Submission Information for Authors

Here you will find all the necessary information to submit a manuscript. Please read these guidelines carefully before submitting. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to send us an email at [email protected], or contact our Editorial Team. Once you are ready to submit, you can do so through our portal..

Scope

We welcome articles from any academic discipline.

We do not accept submissions of articles which have been published in other peer reviewed journals.

We do accept submissions of articles which have been published on pre-print servers such as Zenodo or any of the Arxivs, provided that the be licensed under an CC-BY 4.0 or more liberal license, such as CC0 or a public domain dedication.

Article-processing and publication fees

JOTE does not charge any processing fees.

We have been funded by the Utrecht University Funds and the Descartes Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science and the Humanities. This gives us the resources needed to process the articles and establish the digital infrastructure needed to have a functional online journal without needing to charge individual authors for the right to publish.

Copyright and Credit

License

You agree to our Open Access Policy. (in brief: you retain all copyright, agree to publish the paper under the CC-BY 4.0 license, and give JOTE right to first publication.)

Attribution

Any third-party-owned materials used must be identified with appropriate credit lines, and permission must be obtained from the copyright holder to publish it in all formats of the journal.

Consent

All patients included within case reports or other document types in which an individual or a group of individuals can be identified must have signed consent forms, or had had their guardian do so.

Structure

Empirical articles

• 5 keywords

• A take-home message: a brief summary of maximum three sentences and 50 words that signals reader the main conclusion of the text. It should be a straight-to-the-point conclusion that contextualizes the readers into ‘how’ to read the article.

• An abstract between 150 and 250 words.

• A purpose section of maximum 250 words, including the objective(s) of the study and the initial hypothesis employed. This section outlines the original idea behind the article, and we encourage authors to refer back again to it in the conclusion to explain in which regards the research failed (with regards to the initial purpose) or changed. This section will be placed near the discussion.

• An introduction.

• A method section.

• A discussion.

• A conclusion.

Reflection Articles

There is no set structure for reflection articles.

Meta-Research Articles

There is no set structure for meta-research articles.

Rejected Grant Applications

We are working on an easy submission template for rejected grant applications. For now, email us at [email protected] for information on how to submit and refer to our published grant applications to get an idea what this looks like.

Format

This applies to Empirical, Reflection, and Meta-Research articles.

Word Limit

JOTE does not maintain a word-limit (digital ink is free after all).

You are of course encouraged to write as succinctly as possible.

Formatting & File format

• There are no specific formatting requirements such as font size or typeface employed in the manuscript.

• Submit the manuscript as a .docx file. If you prefer to write in a plaintext format such as .tex, .(r)md, .org etc., you are urged to convert it to .docx before submitting using a tool such as Pandoc.

• When using a citation plugin for a reference manager such as Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, Citavi, or RefWorks, or when using the native citation and bibliography managing capabilities of MS Word or LibreOffice, please leave the citations as they are (i.e., do not convert them to plain text). Keeping the citations in the format used by your citation manager will help speed up the production process.

Anonymization

• To ensure blind peer review, please exclude the names of all authors, affiliations, and contact details from the submitted manuscript.

Tables, figures, and other visual material

How to include visual material

Include all tables, figures, and other material except for (raw) data in the manuscript file. If you want to include external resources that do not fit in the flow of the text, for instance rejection letters for grant applications, please do upload those separately.

Visualization

Prefer visual representations of your data rather than putting them in a plain table. The latter is better served for inclusion in the data which is to be made public, see below. This is not a hard requirement, but it will improve the readability of your article. JOTE has some resources available to aid you in creating visualization, and we have the (limited) capacity to provide a visualization services for free. Please include such a request in the comments to editor on submission if you’re interested.

Citations

Style

Citation and bibliography must be in accordance with the APA Author-Date citation and bibliography system.

In text citations

If you are using a reference manager such as Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, Citavi, or RefWorks, you are encouraged to include a copy or export of your cited works in either Bib(La)Tex (.bib), CSL-JSON (.json), EndNote XML (.xml) or RIS format with your submission. This will help shorten the production cycle of your paper.

Data and Open Science

Datasets

Open science is important, and JOTE wants to help speed up its adoption.

Therefore, when you submit an Empirical or Meta-Research paper in which you have collected, processed, or in any other way generated data, you are required to either

• Publish your data under an open license on Zenodo, OSF, Github, Gitlab, or any other publically accessible resource and include a link to it in your manuscript.

• Including your data in your submission and consenting to JOTE publishing your dataset on our OFS under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license or another open license of your choice.

We maintain the Open Definition for the “open” in open data licenses, which states:

“Open means anyone can freely access, use, modify, and share for any purpose (subject, at most, to requirements that preserve provenance and openness).”

This includes licenses such as

• Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) License

• Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) License

• Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC-0)

• Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL)

• Open Data Commons Attribution License

• Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL)

• Any “do whatever you want” style license.

This does not includes licenses such as

• NoDerivatives (-ND) or NonCommercial (-NC) modified Creative Commons licenses

• Anything stating “All rights reserved”

• Data without a copyright notice/license. At least in the Netherlands, no license = fully closed. Without explicitly stating that others are free to use, remix and share your data you are keeping open the possibility of juridical action against researches who would want to use your data. Even a quick “do whatever you want” in a file named LICENSE is enough!

In some circumstances it may not be possible, feasible, practical or legal to share your all or parts of your data. Examples include personal information, data owned by the corporation conducting the research, or lost data (which might be the reason for submission in the first place).

In such cases, please include an explanation as to why your data cannot be shared with your submission.

Empirical submissions and Meta-Research submissions which involve (re)producing or validating (parts of) experimental data without accompanying datasets or explanation as to why said datasets cannot be provided will not be accepted until these conditions are met.

Software

You are encouraged, but not required, to share the scripts and code used to analyze your data. You can do this by either

• Publishing your code under an open source license and including a link in your manuscript. Do not publish your code under a Creative Commons license. We recommend publishing your code under the MIT license to encourage people to use your code, and the GPLv3.0 or above license if you want them to also share theirs.

• Including your code in your submission and consenting to JOTE publishing your dataset on our Github under the MIT license or any other open source license of your choosing.

Authorship

When a submission is uploaded to our system, the author list should be final and correct. Author lists with the incorrect information can mislead readers and cause confusion about who is responsible and accountable for the published work.

All authors listed must have given prior approval to have their name attributed to the file(s) being submitted and agree to publication. The corresponding author must ensure that all authors qualify for and have agreed to authorship. They are responsible for informing all co-authors of relevant editorial information throughout the review process.

The ICMJE recommends the following criteria for authorship. Authors must have:

• made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work

• contributed to the drafting the work, or revising it critically for important intellectual content

• provided final approval of the version to be published

• agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved

• agreed to be named on the author list, and approved of the full author list

Contributors who meet some but not all of these criteria can be acknowledged in the publication but should not appear on the author list.

Acknowledgements should include sources of funding, supervision of research groups, administrative support, language editing and proofreading. The corresponding author should obtain permission from those being acknowledged, as sometimes being named might constitute an endorsement of the publication.

The addition or removal of authors during the editorial process will only be permitted once a clear and justifiable explanation for why the edit is required has been provided to the editorial team and publisher. Attempts to introduce 'ghost' or 'gift' authorship will be treated as cases of misconduct and reported to the relevant institution.

Double-Blind Review

To ensure blind peer review, please exclude the names of all authors, affiliations, and contact details from the submitted manuscript.

Note: this does not mean removing oneself from citations or not citing oneself.

As well, additional efforts should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other:

Writing style

If the text overtly refers to the authors past work (e.g. "in our past research...."), then the authors must convert this writing style into the passive voice (e.g. "past research shows...."). If and when the manuscript has been accepted this could be changed back to the active voice. Please inform your editor the instances where this is the case.

Document anonymisation

With the documents that you send us, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file. These instructions will help you do so:

For Microsoft 2010 (Windows):

1. Under the File menu select "Prepare for sharing."

2. Click on the "Check for issues" icon.

3. click on "inspect document" icon.

4. Uncheck all of the checkboxes except "Document Properties and Personal information".

5. Run the document inspector, which will then do a search of the document properties and indicated if any document property fields contain any information.

6. If the document inspector finds that some of the document properties contain information it will notify you and give you the option to "Remove all," which you will click to remove the document properties and personal information from the document.

For PDF files:

• With PDFs, the authors' names should also be removed from Document Properties found under File on Adobe Acrobat's main menu.

JOTE's editorial pipeline

What happens when you submit? This is the pipeline that your article will go through:

1. The experimental paper manuscript is received and pre-processed according to the subdiscipline, and a group of editors is chosen from the pool of researchers in the network;

2. The chosen editors find appropriate peer-reviewers (2/3). The editors know the identity of the author(s), and the author(s) knows the identity of the editors; but its is double-blinded between the author(s) and the peer-reviewers;

3. The peer-reviewers process the document, give comments, and forward it to the editor. The editor combines and sends it back to the author(s).

4. The author(s) replies to the comments of the peer-reviewers and incorporates their feedback in the article.

5. Steps 3 and 4 can be repeated according to the editors’ or peer-reviewers’ judgement.

6. When the reflection is ready, it is sent to the author(s), who has the right to comment and reply. Their comments will be taken into consideration in the editorial pipeline of the reflection.

7. Our production team produces the final version of the article, which will be sent to the author.

8. The author(s) have 24h to review the final version.

9. Your article is published on https://journal.trialanderror.org!

All these formalities contribute to what JOTE will look like: a collaboration between the sciences and humanities, with the clear purpose of bettering them both. This is both an ambitious and a humble objective. Ambitious in its purpose, as one journal, to positively change so many fields and humble in the realization that the sciences and humanities are already conducting very rigorous, good research. Each empirical article in JOTE will be accompanied by a reflection article, written by a humanities scholar or another expert in the field. When needed and wanted, the scientist and humanities scholar can communicate via the editor with each other about key parts.