Steps for Submitting a Manuscript
- Prepare your manuscript according to the journal’s template.
- Make sure your work complies with our open science and diversity guidelines.
- Complete the online submission form. Depending on what type of work you submit, this will take approximately 5–15 minutes. A list with all possible questions is available here.
- Submit your manuscript (incl. all relevant files, e.g., title page) via the journal's submission system.
Submission Preparation Checklist
As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
- Journal template: The submission was prepared according to the guidelines in the journal's template. (See Step 1 above.)
- Online submission form: Authors have completed the mandatory submission form for the current submission. (See Step 2 above.)
- Original work: The submission has not been previously published, nor is it currently submitted to another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in “Comments to the Editor”).
- Acknowledging and citing previous work: Previous or concurrent publications of the author(s) based on the same or closely related research are properly acknowledged and cited. It is made clear in the manuscript in which way(s) it represents a novel contribution to warrant consideration for publication. Note: Replications of previous work are explicitly welcomed if identified as such.
- Authorship: Authorship and Contributorship Information: All authors are (1) named in the submission's title page (not sent to reviewers), (2) aware of its submission to the journal, and they (3) approve of it. If a paper is conditionally accepted, a mandatory Contributorship Template needs to be filled out where information on all authors is provided, including their respective contributorships (according to the CRediT System, see also the web-based app tenzing). Contributions that fall short of authorship are mentioned in the Acknowledgments section of the submission (title page). It is strongly encouraged that authors consider the respective degree of privilege/marginalisation that they are experiencing in the academic and the wider societal context to determine authorship (e.g., by putting authors who are least privileged first, as this brings usually the most prestige in academia).
- Consent for data storage: All authors of the submitted manuscript consent to the storage of their personal data transferred in conjunction with the submission and in accordance with the journal's privacy statement.
- Ethical standards: If applicable, all relevant ethical standards for research involving human or non-human (animal) participants have been met. The manuscript includes an ethics statement that provides the appropriate information (e.g., applied standards, institutional review, etc.; see journal's template).
- Data anonymization (if applicable): All research data have been fully anonymized.
- Use of copyrighted materials: No copyrighted material is used unless that material has also been made available under a CC-BY license.