Submissions

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.

The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, or RTF document file format.
Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
The text is double-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustration, figure, and table titles are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end. All illustrations, figures, and tables should be uploaded as supplementary files.
The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.

Author Guidelines

Solicited and contributed manuscripts must be double-spaced and submitted online via this site. Submission of an original manuscript to the Journal will be taken to mean that it represents original work not previously published, that it is not being considered elsewhere for publication; that the author is willing to license the content to the journal by means of an exclusive licence as per a contract that will be sent to the author just prior to publication and, if accepted for publication, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in any language, without the consent of the journal for a period of one year and without acknowledgment of its initial publication in the journal thereafter. Authors must take full responsibility for all figures, etc., and present them as print-ready copy.

Go to the registration page to register as a user of the online system if you do not yet have a username and password. Ensure that you register as an 'Author' when creating your account.

Once you have an online account, login and click on the 'Author' link. The 'Author' page will include a link to begin the online submission process.

When submitting online, please note that you need to click on 'Save/Continue' at the bottom of each page in order to proceed to the next step in the submission process. There are 5 steps to an online submission:

    * In Step 1, please ensure that:
          o You select a section from the 'Journal Section' menu.
          o You review, complete, and check off each item in the 'Submission Checklist'.
    * In Step 2, please ensure that:
          o You provide your personal information (name, email, etc.).
          o You provide the title of your article, media work, or reviewed book.
    * In Step 3, please ensure that:
o You upload a copy of your manuscript in Word (.docx). PLEASE UPLOAD A FULLY INTEGRATED MANUSCRIPT, COMPLETE WITH FIGURES/TABLES/IMAGES, AS WELL AS ADDING ALL FIGURES/TABLES/IMAGES IN THE SUPPLEMENTARY FILE SECTION; MP3 for audio files or MPEG for video files.
          o You remove all personal, identifying information from the submission file as per the provided instructions. Please note that this is not required for book reviews.
          o Tables and figures may be uploaded in their appropriate areas within the manuscript if they are .doc documents.
    * In Step 4, any figures or images that are not .doc should be uploaded as supplementary files.
        o Ensure all personal, identifying information is removed from the supplementary files as per the provided instructions. Please note that this is not required for book reviews.
          o Figures and images should be saved and uploaded to supplementary files using high quality image formats: BMP, PNG, TIFF, EPS, JPEG (uncompressed); not GIF or compressed JPEG.
          o Audio and video files should be saved and uploaded using MP3 for audio and MPEG for video.
    * In Step 5, finish your submission by reviewing your submission details and confirming that your submission is complete.

Reviews
Interested in doing a book or media review? SRC is interested in commissioning reviews from a wide variety of scholars and students.

Book Review Guidelines
Book review guidelines can be obtained from the Managing Editor: bittmanme@shaw.ca .

Article Abstracts
For each article (but not the commentaries or the research in brief), the author must provide a 100-word abstract in English and French. These summaries should be placed immediately below the paper title, author, and institutional affiliation. Each summary should be indented 2.5 cm (1/2") and double-spaced. For those who require the service, translations of abstracts can be undertaken by the Journal at a cost of 25 cents per word.

Author Bio
The author(s) must supply a brief (25-word) bio giving name, rank, institution, institutional address, and email address. Author information and bio should be entered in Step 2 of the online submission process, and not as part of the submission file itself. For example, Rowland Lorimer is Professor Emeritus and was the Founding Director of the Master of Publishing Program and the Canadian Institute for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, BC. Email: lorimer@sfu.ca .

General Formatting
Authors are advised to review the style used by the journal and to submit manuscripts that follow that style as closely as possible. SRC style is based on the American Psychological Association (APA) manual with Canadian spellings. There should be no first-line-of-paragraph indents.

Manuscript Length Guidelines

Article: max. of 6,000 words
Field Note: max. of 5,000 words
Book Review: max. of 1,500 words

Heading Styles
Format each as per the following descriptions:

* First level headings: (Boldface, first word capitalized, justified at left margin, on a separate line)

* Second level headings: (Plain type, first word capitalized, justified at left margin, on a separate line)
* Third level headings: (Italic type, first word capitalized, justified at left margin, on a separate line)

Citations in the Text
    * If the work has more than one author, give all the names the first time the work is referred to, then et al. thereafter.
    * When titles of journals or books are mentioned, they should be italicized, not underlined.
    * If the citation follows a quotation, place the parentheses after the quotation marks but before the end punctuation. For example: ''for the future of telecommunications'' (Smith, 1987, p. 42).

References
    * Following the Notes, list only those works actually cited in the text.
    * The heading for the references should be bold and left-justified, as References.
    * Single-space all entries.
    * Begin each entry at the margin and indent the subsequent lines by 1/2 inch; i.e., hanging indent.
    * Separate the main items in each entry by periods (i.e., name of author, publication date, title of book, etc.) Leave one space between a period and next part of the entry.
    * Publication date should be in parentheses following author name. Title of book should be in italics and only the first word and first word after a colon should be capitalized (see examples above).
    * For articles, the title should be in plain text, with only the first word capitalized; the title of the periodical or edited book should be in italics.
    * For journals the volume number of the periodical volume is in italics, with the issue number in plain text and parentheses. Page numbers are given at the end of the reference but without the requirement for 'page'' or 'p.' See examples below.
    * The formats must be strictly adhered to in terms of punctuation and order of the items within each entry:

Book: Amin, Ash & Cohendet, Patrick. (2004). Architectures of knowledge: Firms, capabilities and communities. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Article in a book: Longford, Gordon. (2004). Rethinking the virtual state: A critical perspective on e-government. In Marita Moll & Leslie Regan Shade (Eds.), Seeking convergence in policy and practice (pp. 109-140). Ottawa, ON: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Article in a journal: Heyer, Paul. (2008). Live from the Met: Digial broadcast cinema, medium theory, and opera for the masses. Canadian Journal of Communication, 33(4), 591-604.

Government document: Royal Commission on newspapers. (1981). Report. Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada.

Website: Gurstein, Michael. (2000). Effective use: A community informatics strategy beyond the digitial divide. First Monday, 8(12). URL: http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_12/ gurstein/index.html [March 4, 2005].

Use of Notes
    * Footnotes are not used in this format; only endnotes are used.
    * Do not use automatically formatted endnotes. Notes should appear at the end of the text and before the references (typed in a regular text). Endnote numbers in the text should be regular text formatted as eight-point superscript.
    * Use of notes should be very sparing. They should be used only where additional explanations are absolutely necessary and cannot be incorporated in the text. Maximum: 10.
    * Notes should be listed after the text and before the list of biographical references.
    * The heading for the notes should be bold and left-justified, as Notes.

Keywords
SRC requests that authors assign 3-5 keywords to their article.

Removal of Identifying Information

To enable blind peer review: prior to uploading your submission files please remove all identifying information, including identifying information in the actual text of the manuscript as well as all identifying information saved internally by software such as Microsoft Word as part of each file's attributes and properties.

Technical Reports

SRC looks for technical reports that have a wide implication for scholarly communication, outlining a technical approach conceptually to a workable technical solution related to online journal publication. The article should provide the foundations, limitations, and recommendations of research, with a call for public comment and scrutiny.

Commentary

Commentaries, as informed analysis of a critical issue, may or may not be classified as original research. This is an editor’s decision. They should encompass a broad set of initiatives in scholarly and research communication.

Field Notes

In setting up SRC the editorial team realized that there was a great deal of activity involved behind the scenes in inventing and developing digital publishing technology. SRC wanted to encourage the documentation of that process and thus created a section called Technical Reports. Following the example of our colleagues in the health professions we are inaugurating yet another useful category to document scholarly and research communication practice. The category will be called "Field Notes" and its intent is to allow those involved in scholarly publishing to share experience and knowledge that they think would be helpful to others. The category will be peer reviewed to ensure that others think the content useful. It is not our intent to set definitive boundaries but Field Notes could encompass the following:

accounts of journal foundings
financial management
encouraging timely peer reviews
strategic planning with relationship to secondary aggregators
legal issues
the development of performance measures
adapting to multiple formats
relationships with commercial publishers.

In overview, SRC is interested in publishes practical accounts of challenges faced by individuals performing the work of scholarly publishing (as opposed to studying scholarly and research communication) when such an account conveys a broadly applicable lesson of interest to our readers. These articles are meant to serve as a resource for individuals facing pragmatic issues in the work of producing scholarly and research communication materials.

Some helpful guidelines. Those wishing to submit to Field Notes should indicate this in their submission and should feel free to submit articles as short as 1,000 words but probably no longer than 5,000 words. In addition, authors should consider the following, which has been adapted from the British Medical Journal.

• Please explain to readers in a few opening sentences why they should read the article and what they will learn.

• Provide some context for the article both what the activity was trying to address and where other related accounts can be found. We don't want an extensive literature review but we do want you to establish that someone on the world may have reported on a parallel experience. The reader should have some sense of what prompted the article. (Include references)

• In the actual account of the activity, please avoid personal narrative.

• Consider focusing on recommendations as you draw the article to a close.

• Another useful approach might be to describe the problem experienced, what tools and techniques were tried - which ones were successful and which ones weren't, costs/benefits, risk/reward, and then a section reflecting on the problem and lessons learned.

Copyright Notice

SRC embraces online publishing and open access to back issues under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Licence. This license allows users to download an article and share it with others as long as authorship and original publication is acknowledged and a link is made (in electronic media) to the original article. The article can be quoted but not changed and presented differently.

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.