responses provided by the criticized Author(s). The benefits can be enormous. For example, the quality of the initial peer-review will be itself put under a thorough scrutiny. Any eventual unrecognized failures of judgment will be objectively exposed by others, sooner or later, and openly published. Another benefit is related to effectiveness of research: Scientists who are CRICKETT's Readers will be saved from repeating known mistakes and wasting their time and resources.

Fairness of peer-review
Peer-review is typically an invisible process, hidden completely in the background of the scientific publishing machinery. As such, it is difficult to monitor or appeal. CRICKETT wants to preserve the good aspects, like the Editor - Reviewer intimacy as we know it, together with the anonymity of Reviewers. But CRICKETT wants to go even further, and it will provide the same dignity to our Authors as well. During the entire manuscript evaluation, the identity of Authors and their workplaces will remain anonymous to anyone except the Editors and the Redaction staff. This way, our Peer-Reviewers will not be given a chance to look down on submissions coming from developing countries, or small organizations, home laboratories, schools, and other less-conventional sources. There will be little or no room for personal preferences or targeted disfavouring, because the Peer-Reviewers will simply not know who is among the Authors of the given manuscript. Thus, prompting them for increased objectiveness and fairness in the provided comments.

Scientometry errors
Imagine a fictive situation when a young researcher works hard to get promoted. However, it is difficult to meet the institutional standards with the minimal citation counts defined for every position. How would it feel to discover that some of the young researcher's citations are counted for the benefit of a non-existent ghost's scientometric profile - just because the researcher's department name was wrongly placed to the position of the surname? Unlike the partly fictional story, this sort of error is not fictional, not at all. In addition, papers can go missing from researchers' profiles, and after fixing all issues with the help desk professionals, the same or additional papers may disappear again a year or two later. Going through such cycle 5 - 10 times can be frustrating, and there are even worse scenarios and additional errors known from real incidents. CRICKETT's position - and the former experience rooting from the technology award mentioned above - is that it should not require rocket science to fix these and similar issues. In CRICKETT's view, there is no artificial intelligence without the underlying natural intelligence. Therefore, as our Authors can discover and enjoy during the submission process, article metadata and bibliographic references are handled easily, neatly, and highly reliably, from the very beginning of the publication process. Our auxiliary tools can even pre-format bibliographic references for in-text inclusions and reference lists, which will also expedite the process of exporting the citation data to other services - including the pointers back to our Authors and their freshly published CRICKETT articles. ■

FORMAT & ACCESS

CRICKETT is published electronically (e-journal) in a traditional newsletter format, released as chronologically numbered separate issues (letters) with unique identifiers. Frequency: Issued as needed, regularly or irregularly. Accessibility: Online storage and downloads, e-mailing services, file transfers, portable data carriers (one or more modalities available at any time). Free articles can be accessed directly and downloaded as full text with no requirement for user registration or login. Licensing: Unlimited free worldwide public access, or various levels of subscription-based restrictions associated with each article and with the reader's membership status. Various parts of any single issue can have different licensing parameters (for example, a freely shared public abstract, but a subscription-based access to the article body). Accordingly, selected issues or their parts can be kept for non-public internal purposes (exclusive members-only access, society-restricted contents). All these details are always clearly indicated, individually for each article, on the respective abstract page / download page. Supported article types and the respective formatting guidelines are detailed in the CRICKETT Instructions for Authors...

DATA RETENTION

The CRICKETT Redaction aims at permanent (eternal) preservation of the published articles - which is important as a security precaution during the journal usual operation, or in the unfortunate event a journal is temporarily paused or discontinued. This is achieved by storing multiple backup copies in different places locally, combined with remote online storage (cloud depositories). CRICKETT is creating its own pre-print repository, and its Data-Retention Plan also includes additional or alternative utilization of third-party gateways (for example, bioRxiv / Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, LOCKSS project / Stanford University, CLOCKSS, Portico / ITHAKA, Europe PubMed Central / European Bioinformatics Institute, and PubMed Central / U.S. NLM are under current consideration, selection, and/or application procedures). ■

LANGUAGE

Submissions are accepted without geographical restrictions. The main publication language is English. Articles in other languages can also be published, in justified cases and upon the discretion of CRICKETT Redaction. The usual summary in English is always mandatory for all published articles. ■

REDACTION

In addition to our own publishing, our CRICKETT Redaction also provides authoring and editorial assistance for our members and collaborators who are preparing their projects, grant applications, or manuscripts for other (external) publishers - such as contributions to specialized scientific journals, books, databases, newspapers, and other media. We can help our partners with everything, starting from the text and image creation and formatting, language and syntax corrections, through data management and statistics, up to correct professional referencing, indexing, licensing, copyright management, and database inclusion. We can handle all editorial and publishing correspondence and peer-review procedures. We can also provide our bibliographic search capacity, data mining and text mining services, and advanced information processing (image analysis, ontology creation, data annotation, etc.). ■

WORKGROUPS

CRICKETT Workgroups are teams of our members and/or external collaborators who perform various organizational tasks or who prepare or process new manuscripts and other materials for publication or other usage. Our staff members are bound by the Workgroup Rules by default, and external collaborators enter into the binding agreement by their participation in Workgroups or Workgroup-related activities. Go to CRICKETT Workgroup Rules...

EDITORS

Articles are assessed, communicated with the Peer-Reviewers or other consultants, and rejected or selected for publication, by CRICKETT Editors. The Editorial Board is being currently assembled by the project Principal Investigator: Marek Dudas, MD, PhD, Associate Professor [Google Scholar] [LinkedIn] E-mail: marek.dudas@crickett.org

EDITORIAL POLICIES

The role of CRICKETT Editors is to work with the Authors to ensure that the final articles meet the highest standards for scientific accuracy, originality, novelty, intellectual importance, practical applicability, research integrity, and ethics. Go to CRICKETT Editorial Policies...

PEER-REVIEW

CRICKETT seeks advice on individual manuscripts from qualified experts in the field who are not part of the journal's editorial staff. Every CRICKETT article is clearly marked as peer-reviewed or not, and the exact methodology is indicated as well, located near the article title. To maximize impartiality and objectivity, manuscripts submitted to CRICKETT are peer-reviewed in a double-blinded manner. Double means that the Reviewers' identities and affiliations remain unknown to the Authors (at all times), and vice versa, the Authors' identities and affiliations are hidden from the Reviewers (until the respective article is published). Go to the CRICKETT Peer-Review Policy...

MISCONDUCT

The Publisher and all Editors and Peer-Reviewers pay close attention to identifying and preventing the publication of articles where research misconduct has occurred or can be reasonably suspected (including, but not restricted to: plagiarism, citation manipulation, data falsification, or result fabrication). Such misconduct is never encouraged, conducted, approved, or overlooked by the CRICKETT journal or its staff. Whenever the Publisher or our Editors become aware of any allegation of research misconduct relating to any article published in CRICKETT, based on the circumstances and the nature of the respective case, one or more of the appropriate procedures published by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) will be followed. Go to the CRICKETT-respected Collection of COPE's guidelines...

PUBLISHING POLICIES

CRICKETT adheres to recognized international standards, guidelines and best practices published by relevant professional organizations. Go to the CRICKETT Publishing Policies...

PUBLISHER

Slovak Histochemical Society (SHS)
Slovenská histochemická spoločnosť (SHS)

SHS is a publicly registered non-profit civil association based in Slovakia, EU, operating as a postgraduate educational academic institution, research-performing organization, and professional scientific society.

Org. ID No.: IČO 0030811180
Tax ID No.: DIČ 2021523141
VAT ID No.: IČ DPH (n/a) -- Not a VAT payer.
Reg. Authority: Ministry of Interior of the Slovak Republic

ADDRESS

Slovak Histochemical Society
Mail Stop: II. posch. / č. dv. 6
Jesenna 1133 / 3
SK-04001 Kosice
SLOVAK REPUBLIC, E.U.

Home Page: www.crickett.org
E-mail: crickett@crickett.org

Note: The original old web site is being gradually migrated to this new article indexing site at crickett.org. This is a necessary transition from the officially depreciated and to-be-discontinued hosting platform.

RESPONSIBLE COMMUNICATIONS

The CRICKETT Redaction reserves the right to reject or ignore unsolicited manuscripts or correspondence without notice. Any mail, posts, messages, digital contents, data carriers or parcels sent to us via any channels remain our property with our unlimited non-exclusive right to store, copy and freely reuse for any internal non-public purposes. The Redaction does not return any such items or may not acknowledge receiving them. The described keeping status changes to our full unrestricted exclusive ownership from the moment of eventual copyright transfer from the sender to the Publisher (see the Copyright rules). We reserve the right to change our communication channels and the means of journal contents distribution at any time and without prior notice. Servers and other electronic devices produce heat, and unnecessary use of electric appliances contributes to harmful emissions and wasting natural resources such as fossil fuels or wood. It's everyone's liability to act responsibly and cut down superfluous consumption, including junk data and telecommunications. We already do so by avoiding vanity online activities, reducing idle server runtime, and by pooling our data streams with others (shared data hosting and similar green strategies). ■

PRIVACY

CRICKETT and its Publisher do not spy on user behavior, and do not collect any personal information other than submitted knowingly and willingly via physical mail, online forms, or e-mail. Go to CRICKETT Privacy Policy...

PAYMENTS

Our contract partners, members, and other collaborators will receive invoices and/or detailed banking information from us in their official correspondence. Fundraising campaigns and fee collections can also be organized with the help of subcontracted cash collectors and/or independent external payment processors (i.e., via third-party accounts and transfer methods beyond our organization's ownership or control) - and these may vary for different parts of the world, currencies, transaction types, or other factors. The current authorized external payment collectors are: 1. Our trusted official representatives verified and published by the national Ministry of Interior, acting either as the institutional executive officials or in their personal capacities as trusted private persons; 2. Online payment gateways and campaign mediators (none promoted at the present time); 3. Other (none promoted at the present time). Donations and other non-profit contributions are strictly non-refundable. ■

REVENUE

The Publisher is a not-for-profit organization by law. Therefore, the Publisher (including its CRICKETT journal) does not generate profit and does not distribute shares in revenue or interests. Instead, all journal-related incomes received by the Publisher or its authorized public collectors are used to improve the journal quality, cover the journal production expenditures, data maintenance, research and other activities or goals of the Publisher or its collaborators, librarianship needs, legal advice, protection and security measures, intellectual property management, consultancy, F&A outlay, journal distribution expenses, and additional overhead costs. Journal charges are explicitly listed in appropriate sections of this web site (manuscript processing, post-publication reviews, contents access fees on individual download sub-pages, etc.). Other sources of revenue (e.g., business sponsorship, institutional or organizational support, governmental schemes, grants, etc.) are listed here: The journal is currently supported solely from the Publisher's internal organizational resources, donations, and the above indicated journal charges. Previous support is acknowledged on the very top of this page. ■