Submissions

Follow the instructions below to submit a manuscript to the Journal of eScience Librarianship.  Submissions must comply with JeSLIB's Article Preparation Guidelines.  Submissions may be returned to authors who do not comply with the guidelines.  To begin the submission process, Register an account (or Login if you have an existing account).

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About

The Journal of eScience Librarianship (JeSLIB)  (ISSN 2161-3974) is an open access, peer-reviewed journal advancing the theory and practice of librarianship focusing on services related to data-driven research in science, technology, engineering, math, social sciences, medicine, and public health. JeSLIB explores the many roles of librarians in supporting eScience and welcomes articles by contributors from all areas of the globe related to education, outreach, collaborations, policy, tools, and best practices. 

JeSLIB publishes articles as they become available for publication, following a thorough review process. Articles are collected together into issues throughout the year, with occasional special issues.

Focus and Scope

The Journal of eScience Librarianship (JeSLIB) is an open access, peer-reviewed journal advancing the theory and practice of librarianship focusing on services related to data-driven research in science, technology, engineering, math, social sciences, medicine, and public health. JeSLIB explores the many roles of librarians in supporting eScience and welcomes articles by contributors from all areas of the globe related to education, outreach, collaborations, policy, tools, and best practices. Submissions covering both theoretical and practical applications are welcomed.

General topics of interest may include but are not limited to:

  • Research data management
  • Librarians embedded on research teams
  • Data services, including policy development
  • Data curation
  • Data sharing and re-use
  • Data management plans
  • Data preservation
  • Metadata and discoverability
  • Institutional and discipline-specific repositories
  • Impact of governmental or institutional policies
  • Open data and open science
  • Data literacy and data education
  • Data citation
  • Tracking impact of research data, metrics
  • Big data
  • Visualization

Submission Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all the following items. 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 the cover letter to the editors).
  2. Research data associated with the manuscript complies with the Data Sharing policy.
  3. The manuscript or video article transcript is in Microsoft Word or RTF file format. If this is a Data in Action submission, the manuscript was created using the Data in Action Article Template.
  4. The manuscript or video article transcript, including the abstract, has been prepared for anonymous peer review if required by masking author names, affiliations, URLs, and self-citations.
  5. References follow the format guidelines specified in the Author Guidelines.
  6. Where available, DOIs or URLs for the references have been provided.
  7. The text is double-spaced; uses a 12-point font; and pages are numbered (Data in Action articles do not need the pages numbered).
  8. All tables and figures are numbered.
  9. The text adheres to all stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.
  10. A cover letter has been prepared separately with information to be entered into the "Comments to the Editor" field on the submission form.

Copyright Notice

  • Authors of original work accepted for publication in this journal grant first publication rights to the journal but retain ownership of the copyright of their content and all other rights.
  • Works published in this journal will be licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Authors may request a different Creative Commons license during the submission process.
  • For attribution, the author(s), article title, publication source (the journal) and the DOI of the article must be cited. For example: Originally published in: Coates HL. 2014. “Building Data Services from the Ground Up: Strategies and Resources.” Journal of eScience Librarianship 3(1):e1063. https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2014.1063
  • Authors retain the right to self-archive any version of their work (preprint, accepted manuscript, or final publisher version) on preprint servers, subject-specific repositories, institutional repositories, or their own website, as long as the work is properly cited and a link to the DOI of the published article is included.
  • Authors are responsible for obtaining the rights to use 3rd party materials prior to submission.

Peer Review

All submissions are subject to review and publication at the discretion of the editors. Submissions within scope will be reviewed by at least two reviewers. On completion of this process, usually within 6-8 weeks, the editors will notify authors of their decision and provide review guidance or additional editing if deemed necessary. Authors are encouraged to write in a style that is clear and concise, and use visuals and references as necessary to document statements. Two excellent resources for clear, plain writing are the Plain Language Action and Information Network and the Hemingway Editor App.

JeSLIB uses an anonymous peer review process, which means that the identities of the authors are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process. To facilitate this process, authors should make every effort to ensure that the manuscript (or video article transcript designated for peer review) contains no clues to the authors' identity. The manuscript or video article transcript itself should not include authors' names, institutional affiliations, contact information, funding statements, or acknowledgements. This information should be included in the cover letter and/or entered into the submission system during the submission process.

Within the manuscript or video article transcript, follow these additional guidelines for anonymous peer review:

  • Replace any information in the abstract and text that would identify the authors, including institution names and URLs, by substituting words such as: [institution name hidden for review].
  • Limit citations to your previous work to papers that are relevant for those reviewing the submitted paper. If it is necessary to cite your own work, cite papers published by the authors in the text and in the reference list as follows: ‘[Anonymous, 2015 – hidden for review]’. Use the third person to refer to work the authors have previously undertaken, e.g. replace any phrases like “as we have shown before” with “… has been shown before [Anonymous, 2015 – hidden for review].”
  • Make sure figures do not contain any affiliation related information.
  • Name your files with care (do not include author or institution names in the file names) and ensure that Microsoft Word document properties are also anonymized.
  • If your submission is accepted for publication, you will be required to put back in information that was hidden for peer review (references to the authors, their institutions, self-citations, etc.) before final copyediting can take place.

Licences

Journal of eScience Librarianship allows the following licences for submission:

  • CC BY 4.0
    Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
  • CC BY-NC 4.0
    Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
  • CC BY-SA 4.0
    Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
  • CC BY-ND 4.0
    Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
  • CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
    Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes. ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
  • CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
    Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes. NoDerivatives — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modified material. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
  • CC0 1.0
    The person who associated a work with this deed has dedicated the work to the public domain by waiving all of his or her rights to the work worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law. You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission. See Other Information below.

Publication Fees

This journal provides immediate open access to its content. The editors believe making research freely available to the public best benefits research, scholars, education, and society. This journal does not charge subscription, submission, copyediting, or author fees.

Publication Cycle

The Journal of eScience Librarianship publishes articles as they become available for publication, following a thorough review process. Articles are collected together into an issue once or twice each year.

Sections

Public Submissions

Peer Reviewed

Indexed

Full-Length Paper

eScience in Action

Data in Action

Curatorial Connections Column

Commentary

Video Article

Book or Product Review

Letter to the Editor