International Journal of Digital Curation

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Author Guidelines

Authors are invited to submit scholarly manuscripts of relevance to the curation and preservation of digital resources. The editors will inform you if your paper does not appear to be within the scope of the journal.

Please note that online submission is currently disabled. Instead, please email your submission to ijdc@ukoln.ac.uk.

The IJDC Template

The IJDC supplies a template which serves both as a means of formatting your submission and as an example of the required layout itself, providing a variety of examples in the complex area of citations and references. We currently provide templates in MS Word format and Open Document format (suitable for use with OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice).

Download Word Template

Download Open Document (ODT) Template

A brief explanation of the template is available below.

Guidelines for Submission to the IJDC

Your paper should follow these guidelines:

1. The journal uses American Psychological Association (APA) bibliographic and formatting standards. While we will accept articles written using another citation and formatting manual, you will need to reformat it prior to publication.  For example:

   Rusbridge, C., & Lyon, E. (2005). Editorial. The International Journal of Digital Curation 1(1), 1-2. doi:10.2218/ijdc.v1i1.1

   More examples of the APA citation style can be found at: http://www.library.arizona.edu/search/reference/citation-apa.html

2. When sending a submission to the IJDC, ensure you provide in the covering email your name, telephone number, email address, academic institution, position (faculty or student), a brief biography and a brief synopsis of the paper. If submtting a paper for peer review, PLEASE DO NOT INCLUDE THIS INFORMATION IN THE BODY OF YOUR PAPER! We use a blind peer-review system.

3. Please fill out the document metadata fields 'Title', to supply the title that appears on the cover page, and 'Short Title', to supply the abbreviated version that appears in the headers. Only fill out the document metadata fields 'Author' and 'Short Author' if you are submitting a general article.

4. Submissions must use the IJDC template and be submitted in MS Word or Open Document format. Do not send PDF files or hard copies.

5. If you are including supplementary content, i.e. any content not intended for presentation within the published version of your paper, please supply it in a separate file or files rather than within the body of your manuscript text.

6. We will acknowledge receipt of all papers submitted to us. If you have not received an acknowledgement within 10 days of sending your paper, please contact us.

About the IJDC Submissions Template

The template for papers to be submitted acts as an example as well as a means of formatting a paper’s content. The examples it contains do not cover all contingencies but provides a view of the most common usages.

The text provides extensive examples of how to cite in the author + date form, the citation year being used as an anchor to the corresponding reference list item. Note that in multiple citations, the order conforms to the order required by the References list, i.e. by author, alphabetical, same author plus others, alphabetical, and year.

The references examples are all prefaced by the type of entry, e.g. journal article, proceedings, book, etc. Although the list is not exhaustive for sanity’s sake, it provides coverage of most types. Editing will pick up any discrepancies beyond these examples, but it is very important that authors place the correct category of reference item in square brackets before each item, even though the References list's order is alphabetical as explained above. This will help editors to ensure formatting is correct. If, for example, the reference is to a message posted to an electronic mailing list, then enter [message posted to email list] before the actual reference and editors will format the item.

Authors are encouraged to keep their references list clear of references to websites or notes of explanation etc. These are best accomplished by footnotes which appear at the bottom of the page in which they are anchored (see example). Note URLs to websites should be prefaced by an English language title, if only the contents of the website’s title tag for readers’ ease of reference.

Authors are encouraged to confine their use of headings and sub-headings to three levels, though the template provides for more should the content demand it.

If you have any queries about the template or matters which, for the sake of brevity, it does not cover, please contact ijdc@ukoln.ac.uk with your query.

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 has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
2. The submission file is in Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx) or Open Document Text (.odt) file format.
3. Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
4. The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
5. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal.
6. If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review have been followed.

Copyright Notice

Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the University of Bath. By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution.

This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence.

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.