About the journal
About the Journal of Sports and Exercise Medicine
A peer-reviewed, open-access journal for research on injury, physical activity and the physiological response to exercise — published by Open Access Pub since 2018.
What the journal is
The Journal of Sports and Exercise Medicine (JSEM) is an open-access journal published by Open Access Pub under ISSN 2694-2283. JSEM publishes peer-reviewed research on the clinical, physiological, biomechanical, and psychological aspects of sports medicine, exercise science, injury prevention, rehabilitation, and performance optimization across athletic and general populations.
Every article is free to read from the day it appears, is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license with copyright retained by its authors, and is registered with Crossref under the DOI prefix 10.14302. The journal has published continuously since 2018.
The work may use clinical, laboratory, field, population, qualitative or computational methods. It must make a substantive contribution to sports or exercise medicine, and its claims must be supported by the design.
Why the journal exists
Research about physical activity is written in two registers that are not read together often enough. A clinician describing the management of an athletic injury and a physiologist describing an adaptation to training are working on the same body, frequently on the same person, and publish in different places. The questions that matter most in this field — when a knee is ready to take load again, what a season of training does to a young athlete, whether a screening test predicts anything — cannot be answered from either register alone.
JSEM was founded to hold both. It gives clinical sports medicine, exercise science, rehabilitation research and performance science a single peer-reviewed venue, open to read, so that work in one can be found and cited by work in the other. It accepts research from single-clinic case series to multi-center cohorts, and from laboratory physiology to field measurement, provided the method supports the claim.
It serves the people who generate and apply that evidence: sports medicine physicians, physiotherapists and rehabilitation researchers, exercise physiologists, biomechanists, sports scientists, and clinicians studying physical activity in health and disease.
Sports medicine and exercise science are not the same thing
Sports medicine and exercise science address complementary questions. Their methods and endpoints may differ, and each contribution is assessed against standards appropriate to its design.
A patient, an injury, a decision
Diagnosis, management and complications of injury in athletic and physically active people: acute and overuse mechanisms, concussion assessment, sports traumatology, surgical and non-surgical outcomes, and the criteria that govern return to play. The design is clinical, the endpoint is a patient outcome, and the standard of evidence is the standard of medicine.
A mechanism, a load, a response
Physiological, metabolic, neuromuscular and biomechanical responses to exercise: training adaptation, fatigue, exercise testing, environmental physiology, motion analysis and loading. The design is experimental or observational, the endpoint is a measured response, and the population is often healthy rather than injured.
Rehabilitation, prevention, prescription
Graded loading after injury, criteria-based progression, screening and injury-prevention programs, exercise prescribed as treatment in chronic disease, and the monitoring of load and recovery. This work needs both literatures at once, and it is where the journal is most useful.
Holding both does not make them interchangeable. A laboratory study of training adaptation is not a clinical trial; a finding in an injured cohort does not transfer untested to a healthy one; and a mechanism demonstrated in a controlled setting is not yet a protocol. Manuscripts are assessed against the standards of the literature they belong to, and are expected to state which that is.
Research and practice
Most of what JSEM publishes is read by people who also treat patients, prescribe exercise or prepare athletes. The journal takes that seriously in the only way a journal can: by asking that a manuscript report enough for a reader to judge whether its finding applies to the people in front of them.
Manuscripts should describe the research setting, participants or materials, methods and limitations so readers can assess the contribution. Distinguish prespecified outcomes and analyses from exploratory work; a clinical application is not required for every study.
A published study is evidence, not instruction. Nothing in this journal is individual medical or performance advice, and no single study establishes a training prescription, an injury-prevention guarantee, a rehabilitation protocol or a return-to-play rule. Publication records that a finding met the journal’s standards for reporting and review; it does not establish that an intervention is proven, safe in every context, or appropriate for a particular person.
Editorial responsibility
Decisions are made by named editors working in the journal’s subject, on the evidence in front of them.
Editor-in-Chief and editorial board
The Editor-in-Chief holds final responsibility for what the journal publishes. The editorial board provides subject expertise across sports medicine, exercise physiology, physiotherapy, orthopedics and biomechanics, advises on scope and standards, and handles manuscripts within its members’ own fields. Each member is listed with their affiliation and, where one has been supplied, their ORCID iD.
Screening, review, decision
All submissions undergo initial editorial screening. Manuscripts that meet the journal's scope and minimum requirements proceed to independent peer review.
Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request. Manuscripts that proceed to external peer review are normally evaluated by at least two independent subject-matter experts.
Editorial decisions are based on scope, scientific quality, methodological rigor, ethical compliance, reporting quality, and relevance to the journal.
Editorial decisions are independent of any fee, membership, service or role. An editor with a competing interest in a manuscript — institutional, financial, or a recent collaboration with its authors — declares it and takes no part in the decision. An article processing charge falls due only after acceptance and has no bearing on how a manuscript is assessed.
Editorial policies in full · Reviewer guidelines · Guidelines for editors
Research integrity in this field
In sports and exercise medicine the handling of the participants is part of the science. The journal’s requirements reflect what this subject actually risks.
- Research ethics. For human research, report the responsible ethics body's approval or applicable exemption, and informed consent or an authorized waiver, with relevant reference details. Obtain written consent for publication of identifiable material. For animal research, report applicable approvals and welfare safeguards.
- Athletes are identifiable from very little. A squad, a position, a season and an injury can name a person without a name being used. Written consent for publication is required for identifiable case material, including photographs and imaging, and authors are expected to minimize the risk of identification through combinations of indirect detail.
- Report the participants as they were. Training status, age and sex distribution, sample size and the statistical approach are reported, so that a finding can be placed in the population it came from rather than generalized past it.
- Declare what stood to gain. Competing interests are disclosed in full, financial and non-financial. Studies funded by manufacturers of equipment, devices, footwear or supplements must demonstrate independent rights of data analysis and interpretation.
- Register, and make the data available. Interventional clinical trials must be registered in an accepted public trial registry at or before the first participant provides consent for enrollment. The registry name, registration number, and registration date must be reported in the manuscript. Every empirical research manuscript must include a data-availability statement.
- Report to the standard of the design. CONSORT for randomized controlled trials, STROBE for observational studies, PRISMA for systematic reviews, ARRIVE for animal research.
The publishing model
Open access, author copyright
Every article is open access from publication, with no subscription and no reader charge. The license is Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: authors retain copyright, and anyone may reuse the work with attribution.
A permanent DOI
Every article is registered with Crossref under the prefix 10.14302 and keeps its DOI permanently, so a citation resolves whatever else changes. Authors and editors are displayed with their ORCID iD where one has been supplied. DOI registration identifies an article; it is not journal-level indexing.
Corrections and preservation
Corrections, retractions and expressions of concern are published and linked to the article they concern, so the version of record stays complete. This journal’s content is committed to Portico, a not-for-profit digital-preservation archive run by ITHAKA (the organization behind JSTOR). As articles are deposited they enter Portico’s permanent archive, so the scholarly record stays available for the long term — even if a title one day ceases to publish.
An article processing charge applies after acceptance only. There is no submission fee, no peer-review fee and no charge to readers.
Identifiers, discovery and preservation · Article processing charges · Preservation policy
Journal facts
- Title
- Journal of Sports and Exercise Medicine
- Abbreviation
- JSEM
- ISSN
- 2694-2283
- Publisher
- Open Access Pub
- Subject
- Sports injury medicine, exercise physiology, rehabilitation, biomechanics and motor control, and exercise and physical activity in health and disease across athletic and general populations.
- Publishing model
- Open access, immediate. No subscription and no reader charge. An article processing charge applies after acceptance only.
- License
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Authors retain copyright.
- Crossref DOI prefix
- 10.14302
- Peer review
- Single-blind by default; double-blind review is available on request.
- Publishing since
- 2018
- Language
- English
- Editorial office
- [email protected]
Across the journal
Journal of Sports and Exercise Medicine (JSEM) · ISSN 2694-2283 · Crossref DOI prefix 10.14302 · publishing since 2018 · published open access by Open Access Pub under CC BY 4.0, with copyright retained by authors. Editorial decisions are independent of any fee, service, membership or role.
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