Submissions

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Author Guidelines

Authors should refer to the Journal's Focus & Scope document, and the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the journal layout template in Microsoft Word or LaTeX formats. Authors submitting in LaTeX format should upload both a PDF and the source files.

Blinding Manuscripts for Review
JLA conducts a double-blind review process such that authors do not know the identity of reviewers and reviewers do not know the identity of authors. The following steps will help ensure that you submit a properly blinded manuscript for review

Do Not Include Author Information on the First Page of the Manuscript
The title page should only include the manuscript title, abstract and keywords as initial information.

Identifying information, including names, affiliations, and contact information for ALL authors must be entered into the appropriate OJS submission fields only. Following COPE standards, changes to authors once a manuscript has been submitted will not be allowed except in the case that a clear reason for the change in authorship is given and all authors have given their written consent to the change.

Do Not Include Identifying Details in the Body of the Manuscript
Details that could identify the authors, such as titles of projects and websites, should be blinded by replacing the actual details with a placeholder. E.g. [Project Title] or [URL]

Do Not Include Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements can be added in the final revisions once a manuscript has been accepted.

References in the Manuscript Should be Presented in the Third Person
Use of references in the manuscript should not disclose the identity of the authors. The best way to do this is by including citations to the authors’ own work in the third person. E.g. In a paper by Author Chang, the reference could read “Drawing on the previous method developed by Chang et al. (2015)….” with the full citation by Chang included in the reference list.

In situations where either (a) the current work is so intimately related to the prior work that such a third-person reference would still disclose identity or (b) the number of references to prior work by the same author would de facto reveal their identity, place holders should be used instead. E.g. “Elaborating the same analysis method (Authors, 2014; 2015) that was used on the same data previously (Authors, 2016)…” In this case the full citation should not be included in the reference list.

For Revised Submissions, Do Not Include Author Names in the Reviewer Response Letter
When making a revised submission, you should include a separate document that clearly explains how you have addressed the comments that were raised in the reviews and decision letter. This reviewer response letter will be shared with the reviewers and therefore must not contain author names or any other identifying information. The reviewer response letter should be uploaded as a supplemental file in the OJS submission system.

Document properties and personal information should be inspected and removed.
In Microsoft Word, go to File > ‘Inspect Document’ > click ‘inspect’ and then ‘remove all’ under the properties and personal information. This removes author names from the document metadata. Detailed instructions may be found in Microsoft Office help (and, for Mac), or equivalent for your software.

Unblinding the Final Submission of an Accepted Manuscript
When a manuscript has been accepted for publication, you will be asked to resubmit the approved version with all identifying information restored. The first page of the final, accepted manuscript should include the title of the manuscript, authors' names, affiliations, and e-mails. All placeholders should be replaced and acknowledgments should be added at this time. Any in-text citations that had placeholders should also now be replaced and the full citations incorporated alphabetically into the reference list.

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.

  1. The submission must follow the guidance appropriate to the section to which it is submitted and include all required elements, as detailed in the Journal’s Focus & Scope materials, including word limits, document sections, inclusion of ‘notes’, etc.
  2. The submission has not been previously published, nor is it under review elsewhere.
  3. Submissions that extend previously published conference papers are welcome provided that the journal submission has sufficiently been extended (at least 25-30% of new contribution). Submissions that are extensions of previously published conference papers must be accompanied by a cover letter outlining the new contributions.
  4. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Journal Layout Template (in Word or LaTeX), is written in English, and provides URLs and DOIs for the references where available.
  5. Author lists contain all those, and only those, who meet the JLA criteria for authorship by (1) making substantial contributions to study conception, design, or analysis and interpretation; (2) being involved in the writing of the manuscript; and (3) approval of and responsibility for the final version. All authors must adhere to Journal Policies, including the Authorship Statement.

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

    1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons License, Attribution - NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
    2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
    3. Authors are permitted to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process. Where an earlier version of a manuscript was available publicly, this should be (1) noted to the editors in an accompanying file or submission note, and (2) if the paper is accepted, added to the declaration of interests section of the manuscript. Any preprint version should be updated to refer readers to the journal version as the document of record. The JLA supports open dissemination of knowledge as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).