South African Journal of Animal Science
Journal / South African Journal of Animal Science / About the Journal

Sponsoring Organizations

• South African Society for Animal Science
• Agricultural Research Council of South Africa

Peer Review

Guidelines for Reviewers

In your review, please consider the following aspects of the manuscript as far as they are applicable:

1. Does the manuscript represent an original contribution to current scientific knowledge of the principles or the application of principles governing the functioning of animals and their relationship to the physical or social environment? 
2. Does the introduction indicate the status of current knowledge and motivate why the study was done? Is there a clear hypothesis?
3. Are the objectives of the study clearly defined?
4. Is the experimental design appropriate to resolve the stated objectives of the study?
5. Are the experimental techniques appropriate to resolve the stated objectives of the study and are full details thereof provided?
6. Is the study acceptable from an ethical point of view, and is this clearly stated in the text?
7. Are the results presented in an unbiased fashion, and are they presented in a clear, concise, and complete manner? 
8. Are all the tables/figures necessary? Do figures duplicate data in tables?
9. Is the discussion relevant and adequate for the full interpretation of the results, without becoming speculative?
10. Does the discussion place the results in the context of the existing literature, without losing focus on these results?
11. Do the results and discussion justify the conclusions drawn from the work?

 

NB: Please concentrate on the scientific merit of the paper, and do not spend time correcting editorial shortcomings.

Please also note the following: 

1. The identity of reviewers will remain confidential and will not be divulged to the authors.
2. If you use the “track changes” option when reviewing the manuscript, your identity (or that of the computer used) will be revealed in any comments made, or if the cursor is placed over the tracked changes for a few seconds. It is therefore important for you to change your Microsoft Word username prior to making any comments or tracked changes on the reviewed document. This can be done via the following steps: File > More > Options > General > Personalize your copy of Microsoft Office. 
3. The unpublished manuscript is a privileged document. Please protect it from any form of exploitation. Reviewers are expected not to cite a manuscript or refer to the work it described before it has been published, and to refrain from using the information it contains for the advancement of their own research.
4. A reviewer should consciously adopt a positive, constructive and impartial attitude towards the manuscript under review. Your position should be that of the author’s ally, with the aim of promoting effective and accurate scientific communication. Although a reviewer may not fully agree with an authors’ interpretation of the data, the authors’ opinions should be allowed to stand unless they are shown to be in error.
5. A reviewer should not discuss a paper with its author without first consulting the editor.
6. In comments intended for the authors’ eyes (i.e. comments inserted on the manuscript), criticism should be presented dispassionately, and abrasive remarks avoided.
7. Suggested revisions should be phrased as such, and not expressed as conditions of acceptance. Please distinguish between revisions considered essential and those judged merely desirable in your comments on the manuscript.
8. Reviewers are not expected to correct deficiencies of style or mistakes in grammar, but any help you can offer to the editor in this regard will be appreciated.

Open Access Policy

https://www.sajas.co.za/policies#open-access

The South African Journal of Animal Science is a peer-reviewed, open access journal, supporting the Budapest Open Access Initiative principles: “By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, is to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.” Therefore, copyright remains with the author(s) of the article(s).

Copyright holders (authors) are eligible to upload the published versions of their articles to their institutional repositories or personal websites (refer the License). However, we recommend creating hyperlinks to the articles on the primary journal website (this site) instead of duplicating the full manuscripts, in order to preserve accurate usage statistics. Refer to the entry for SAJAS on the JISC Open Science Policy Finder.

Publication Scheduling

One volume will be published per year, consisting of 12 issues, published at monthly intervals.

Journal Identifiers

eISSN: 2221-4062

print ISSN: 0375-1589