About the Journal

What to Submit

Fact-based research papers on all facets of funding, distribution, regulation, marketing, promotion, and environmental impacts of vaccines are encouraged. Unbiased theoretical papers and well-designed empirical studies of efficacy and safety are welcomed. Contributors are encouraged to examine implications for national and international vaccination policies. Occasionally, a case-study or series of them may be published provided the authors confirm that prior consent has been obtained in writing from each participant. Normally any such participant should be completely anonymized. Exceptions, if ever there are any, must be well-documented and justified on a case-by-case basis.

Contributions must be free of undisclosed “conflicts of interest”. The conflicts least commonly acknowledged, but most important to disclose, are those stemming from funding by corporate, pharmaceutical, or governmental agencies committed to outcomes favorable to vested interests that existed prior to the design, execution, and submission of the work for publication. Employees, consultants, and indirect beneficiaries of such funding past, present, or future must disclose any such relations even if they only seem to resemble potential conflicts of interest.

Theory and Research Ready for Peer-Review

Work presenting coherent theory, experimental findings, factual reports on current vaccine uses and policies, and civil debate within the scope of the journal are invited from all persons and entities — including those with disclosed vested interests. A vested interest in promoting one or many vaccines does not disqualify the contribution so long as those conflicting interests are plainly disclosed and the requirements of civility and scholarship are met. With all the foregoing in mind, the journal will only publish peer-reviewed articles consisting of Original Research, Reviews, Occasional Editorials (solicited or volunteered), and Commentaries (examining one or several previously published articles in IJVTPR). Because we aim to peer-review everything that we publish, traditional "Letters to the Editor" will be welcomed by the Editor-in-Chief, but will be published only if the author is willing to go through the peer-review process, to pay at least the minimal article processing fee, and, even then, the comments can be published only if the work passes muster with the Editorial Board.

All of the submissions should incorporate empirical research grounded in sound theoretical reasoning, including computer modeling if used, and must also cite the most relevant, and most up-to-date references from the best qualified peer-reviewed sources and taking into consideration the larger ongoing discourse in the worldwide academic literature. It sounds like a big task, but with Google Scholar and/or the Web of Science, and similar search engines, the work can be done to the point where the relevant current literature is well-covered if not exhausted. Authors ca judge that they have nearly covered all the relevant material when the same citations keep recurring in their searches.

The style preferred is not one of the many used by the mainstream medical journals, but is rather the American Psychological Association (APA) 7th edition. Multiple in text lists deviate from the APA 7th edition style inasmuch as we insist on chronological order, oldest to newest, not alphabetical. Except for the purpose of scholarly criticism, authors are advised not to cite any work  where undisclosed biases (e.g., owed to funding or other forms of sponsorship) are either known or reasonably suspected of being in play. Citations of blogs, websites, government agencies, or other sources that either lack a peer-review process or that are known to publish researchers with undisclosed pecuniary biases, are not acceptable unless flagged appropriately and critiqued. For the competent sources cited, relevant theories and experimental findings need to be adequately interpreted and explained in the submission. The reference list should include active hyperlinks to the URLs of all entries and these entries should also be hyperlinked to the in text reference: this approach can be used in MS Word and makes omissions of references in the text and list at the end of the article a thing of the past. Authors are urged to use an appropriate search engine to track down a DOI or URL for every entry in their Reference list.

Authors are free to offer hunches, inferences, and hypothetical conclusions based on their own best judgment, but such statements should not be based solely on opinion. Of course, legal opinions, in the technical sense, may be offered where appropriate and identified as such, but, in general, this journal does not solicit or accept mere opinion pieces. We will apply the Feynman rule: “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” Areas of interest may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• disease conditions targeted for prevention (or not targeted, and why);
• effects of adjuvants aiming to enhance the impact of active components of vaccines;
• antiseptics, antibiotics, etc. incorporated to prevent unintended infections;
• interactions of targeted and non-targeted pathogens in recipients of vaccines;
• effects on microbiota, mitochondria, essential components of the CNS, etc.;
• measured efficacy and risks of distinct delivery vectors, including recombinant DNA;
• interactions with other medicines, supplements, and biophysical conditions;
• lateral transmission of targeted pathogens to individuals or groups;
• quality control in the manufacture of pathogens or components of vaccines;
• measures of positive and/or negative impacts on immune defense systems;
• epidemiological dynamics of the uptake of vaccines on diseases, deaths, and morbidity;
• national and international vaccination policies in relation to any of the foregoing;
• studies of vulnerable populations and their differential sensitivities to vaccines;
• well-designed comparisons of vaccinated versus unvaccinated persons and groups;
• computer modeling, theory, and empirical studies of the “herd immunity” doctrine;
• critical examination of field-trials preceding licensing and distribution of vaccines;
• historical, legal, and policy studies examining measured benefits and risks.

Letters and Commentaries

We do not publish traditional "Letters to the Editor" because our intention is to do a full-fledged peer-review of everything we publish. Therefore, we ask those familiar with the traditional approach of writing "Letters to the Editor" to consider putting their comments into the form of an article commenting on one or more other articles already published. The article processing charges will apply as usual and the work will need to be templated and treated very much as any other article we publish. Comments are invited on articles already published (and our authors will be invited to respond to any comments we publish, with no upper limit on the number of exchanges): comments may address, for instance, relevant work that was not cited but should have been, how to strengthen an experimental design or theoretical argument, suggesting a follow-up on original research, presenting compelling counter-evidence, and so forth.

Reviews and Editorials

Reviews and editorials may address any of the foregoing problematic issues. It is recommended that authors submitting work in these categories consult featured reviews by Cochrane to help them in constructing an acceptable article. The journal will also occasionally publish “book reviews” focusing on one or more books or monographs, but scholarly review articles and editorials should address issues of general interest to professional clinicians, researchers, policy-makers, and members of the general public. The objective of the IJVTPR is to make peer-reviewed independent research, free from constraints of monetary, political, or any other undisclosed influence, about vaccine theory and practice freely accessible.

Peer Review Process for the IJVTPR

1. Peer Review Policy. Our policy is to peer-review every submission that is relevant to any of the subject-matter areas summarized above. Any submissions that are judged outside the scope of the journal, or that violate our no ad hominem policy, may be rejected without further review. In cases of doubt, reviewers may nonetheless be called upon to make sure no worthy submission is mishandled. However, we do not accept advertising or marketing materials in any form even if it is well-disguised and presented as if it were genuine academic research. Nor do we condone or accept papers from authors who have not openly declared known conflicts of interest, or ones that we suspect and believe should be brought out into the open, i.e., be declared plainly. We will make explicit here that we do not regard active hyperlinking of published material (required of our authors for the sake of our readers in order to make relevant material easily accessible to reader/researchers) as the sort of "advertising" or "marketing" that we are determined not to engage in.
   
   Apart from this peer-reviewed journal, it seems that there are exceedingly few academic journals that are not controlled directly, or indirectly, by the very multi-billion dollar industries of pharmaceuticals, medicines, medicinal procedures, hospitals, clinics, and their collaborating government agencies that are not largely controlled, and effectively owned by parties with deeply conflicted financial and other vested interests.  For that reason we are determined to avoid any financial ties to advertisers or marketeers seeking to control the material published in the IJVTPR. 
   
   
2. Peer Review Practice. Typically, at least two reviewers from the Editorial Board, all of whom serve as volunteers at their own expense and of their own free will, are called upon to examine and critique materials submitted only if it is in the subject-matter areas within the scope of this journal. The technically complex and abstract theory, practice, and research pertaining to vaccines will almost always involve multiple back and forth interactions asking for detailed revisions, clarifications, and the like with three to seven reviewers examining and critiquing every article before it is published.
   
   Contributing authors are asked to provide adequate evidence of their own qualifications through their ORCID number, and by giving an accurate and up-to-date summary of their own experience and research relevant to whatever work they are submitting for consideration.  Items that draw on the contributor’s prior published work may be acceptable with full disclosure of any prior book or other academic publication(s) where the work appeared previously, but must be openly disclosed, and will always be judged on the merits.
   
   
3. Plagiarism, which is exceedingly unlikely to get past the first step in the review process, will be discovered if and when it occurs, and will absolutely not be tolerated. Material may be quoted verbatim with accurate citation of the source, and paraphrased material may be used with appropriate credit to the source, but verbatim insertion of 7 or more of someone else's words without the appropriate use of quotation marks and credit to the source is unacceptable.  If in doubt, authors are urged always to give credit to the original source and when paraphrasing to check the original to make sure whole passages are not inadvertently inserted without appropriate quotation marks and detailed credit (with the page number or paragraph number, as needed) so readers can find and check the original source for themselves. 
   
   
4. Conflicts of Interest. We are most concerned about the kind of conflicts that promise in some way to put money in the pocket of any would-be contributor. With that in mind, the IJVTPR policy conforms to the recommendations detailed by the Committee on Publication Ethics as discussed at https://publicationethics.org/ and as spelled out at the PLoS ONE site https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests with this singular exception: The IJVTPR aims for the higher standard of complete financial independence from the typical vested interests of the medical/pharmaceutical/governmental hegemony that for some years now, has dominated academic publishing especially in the multi-trillion dollar industry of the pharmaceuticals, genetic therapies, vaccines, and all that is associated with the subject-matter of this journal. We do not accept advertising of any kind and the minimal publication fees paid by contributors (that can be and are waived upon reasonable requests) only cover expenses for software, archiving, the Digital Object Identifiers, processing of meta-data, and other necessities.
   
   
5. Declaration of Purpose: The journal exists as a non-profit entity solely for the purpose of public education. Its first issue was published July 15, 2020, and, to this date, it remains, as far as is known, the only academic peer-reviewed open access journal that is completely free to readers and accessible to independent researchers who are quite generally precluded from publishing theory and research that does not conform to the marketing and propaganda objectives of the mainstream medical/academic journals that are charging about ten times the fees that enable maintenance of the IJVTPR. The aim of IJVTPR is to offer an outlet for the rational examination of theory and research in this field. Our aim is to avoid and/or expose pretentious “academic” work that is actually being shaped, cherry-picked, and tweaked to conform to the advertising slogans, mantras, and untruths of an industry increasingly dominated not by genuine inquiry and critical thinking, but by propaganda, marketing, profit-margins, and government protections that threaten the freedom of our nation and the people of the whole world.
   
   
6. Conflict of Interest Policy of IJVTPR. In view of the foregoing, our conflict of interest standard is higher, more intense, and stricter than that of the mainsteam journals where editors and staff are generally bankrolled by vested interests that stand to gain monetarily from certain directed research outcomes and prior theoretical commitments that are commonly concealed rather than disclosed. We refer all of our users to the long-standing and irrefragable claims of Professor John Ioannidis of Stanford, and his collaborators, showing that much of what is published in the mainstream journals is false and in many cases is designed in such a manner as to obtain a particular marketing objective that covers up rather than reveals the truth of the issues supposedly at stake (Ioannidis, 2005; Fanelli et al., 2018). Much of what is published as academic “research” is actually known to be propaganda guided by the interests of advertising. Most mainstream academic/medical publishing is being done in collusion with the CDC, FDA, the huge manufacturers of drugs, therapeutics, and “gain of function” potential pandemic pathogens (PPPs) represented to the public either as non-existent — as claimed by Anthony Fauci under oath (2012); but see Fleming (2021) for a long trail of research explicitly designed to create the COVID-19 “pandemic” and boasted about by Fauci himself (see Figure 1 in Broudy & Kyrie (2021, p. 150; published in the New York Post ) — or merely as defensive precautions by a benevolent government. To all that, the IJVTPR is an appropriate and needed independent academic response.
   
   
7. Peer-Review Limitations Acknowledged. There can be no completely perfect peer-review system, but our goal is to rely on the best and most qualified examination of the theory and research submitted for review that can be had.
   
   We do not subscribe to the concept of “blinded” review which we consider to be pretentious and mostly untrue as the cited works above already have shown.
   
   We prefer and generally require, except where the safety of an interlocutor may actually or potentially be at risk, or in exceptional cases where an interlocutor has explicitly asked for whatever reasons, not to be identified.
   
   Open critical and thoughtful exchanges in which reviewers interact freely with submitting authors to obtain the best work that can be produced is our policy. Academic research and theory, and especially publications such as those that appear in the IJVTPR are always to be regarded as “progress reports” subject to amplification, correction of errors that may be discovered at any time, and always subject to ongoing critical review, debate, and continued open inquiry.
   
   The purpose of peer-review is to ensure open discussion by qualified academics who are diligently pursuing comprehension and representation of experimentally verifiable knowledge — in keeping with, as we have said, the “Feynman rule” — if it does not agree with well-designed experimental research the theory is wrong. And, to that rule we may add, if some part of a published work is badly written or incomprehensible, the possibility of replication, or integration of the theory, practice, or research finding(s) potentially at stake is impaired or perhaps entirely inaccessible. So, it follows that the works we publish must be subject to as much rewriting and back-and-forth clarification as needed to make them intelligible.
   
   There is also much to be said for thoughtful and critical examination of ideas, but in the final analysis it is agreement between representations and known facts that is pursued — ordinary truth of the narrative kind (Oller, 2010, 2014). Repeated mantras and propaganda, lies concocted to sell dangerous products (see Fleming’s ground-breaking work, 2021), will be easily recognized in such a context whereas genuine critical thinking and honest pursuit of ordinary truth will also, generally, be known to thoughtful readers.
   
   The old wisdom that truth is known by its fruits, applies. The purpose of peer-review is to ensure, as much as is possible, the honest pursuit of such knowledge — ordinary true representations consistent with observable facts.
   
   
8. More Recent Thoughts from the Editor-in-Chief on Peer-Review for This Journal. As we near the completion of the sixth year of editing and publishing this journal (beginning about a year before the first issue was published on July 15, 2020 forward to today’s date of April 19, 2025), here are some things I think I have learned.
   
   (a) First and foremost, academic publishing is a team sport. Interactive reading, writing, and re-reading with more re-writing, in multiple cycles, is the norm for this journal and I believe it is usually required. The reason? Because “good writing” though a pretty fiction hardly exists. Only good re-writing can be found, I believe, in the real world. To achieve good "re-writing" requires multiple back-and-forth cycles, reading, writing, re-reading, re-writing, and so forth. Why should we put ourselves to such trouble? Charles S. Peirce wrote many years ago: "The best maxim in writing, perhaps, is really to love your reader for his own sake" (in Fisch, et al., 1982, p . 9). If we commit to that principle, we must be willing to do the work that our love for our readers calls for. This means as many rewrites as necessary to make the work as intelligible, up-to-date, and informative as we can make it.
   
   (b) Good reviewers aim to help authors bring their work up to the highest possible level in the already ongoing worldwide academic discourse concerning vaccine theory, practice, and research. Good academic writing and editing is grounded in and responsive to that ongoing discourse. In my view, that is the sole reason for peer-review. It is not a process for the faint-hearted or for prima donnas. As Solomon observed, “much study is a weariness of the flesh and of the making of many books there is no end”.
   
   (c) In the study of vaccine theory, practice, and research, our goal is to seek the truth and make it known. We do not do it for money, fame, or material rewards, but for the sake of generations to come. In the course of the required multiple cycles of back-and-forth work by authors and editors, both sides can learn, as Charles Peirce once put it, we can even benefit from “nauseatingly uncomprehending criticisms”. If that is so, imagine how much more we can learn from reasonable questions, criticisms, efforts to paraphrase-develop-or-amplify, suggestions to enrich the material with more up-to-date or more relevant references, better or more relevant theory, neglected areas of science that are already well-developed in the published scientific literature, or sometimes suggestions may pertain to better organization, clarification of meanings, clearer summarizing, and so forth.
   
   (d) All good editing, I believe, aims toward greater coherence, intelligibility, consistency, informativeness, and above all else connecting everything we publish with the larger academic discourse that is always underway in the worldwide research community. Authors whose work is already perfect in their own eyes, or who see themselves as incontrovertible founts of new wisdom, are advised to seek another outlet for their work.
   
   (e) The editorial process for this journal must be comprehensive. It is not merely about words, phrases, and sentences, but it is about the whole organizational enterprise insofar as submitted research published in this journal must engage coherently and intelligibly with the larger ongoing discourse of a much greater community than we are able to directly represent ourselves. The literature reviewed, or left out; the methods applied, or not; facts considered, or neglected; the theoretical ideas embraced, or rejected; areas of science referred to, or left out must all be taken into account. Everything is fair game in any submission for critical examination, for requests for clarification, suggestions for adding or deleting content, suggested rewrites that authors can take, leave, or paraphrase in their own words. Authors whose writing only needs to be checked for grammar or spelling errors may want to consider getting ChatGPT or some other AI entity to help them self-publish on a blog, or, at any rate, they will probably find it best to submit their work for publication somewhere else. Not here.
   
   (f) It is commonly noted that we stand on the shoulders of our predecessors and that all scientific writing is more or less some form of paraphrase of ideas we all came to understand more or less by thinking through ideas from others. Even original creative insights that dramatically reconceptualize prior knowledge, theory, or findings tend to appear in the minds of multiple authors almost simultaneously. This fact suggests that there are not any creative or new ideas that cannot be shared in some manner through the miraculous powers of communication. And, in the end, the ideas worth sharing are not uniquely our own property to begin with. If they are so original they cannot be shared, there would be no possibility, much less a rational intention of sharing them. Once in the public arena, even the most original ideas become available to everyone who takes the trouble to understand them. 
   
   (g) Authors are ultimately responsible to accept or reject proposed edits, and in the final analysis, the editors are responsible for making a judgment on whether or not to publish a work no matter how many cycles of editing it may have already been put through. Authors can also withdraw a submission at any point right up to its final acceptance for publication. Even after any given work is published, that article can still be critiqued, re-examined, even ripped to shreds by some skilled debater (possibly one of the editors of this journal), or defended by its authors (and/or accepting editors), but we will not retract any article we publish.
   
   (h) Our own work in editing this journal is not only for the health and welfare of the present generation of authors, editors, and readers and their children etc., but we are always looking toward the future of the children not yet born and their unborn children. We look toward a time when those doing this work now will no longer be around. Our work is mainly in the hope of ensuring the future for unknown generations yet to come.

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The information on this website, and whatever may appear in the IJVTPR, is not intended as a diagnosis, recommended treatment, prevention, or cure for any human condition or medical procedure that may be referred to in any way. Users and readers who may be parents, guardians, caregivers, clinicians, or relatives of persons impacted by any of the morbid conditions, procedures, or protocols that may be referred to, must use their own judgment concerning specific applications. The contributing authors, editors, and persons associated in any capacity with this website and with the journal disclaim any liability or responsibility to any person or entity for any harm, financial loss, physical injury, or other penalty that may stem from any use or application in any context of information, conclusions, research findings, opinions, errors, or any statements found on this website or in the IJVTPR. The material presented is freely offered to all users who may take an interest in examining it, but how they may choose to apply any part of it, is the sole responsibility of the viewer/user. If material is quoted or reprinted, users are asked to give credit to the source/author and to conform to the non-commercial, no derivatives, requirements of the Creative Commons License 4.0 NC ND.