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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 are an independent non-profit that relies on donations and publishing activities for third parties to get funded. 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.
Please click the link below to make a small, one-time donation to help keep us afloat!
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. Provide the ethics approval PDF along with the manuscript where appropriate. Exceptions to this should be raised with the editor-in-chief.
Preprints
Provide the link or DOI to the document in the cover letter and manuscript. See our section on open publishing below for more information!
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.
Please note that while we do accept for submission articles that analyse and reflect on misconduct, we will not publish any articles that engage in ad-hominem attacks or which encourage bad-faith debate. We believe that to reform the existing academic culture, problems with the culture must be discussed, but we encourage authors to adopt a kind and impartial tone when writing such pieces. If you are unsure whether your article is suitable for publication, please get in touch with the editor-in-chief for advice.
Rejected Grant Applications
We are working on developing a repository for RGAs. Watch this space for more information in the future!
Registered Reports
This submission type, while not complicated once you understand how it works, should be followed carefully. Below is a detailed but easy-to-read primer on the format and our one-year trial.
Preregistration and Stage 1 Protocol
When you prepare a registered report (RR), you write out your plan for a research study before you conduct the study. You document every detail that you can possibly plan, including the study’s introduction, aims, hypotheses and research questions, and the method (with study design, procedure, sample characteristics, size and participant recruitment plan, analysis plan). If you were to submit this plan, a written document, as-is, to a repository such as the OSF and make it public, you would have just made a ‘preregistration’. If you stick to this public plan when you conduct the research, you will have conducted a preregistered study. Providing you have conducted this study precisely as you said you would, this study is less likely to be weakened by hindsight or confirmation bias, and your conclusions are likely to be more reliable (than if it hadn’t been so registered) as a result. This is because you have conducted a study as it was planned, and not changed anything like your hypotheses or because of having seen your results (a questionable practice known as HARKing; Kerr, 1998).
If, instead of uploading this plan to the OSF and going on with your planned study, you submit it to a journal that accepts RRs, you have just completed the first step in conducting a registered report. That document you submitted is now called a Stage 1 RR protocol and will be peer-reviewed with the journal you submitted it to. This peer-review process is almost the same as when you submit a full manuscript, but in this case the reviewers only have the first 60% of the article to review. Another difference too, is that they give you feedback to help improve the to-be-conducted study (as opposed to commenting on a study that is already in the past). In this way, your planned method is reviewed (and can be improved) before you collect your data, and your study’s validity and overall quality may be higher as a result, than it would otherwise have been.
IPA, Stage 2 Manuscript and Deviations
Once the reviewers have approved your study plan (after one, or possibly more rounds of reviews), you receive what’s known as in-principle acceptance (IPA), or acceptance in principle (AIP). This means that the journal guarantees publication of the final (Stage 2) manuscript (typically after another review round) irrespective of whether your results support your hypotheses. The implication is that it doesn’t matter if your study doesn’t ‘work’, or if you find something completely different to what was expected. Your study will be published.
Note that publication after IPA being granted is dependent on the plan being followed. The study you conduct must conform to the procedure and method agreed upon after the review of the Stage 1 protocol. Sometimes (often) studies do not go to plan, however, but these deviations can usually be accounted for. If unforeseeable problems (such as an equipment malfunction) occur, deviations can be flagged in the Stage 2 manuscript. These deviations are common, and typically all that is required is that you clearly and transparently report the deviation, why it occurred and what steps were taken to rectify the issue. If deviations occur that can be foreseen (such as a change in the sample size or composition), it is to contact the handling editor of your RR, to check what the best course of action is, given that a deviation from the plan is likely. The editor will work with you on how to modify the plan such that the validity of the study (and the conditions of your IPA) is protected.
Exploratory Studies
Sometimes, your planned study will yield an interesting path for another, unplanned analysis. Will the RR accommodate such exploratory extra studies? In most cases, yes. One strength of the RR format is that it can help us distinguish between confirmatory (planned tests of hypotheses or answering of research plans) studies, by planning what can be planned, following the plans that were made, and fully and transparently reporting everything that was done outside of the plan. If you provide (sub-) headings for the confirmatory and exploratory studies in the Stage 2 manuscript, and document transparently the exploratory study that you conducted, this should not threaten your IPA status (see Field et al., 2019, pages 9-11 for how this can be done). If you are in doubt, you should always contact your handling editor to get written confirmation that any deviations or unplanned studies are allowed. This makes it easier for you and your editor to ensure the quality and trustworthiness of what is published – to the extent that that is possible – later down the track.
What about qualitative research, and other studies (like Delphi studies, for instance), which are largely exploratory by nature, or ones that don’t really use hypothesis testing? No problem. No researcher wakes up one morning and just goes and conducts a research study. There are always plans and ideas for what should and might be done, even if the study design allows for uncertainty. It is true that the clearer and more detailed a study’s plans can be, the more likely it is that unwanted bias is not accounted for in the results. That said, transparent, detailed, and honest reporting and registering what can be planned will always go a long way to producing high-quality, reliable, and valid research. If research is conducted in the spirit of integrity and makes as much use of available tools like RRs as possible, we are already on the right path to better research future. Indeed, the more that is left uncertain, the more carefully we must tread carefully with respect to when IPA is given. This is because this system will only work to improve research quality widespread if quality measures are taken seriously, and IPA is given when it is warranted.
If you are in doubt, please contact me (Sarahanne Field) to talk about your study plans and whether they are appropriate for an RR submission. I believe that in most cases, we can come to a plan to control unwanted bias and produce an RR worthy of the label.
JoTE’s One-year RR Pilot
Although the idea of registering a research plan before you conduct the research is not new, the RR was first formally introduced as a submission type in Cortex in 2013 (Chambers, 2013). In the 11 years since then, the format has gradually become known within the academic sphere, having spread to over 300 journals, with journals accepting the format in every major scientific discipline (https://www.cos.io/initiatives/registered-reports).
The Journal of Trial & Error is proud to join these ranks and become a journal that accepts the RR format. We embrace the messy, non-linear nature of science and believe that in accepting RRs, we can help shift norms in science from only accepting novel, as-predicted results, to fully and transparently documenting every element of the research process and publishing good-quality research regardless of whether the study behaved as the authors would have wanted it to. We wish to encourage clearly defined lines between confirmatory and exploratory studies, and the publication of studies that are the result of careful planning and hypothesising, rather than of HARKing.
We are accepting RRs as part of a pilot, which will last a year from March 25, 2024. We will introduce this as a pilot only (and continue to accept RRs after this period), as we (the editorial team of JoTE) wish to be able to give RR studies the time, attention, and effort they require and that their authors are entitled to. We are a small journal running on donations and grant funding that is finite. Most of our staff are volunteers, which means that we operate within those restrictions and may not always be able to provide the editorial support to cover the RR process. Should we discontinue the pilot after a year, we will announce this on our social media and website.
References
Chambers, C. D. (2013). Registered reports. A new publishing initiative at Cortex. Cortex, 49(3), 609-610.
Field, S. M., Wagenmakers, E. J., Kiers, H. A., Hoekstra, R., Ernst, A. F., & van Ravenzwaaij, D. (2020). The effect of preregistration on trust in empirical research findings: Results of a registered report. Royal Society Open Science, 7(4), 181351.
Kerr, N. L. (1998). HARKing: Hypothesizing after the results are known. Personality and social psychology review, 2(3), 196-217.
Streamlined Review (SR)
Following the lead of our peers in the academic publishing sphere, Collabra: Psychology, we are now accepting streamlined review submissions. This option is for authors who have a manuscript that has recently (within one year) been rejected after peer review by another journal, for reasons other than the quality and soundness of the research therein. Such authors may submit this rejected manuscript along with all previous editorial documentation (detailed guidelines below).
The editor handling the submission has the following options:
Reject or accept the article based on the information obtained in the existing reviews/editorial information, without soliciting more reviews or further revisions from the author,
Request further revisions from the author,
Seek additional reviewers and proceed with the article as if it were part of a typical review process, in case more information is needed to make a decision.
Please adhere to the following if you wish to submit a manuscript for consideration as a streamlined review type:
In the cover letter/comments to editor, please state 1) that you wish for your manuscript to be considered as a streamlined review and 2) the journal it was previously rejected from.
Please upload along with the manuscript files all documentation produced in the previous editorial process. This includes (but is not limited to):
the editorial decision letter(s),
the reviews with reviewer names if the reviews were signed,
author responses to review comments, and
the revised manuscript with clear indications of what changes were made (using, for instance, highlighting, a contrasting text colour or track changes).
Note that JOTE is not at liberty to share the peer reviews undertaken by the previous journal handling the article unless express permission is obtained from the handling editor and reviewers. Any peer review undertaken by JOTE editors will, however, be shared in line with our open peer review policy. Authors should ensure that they make open all data, code and materials associated with the article just as with any regular submission, providing they are legally permitted to do so. Failure to abide by our open materials policy may result in a desk reject.
Format
This applies to Empirical, Reflection, SR, and Meta-Research articles (including RRs).
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, and articles that are overly and unnecessarily long may be returned to the author for revision before going out for review. Please contact the editor-in-chief if you have concerns about this.
Formatting, File format & Style
Use APA 7 - your manuscript will be returned to you if the APA 7 style is not generally adhered to. This includes citations: if your reference list is incomplete, full of errors or contains citations that do not appear in the article text, your manuscript will be returned to you for amendment and resubmission.
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.
We require that you use American English.
Anonymization
This is not required; we operate on a fully open peer-review system, meaning that the identities of both author and reviewer are open.
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, and must be complete and largely free of errors.
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, Research Equals, or any other publicly 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 OSF 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 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 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.
Note: Ensure you provide the link or DOI for the location of the materials in the cover letter and manuscript!
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.
To bring this one step further, all manuscripts with more than one author must clarify all author roles with the CRediT Taxonomy. Provide a section with this information in the manuscript after the title and before the abstract. The categories in this taxonomy are:
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.
JOTE's editorial pipeline
What happens when you submit? This is the pipeline that your article will go through (for all article types except RR):
The manuscript is received and pre-processed according to the subdiscipline, and a handling editor (or editors, if appropriate) is chosen by the editor-in-chief;
The chosen editors find appropriate peer-reviewers (2/3).
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).
The author(s) replies to the comments of the peer-reviewers and incorporates their feedback in the article.
Steps 3 and 4 can be repeated according to the editors’ or peer-reviewers’ judgement.
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.
Our production team produces the final version of the article, which will be sent to the author.
The author(s) have one week to review the final version.
Your article is published on https://journal.trialanderror.org!
For an RR:
The Stage 1 RR protocol (which should include a detailed description of any study plans, including the introduction, hypotheses/research questions and method) is pre-processed by the editor-in-chief, like any other submission. This initial assessment is made based on review criteria. If the Stage 1 protocol falls seriously short of the following criteria, it will receive a ‘desk reject’, after which there is no possibility of revision and resubmission. If the protocol’s qualities come reasonably close to the criteria, the protocol will be moved to peer review. If the assessment is somewhere in between, the editor might request revisions before it is reviewed externally.
Review criteria (adapted from author guidelines on PCI-RR’s website):Scientific validity of the research questions, and hypotheses (where applicable). Are the research questions justifiable from a research perspective? The way the research questions are assessed will vary depending on whether the research is qualitative or quantitative. If hypotheses are stated, are they precise, and do they follow logically and directly from the theory?
Methodological soundness. The validity of the planned design and procedures is assessed in relation to the theory and research questions (and hypotheses, where applicable). Does the design make sense given what is being explored? Is/are the participant sample, recruiting strategy and exclusion criteria appropriate?
Analysis. Do the planned analyses follow on from the research questions (and hypotheses, where applicable)? If a study seeks to account for both pro-alternative and pro-null findings, are the appropriate statistics being used (i.e., the Bayesian approach, in the case of possible pro-null findings)? Where applicable, has a power calculation been done? For quantitative studies - are quality checks planned, including positive controls, robustness checks, manipulation checks, etc? In other words, ensure that you incorporate all suitable checks in your plan to ensure the validity of the study. In the case of qualitative research, will member checking or triangulation be used, and will you include a positionality statement in the final manuscript?
Feasibility. Is the proposed study and analysis feasible?
Clarity/detail in descriptions of all plans. The extent to which a Stage 1 protocol can reasonably limit unwanted bias is related to how clearly described the study pipeline is. The more detail and clarity, the more likely the final study is to be free of problematic bias. Don’t be afraid to write a long protocol - this Stage 1 document should include any and all detail that can be determined about the planned study a-priori!
Once the Stage 1 protocol has been favourably assessed, it can be moved to peer review. As with a regular article, 3/4 reviews will be solicited. Typically, 1-2 ‘methodological’ reviewers and 1-2 ‘content’ reviewers will be chosen. This is to ensure that both the methodological and field/discipline-specific elements of the protocol can be assessed.
The reviews will be processed by the editor. In the case of constructive reviews, the authors will be invited to revise and resubmit their protocol. If the reviews are generally negative, the editor has the discretion to either reject the protocol or allow for a revision.
Once the reviewers and editor are satisfied as to the quality of the Stage 1 protocol, IPA will be awarded. At this point, authors are free to begin conducting their planned study.
Once the authors have completed and written up the planned study, they submit what is known as a Stage 2 RR manuscript. This is just the same as a regular manuscript, however there are a few things to note. First, all details of the planned study must be retained in the Stage 2 manuscript. The introduction, hypotheses and/or research questions, and methodology. Naturally the descriptive language in the sections after the introduction section need to be modified (from “we plan to…” to “we did…”), but all of what was planned should be kept otherwise as-is. If there were deviations, they should be clearly noted in a separate subheading or section.
This Stage 2 manuscript goes back to the handling editor who sends it back to the reviewers for another round of reviews. Ideally, the reviewers in the rounds are the same, however occasionally new reviewers need to be found for the Stage 2 manuscript. If this happens, the editor ensures that the reviewers understand the conditions of the RR (i.e., that IPA has been awarded based on the accepted Stage 1 protocol, and that they are to review it accordingly). The review criteria are similar to the Stage 1 protocol, but some important differences should be noted.
Were the quality checks conducted, and do they indicate the data is a valid test of the planned hypotheses? This criterion is largely related to quantitative research, however it applies in concept to qualitative research also. Generally, do these data provide a valid answer to the question they were supposed to address?
Are the key elements of introduction/hypotheses and/or research questions, method etc the same between the Stage 1 and 2 submissions? If not, are deviations fully and clearly reported and sufficiently motivated? Generally speaking, did the authors adhere to the plans they made in Stage 1?
Are any unregistered exploratory analyses reported and justified? Are they clearly delineated (e.g., through the use of clear subheadings) from the confirmatory ones, where applicable?
Are the conclusions and claims the authors draw from their findings reasonable or justifiable? Are they nuanced enough, or do they oversell the findings?
Once, via one or more review rounds, the editor and reviewers are satisfied that the study has been fully and transparently reported, the article goes through the rest of the regular production pipeline including copyediting, typesetting and proof approval by the author. The study data will need to be made open (where appropriate and ethical) by either the author, or submitted to us along with the manuscript (to be made public on our OSF page) - for details see our policy on data sharing.
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.
