Submission Guidelines

 

The present guidelines aim to describe the key aspects of the submission, reviewing and publication process at JCLS. Please read this document carefully if you consider submitting an article to the journal.

We hope these guidelines are useful as they are, but would also like to encourage you to contact us at info@jcls.io with any questions that are not addressed or any issues that are not explained clearly. We will be happy to help and thankful for ideas on how to improve the submission guidelines.

1. Overview of the Submission, Reviewing and Publication Process

2. General Information on the Journal

3. Preparing your Submission

4. Article Structure

5. Publication Fees

1. Overview of the Submission, Reviewing and Publication Process

The process from registration to publication is roughly as follows (for details on each step, see the information below):

  • Writing: You are welcome to develop your text using your favorite LaTeX editor or an online, collaborative LaTeX editor (e.g., Overleaf). Be sure, however, to use the JCLS LaTeX template package.
  • Submission: Once your article is ready for submission, register an account and create an entry for your submission on Janeway and upload all relevant files there. This will launch the reviewing process.
  • [journal-only track only:]
    • Reviewing: You will receive two types of feedback on your article. First, via Janeway, you will receive the editor’s decision regarding your submission as well as suggestions for revisions made by the reviewers. Second, you will receive point-by-point comments directly in a copy of your LaTeX manuscript in the journal’s Overleaf instance.
    • Revision/final version: In case of acceptance, authors are expected to submit a revised version of their article that takes reviewers’ comments. You will receive the editor’s decision regarding the acceptance of the final version.
  • [journal+conference track only:]
    • Reviewing: You will receive two types of feedback on your article. First, via Janeway, you will receive the editor’s decision regarding the acceptance of your submission as conference contribution as well as suggestions for revisions made by the reviewers. Second, you will receive point-by-point comments directly in a copy of your LaTeX manuscript in the journal’s Overleaf instance.
    • Publication of conference version: If your submission is accepted for the conference, you have the option to make minor revisions to your paper before a ›conference version‹ of your submission will be published as PDF.
    • Revisions: Following the conference, authors are expected to submit a revised version of their article that takes reviewers’ comments as well as feedback from the audience at the conference into account. Authors are expected to summarize their revisions in a brief statement. 
    • Second round of reviewing: In this second round of reviewing, reviewers assess the way in which authors have responded to reviewers’ comments and conference.
    • Decision about journal acceptance: You will receive the editor’s decision regarding the acceptance of your submission as journal article.
  • Publication: The final version of the submission is copy-edited, layouted and published as HTML and PDF in the annual conference issue of JCLS. Furthermore,  an XML version is archived by University and State Library Darmstadt.

2. General Information on the Journal

Registration

Authors planning to submit an article to JCLS need to register an account in the JCLS system. This can be done at https://jcls.io/register/step/1/.

Submission Types

JCLS publishes two types of research articles. Submissions in the conference + journal track are peer-reviewed, presented at the conference and revised before being published in the journal, all on a specific annual timeline. Submissions in the journal-only track are peer-reviewed and published in the rolling issue. Information about the current open submission tracks can be found here.

Length

Submissions should be 6000–8000 words in length (headings, notes, code listings, figure captions included, but reference list excluded).

Language

All submissions must be written in English.

Publication Formats

Articles need to be prepared in LaTeX using the template provided by JCLS. Articles will be published in three formats: HTML, PDF and XML. All three formats are made publicly available.

Licence

As an diamond open access journal committed to accessibility and re-usability, JCLS publishes all articles with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY) licence.

Research Integrity

JCLS is committed to the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity.

3. Preparing your submission

Format

For preparing submissions, authors are expected to use the LaTeX template provided by JCLS (be sure to use the LuaLaTex compiler). For the preparation of the LaTeX document, authors are welcome to use their preferred LaTeX-compatible writing environment or an online, collaborative LaTeX editor (e.g., Overleaf). An up-to-date TeXLive or MiKTeX installation, including biblatex and LuaLaTeX should suffice as LaTeX editor.

Style Guide

Please use the JCLS Style Guide. For any aspect of style, copyediting and layout that is not covered by the JCLS Style Guide, or when in doubt, please follow the detailed guidance provided by the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition, 2017).

Author Metadata

Author metadata needs to be provided in the file called “authors.tex” that is part of the LaTeX template. Please follow the instructions provided there. Relevant metadata includes last name, first name, ORCID, affiliation and email address, as well as a description of the author’s contribution to the submitted paper. These authors’ contributions need to be described using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CrediT, see https://credit.niso.org). In case you would like to mention additional contributors to your submission who do not, however, qualify as authors, please use the “Acknowledgements” section to do so.

Abstract

At submission time, please provide an abstract for your article. Abstracts should be succinct (100–150 words in length) but provide essential information on the article, including mention of the key issue that is addressed, the materials that are analyzed, the methods used, and the key results or contributions of the article.

Keywords

Four to six keywords should be added at submission time. Keywords should cover the following areas, as applicable: Type of data analysed, language(s) and period(s) of the data analysed, issue addressed, methods used, subfield of CLS concerned.

References

References need to be included in the text using the LaTeX \cite{} mechanism as in-text references. Complete bibliographical metadata (including e.g. first names of all authors and editors, publisher for monographs and conference proceedings, and DOIs wherever available) need to be provided using the BibTeX file in the LaTeX template. Please make sure the BibTeX file is clean and complete (ISBN, ISSN, abstracts and keywords should be removed). In-text references and the bibliography will be styled automatically according to the Chicago Manual of Style citation guidelines. 

Footnotes

Footnotes can be used for extended and/or commented bibliographical references or additional information (but not for regular references). They need to be included in the text using the LaTeX \footnote{} mechanism. Footnotes will be layouted automatically.

Figures

Figures are included in the ZIP archive when submitting the article to the JCLS system. They need to be provided in a vector format (SVG) or in a high resolution pixel-based format (300dpi or better, as JPEG or PNG).

Figures should not be numbered manually, but using the relevant LaTeX mechanism. They each must be provided with a caption (using \caption{}) placed below the figure.

When submitting figures, please note that all copyright issues need to be resolved by the authors. The journal aims to publish all content, including figures, with a Creative Commons Attribution licence. A brief licence statement (name of creator and CC licence) needs to be included in the captions. Please contact the editors if you plan to use figures from third parties that require a different licence. 

Tables

Tables need to be formatted as LaTeX tables. Please keep tables as simple as possible. Tables should not be numbered manually, but using the relevant LaTeX mechanism. They each must be provided with a caption (using \caption{}) placed below the table. 

Anonymization

In order to allow for blind reviewing, JCLS asks you to anonymize your submission carefully. Anonymization by the authors includes especially:

  • Make sure not to mention your name, email, or institution in any part of the main text (the author information and contributions sections will be anonymized by the editors).
  • If citing your own work, remove first person pronouns (e.g. instead of »As we found in Miller et al. (2020) …«, please use »As Miller et al. (2020) found …«).
  • Check and anonymize metadata of any other files.
  • Anonymize your code and repositories, either by removing links with »[REPOSITORY REMOVED]« or by anonymizing the repositories (GitHub-repositories can be anonymized with https://anonymous.4open.science/).

Please note that all information given in the acknowledgement.tex and authors.tex files will be anonymized by the editors.

Data and Code

In JCLS’s review process, there is a basic and an extended code and data review. The basic review is mandatory and is part of the normal reviewing process. The extended review is an optional step that authors can request for their article once it has been accepted in principle (e.g. for the annual conference). There is a separate document that provides further information on the code and data review. 

 

4. Article structure

Article Sections

Apart from the abstract, the introduction, the main body of the submission and the conclusion, submissions must include the following, mandatory sections: Data and Code Availability, Author Contributions, and References.

Submissions may optionally include any or all of the following sections: Acknowledgements, Ethics Statement, Supplementary Materials, and Competing Interests. These sections are placed after the Data and Code Availability section and before the References section.

See the separate entries about these sections below.

Data and Code Availability

At the time of the final publication, and to the extent that it is feasible, JCLS expects authors to make data and code used in a submission freely and reliably available to others. We recognize that copyright and/or privacy law as well as other issues can be an impediment to this vision and will support authors in developing a suitable strategy in such cases.

The “Data and Code Availability” statement serves to include information relevant to these issues. At submission time, one or several repositories containing data and code, suitably anonymized, should be indicated here. For final publication, key requirements are that data and code have been deposited in a trusted, public long-term repository such as Zenodo or Figshare and that a DOI or a similar stable identifier is provided. A brief explanation of the data and code made available should be included. In case authors can only provide limited access to data and code, these limitations should also be described in this section.

Authors who can only provide limited access to data and code are requested to include a statement, during the submission process, in the section ›Comments to the editor‹: There, please explain your situation and outline how you can provide data and/or code to the reviewers non-publicly.

References

The reference list will be generated automatically from the BibTeX file. If you discover errors in the bibliographical metadata, please fix them in the BibTeX file.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements need to be included in the file “acknowledgement.tex” of the LaTeX template. The corresponding section of the submission will then be generated automatically. The acknowledgements can be used flexibly to include funding information, to thank reviewers or to acknowledge other types of assistance in preparing the submission. You are free to use the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CrediT, https://credit.niso.org) in this section as well. (This section will be anonymized automatically for reviewers.)

Author Contributions

This mandatory section will be generated automatically from the author metadata provided in the LaTeX template (see Author Metadata). (This section will be anonymized automatically for reviewers.)

Ethics Statement

If your research involves the use of data that may raise concerns regarding privacy, personal safety, human or animal rights or any other issue related to ethics, provide information here on the ethics clearance procedure that has been followed.

Supplementary Materials

This section can be used to link to supplementary materials other than data and code directly relevant to the paper.

Competing Interests

In case you have any competing interests to declare regarding your article, whether financial or non-financial, personal or non-personal in nature, please explain it succinctly in this section.

5. Publication Fees

JCLS does not require authors to pay an article processing charge (APC) or any other fee in order to publish an article.