To JHCPU Readers and Authors:

Thank you for taking time to read the following.

This note follows up on the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved's (JHCPU's) current Call for Abstracts on food access, nutrition security, and associated health outcomes for a supplemental issue sponsored by Instacart:

https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/journal-health-care-poor-and-underserved

In response to an inquiry and for everyone's benefit, I would like to clarify the role of the sponsor in the creation of this supplement (or any other) to JHCPU.

The issue of editorial independence of supplements is of particular concern when it comes to corporate sponsorship rather than sponsorship by a government agency or academic consortium, but the procedures are the same.  The next several paragraphs outline JHCPU's procedures for producing supplements and the role of the sponsor.

There is an abstract review committee that meets after the Call for Abstracts is issued and abstracts are submitted. The purpose of the Call is to limit paper submissions to a number we can handle.

The abstract review committee *does* include people from the sponsor as well as the Journal.  The abstracts are scored by two reviewers, one from the sponsor and one from JHCPU, on the basis of a number of quality parameters, none of which relates to the corporate sponsorship or any goals they might have beyond the general topic of the issue. The whole committee meets to discuss every abstract after they have been scored.

Once the invited papers (~2-3x the number that will ultimately be accepted) are submitted, the Journal staff invites external reviewers matched to the paper by topic to conduct a blind peer review. This work in no way involves the sponsor.

When at least two external reviews are in for each invited paper, the JHCPU editor makes decisions about acceptance/reconsideration/rejection based on the reviews (and the upper limit of papers that can be accepted for the issue).

The decisions at this stage can be affected by the editor of the Journal but are almost wholly a function of the reviews. The same is true of the final decisions. While we do make the papers and reviews available to the sponsor, there is no review by the sponsor to decide about the papers. Publication decisions are made by the Journal and in no way involve the sponsor.

Thank you for the opportunity to clarify our relationship to supplement sponsors.

Ginny Brennan

Virginia M. Brennan, PhD, MA (she/her)

Editor

Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved

[log in to unmask]