Author guidelines

Composition of the submitted text

Submissions should be in English with UK spelling and follow the Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.) for punctuation, citation styles, and other matters apart from spelling. Special calls for publications in languages other than English will be published from time to time.

Authors whose native language is not English are strongly encouraged to have their manuscripts edited by a native or near-native speaker before submitting.

Authors should follow these submission steps.

All metadata (name of authors, title, abstract and keywords) are automatically retrieved from the original repository in which the authors deposited their preprint. But authors are strongly invited to provide these primary metadata in the submission process:

  • First name, last name
  • Affiliation
  • ORCID
  • Keywords (maximum 6) in English and in one more language
  • Abstracts (in English and in one more language)

Regarding underlying data, authors should pay special attention to providing the following:

  • Publication date(s)
  • Data type
  • Link to dataset stored in citable long term repository
  • Any related articles
  • Licence/copyright
  • Is data open or closed
  • Principles of text normalization (orthography, capitalization, punctuation, space, ligatures, etc.)

Image rights

Each image should include a caption that provides important information about the image. It is important that the rights holder is acknowledged explicitly or, in the case of fair use or public domain, implicitly. If you are the rights holder for the images, they will be released under the same license as the rest of your article, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0. If you include images whose rights holders are other people or organizations, you must secure permission, and state clearly in each relevant caption the rights holder and the license granted you to include the image in this publication.

Submission Preparation Checklist

All submissions must meet the following requirements.

  1. Check that your arguments are original, logically structured and coherent.
  2. Check you have rights to publish all your images.
  3. Check that you have submitted all the necessary files.
  4. Check that every references is in the bibliography and that the bibliography does not contain unreferenced items (orphans)
  5. Check that you agree to release the article under a CC-BY 4.0 license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Generative Artificial Intelligence

Authors must disclose the use of generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process by adding a statement at the end of their manuscript in the main manuscript file, before the References list. The statement should be placed in a section entitled ‘Declaration of Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process’.

Statement: During the preparation of this work the author(s) used [NAME TOOL / SERVICE] in order to [REASON]. After using this tool/service, the author(s) reviewed and edited the content as needed and take(s) full responsibility for the content of the publication.

This declaration does not apply to the use of basic tools for checking grammar, spelling, references, etc. If there is nothing to disclose, there is no need to add a statement.