Submitting an Article Online

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Author Guidelines

Submissions should be made electronically through this website. Once submitted, the author can track the submission and communicate with the editors via the online journal management system. Please note, on submissions with multiple authors only the submitting author will be able to do this.

Please ensure that you follow the Author Guidelines when preparing your manuscript.

Manuscripts that do not follow our formatting and other guidelines will not be reviewed. Manuscripts that grossly exceed the maximum length will encounter delays and require major revision, or will be assessed an additional publishing fee on top of the Author Publishing Cost (APC) listed here. 

Article Types

• Research Papers: Quantitative and qualitative research about the practice of citizen science. These articles might, for example, address how learning outcomes differ among models of citizen science; how various features of project design yield high-quality data; the efficacy of various participant recruitment models; and the effectiveness of different technologies for implementing and facilitating a range of projects. Research-focused articles should be 6,000–8,000 words in length.
• Review and Synthesis Papers: Overviews with meta-perspectives of significant topics in citizen science such as conceptual or theoretical reviews or syntheses of methods. Articles focused on review and synthesis should be 6,000–8,000 words in length. 
• Case Studies: Evidence-based reports exploring a project’s intended and actual outcomes for education, conservation, research, and/or policy. Case studies should be 6,000–8,000 words in length.
• Essays: Perspectives on issues in the field of citizen science, particularly new ideas, controversial positions, and hot-topic highlights. Essays should be 4,000–6,000 words in length.
• Methods Papers: Descriptions of new (or innovations of old) methods that involve citizen science participants. These papers should elucidate the testing process and results, and should provide suggestions for further methodological improvements or applications. Methods papers should be 4,000–6,000 words in length.
• Meeting Reports: Descriptions of citizen science meetings, sessions, or conferences. The report will explain how the meeting was developed and implemented to achieve advances in understanding of citizen science theory and practice, and will examine its outcomes. (Individual papers presented at conferences do not fall under this category but should instead be submitted as research papers, review papers, case studies, essays, or methods papers.) Meeting reports should be approximately 1,000–6,000 words in length. 

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. Any third-party-owned materials used have been identified with appropriate credit lines, and permission obtained from the copyright holder for all formats of the journal.
2. All authors have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper and satisfy the authorship guidelines.
3. The submission file is in OpenOffice or Microsoft Word file format.
4. All DOIs for the references have been provided, when available.
5. Tables and figures are all cited in the text. Tables are included within the text document (after the references), whilst figure files are uploaded as supplementary files.
6. Figures/images have a resolution of at least 150dpi (300dpi or above preferred). Each file is no more than 20MB per file. The files are in one of the following formats: JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS (to maximise quality, the original source file is preferred).
7. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines. If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, you may also choose an optional blind peer review.
8. Authors agree that (if applicable) the contents of their study meet the journal policy on ethics and consent.

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

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.

Publication Fees

The authors agree to the above payment terms, which will apply to this submission if and when it is published by this journal (comments or questions to the editor can be added prior to submission)

Waiver Information

If you do not have funds available to pay the APC (e.g. because your institution/funder will not cover the fee) then we may be able to offer a discount or full waiver. Please ensure that you contact the editor as early as possible should you need to discuss waiver options or the APC in general. Editorial decisions are made independently from the ability to pay the APC.