An open-access journal dedicated to macular and retinal disease — free to publish, free to read, with every accepted paper accompanied by its full review record.
Aims & Scope
Macula publishes original research, case series, systematic reviews, and imaging reports on diseases affecting the macula and posterior retina — age-related macular degeneration, diabetic macular edema, macular dystrophies and telangiectasia, vitreomacular interface disorders, and inherited retinal disease with macular involvement.
We welcome clinical trials, epidemiological studies, multimodal imaging (OCT, OCT angiography, fundus autofluorescence), pharmacologic and surgical outcomes research, and translational work bridging bench and clinic. Surgical scope includes macular hole and epiretinal membrane repair, vitrectomy for vitreomacular traction, submacular surgery, and complications of macular surgery. Manuscripts are considered from any country, in English.
Editorial Board
Six named members with confirmed institutional affiliations.
Peer Review & AI Policy
Macula pairs conventional expert peer review with an AI-assisted read of every submission. The two run in parallel and are reconciled by the handling editor — the AI never issues a verdict, and it never reviews alone.
The handling editor checks fit with scope, completeness, and reporting-guideline adherence (CONSORT, STROBE, CARE, as applicable) before review begins.
At least two reviewers with relevant expertise in macular or retinal disease assess the manuscript on its scientific merit, exactly as in conventional peer review.
Claude reviews the manuscript for methodological consistency, statistical clarity, adherence to reporting guidelines, and internal contradictions, flagging items for the editor and human reviewers to weigh — not resolving them.
The editor merges human and AI notes into a single report, removes anything non-constructive, and returns it to the authors. The final report is published alongside the accepted article.
What this does not mean: the AI does not author a review, does not vote on acceptance or rejection, and has no access to a manuscript beyond what is needed for the checks above. All editorial decisions remain with named human editors.
Confidentiality: unpublished manuscripts are processed under the same confidentiality terms as any reviewer — not used to train external models, not retained beyond the review cycle.
Editorial discretion: non-constructive or pejorative language, from either human reviewers or the AI, is removed by the editor before a report reaches the author or is published — the substance of a criticism is always kept, its tone is not.
Author Guidelines
Ethics & Licensing
All accepted articles are published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY) license, free to read and reuse with attribution, immediately upon publication.
To limit conflicts of interest, no more than 25% of the articles published in any calendar year may list an editor, editorial board member, or reviewer as an author — consistent with DOAJ's endogeny criteria. All submissions are screened for plagiarism and image manipulation before review.