Production best practices

Journal issues

General practices

• ISSUE COVER: Provide an image for use as a thumbnail representation of the issue cover. Optimal size is 256px wide by 331px tall, and not more than 100KB. Provide alt-text for the cover image (you can send it to us in an email, or include it in a text file in your journal's Box folder).
• COMPLETE ISSUE PDF: If publishing in PDF format, provide a complete issue PDF, if you want that to be available to your readers.
• WEB ACCESSIBILITY: Check files for web accessibility. Web accessibility is a requirement.
• FILES AND FILE NAMES: Please do not include spaces or special characters in file names.

Setting up a new issue in OJS

• (To be developed - currently no editors do this)

Journal articles

Files

• Check files for web accessibility. Web accessibility is a requirement. More guidance on web accessibility best practices is available.
• If publishing in PDF format, provide each article as a separate PDF, with references contained within each article.
• References (citations):
  • We recommend that your journal's guidelines for authors suggest they provide DOIs for all cited papers that have them, and specify a citation format to use.
  • When non-DOI URLs are used, they should not contain proxy information or search/query strings - they should be the simple, correct URL for the article.
  • Complete and correct references give a more professional impression so we strongly advise checking and correcting authors' references.
  • Journals that issue DOIs must also support reference linking, as described below.
• If publishing HTML articles, please see PKP's production guidance for HTML.
• Files and file names: Please do not include spaces or special characters in file names.

DOIs and reference linking

If the journal's articles will have DOIs assigned to them, some additional work is required to support reference linking, a requirement of our membership in CrossRef. This also enables the display of an article's references on the landing page for that article, in OJS.

Reference linking for journals that do NOT use the OJS submission system:

• We advise you to make reference formatting requirements known to your authors, to make your work easier.
• Essential requirements for formatting references:
  
  • A list of references is provided at the end of each article.
  • References must be in alphabetical order, or presented as a numbered list.
  • No line breaks within a reference.
  • Spell out author names each time (i.e. do not use "____" or "ibid." or other, similar conventions).
  • If references already include DOIs, include them at the end of the reference, prefaced by "DOI: "(https://doi.org/...)
  • Any reference style is allowable, but whatever is used, within an article, it should be used consistently.
• If you need to edit the author's list to meet the above requirements, we suggest working in a text editor (TextEdit on a mac, Notepad on a PC). These work better than MS-Word, which can have trouble with diacritics and some symbols and punctuation.
• For each paper, paste the list of references into Crossref's simple text query tool. For this step, references MUST be in alphabetical order, or numbered, even if the order is different in the article itself.
• Check each DOI that appears in the resulting text to make sure the matched paper is the correct one.
• Replace the author's reference list with the Crossref one - either in its entirety, or replacing selected references that have been updated by Crossref to include DOIs.
• ALSO save the Crossref extracted references as a plain text file, giving it the same file name as the paper containing the references (but with file extension .txt).
• Check the plain text files for errors and correct them, working in a text editor such as Notepad (PC) or TextEdit (Mac), not MS-Word. Common errors are duplicate display of a DOI (when already present and not prefaced with "DOI: "), extra empty references (when extra white space is present in the reference list), and errors with diacritics and other special characters.
• Transfer the plain text files to us, using whatever your journal's agreed upon workflow is.

Reference linking for journals that DO use the OJS submission system:

• In order to have a consistent reference list for Crossref’s XML Export Plugin and Crossref Reference linking, the references must be enabled and required during submission (contact cul-publishing@cornell.edu to enable this).
• It is STRONGLY ADVISED that a copyeditor check the formatting of references in the metadata.
• Essential requirements for formatting references:
  
  • A list of references is provided at the end of each article.
  • References must be in alphabetical order, or presented as a numbered list.
  • No line breaks within a reference.
  • Spell out author names each time (i.e. do not use "____" or "ibid." or other, similar conventions).
  • If references already include DOIs, include them at the end of the reference, prefaced by "DOI: "https://doi.org/...
  • Any reference style is allowable, but whatever is used, within an article, it should be used consistently.
• References are then extracted for linking automatically, at the time of publication and DOI assignment.
• Recommended instructions to authors (this can be configured for each journal, when OJS is used to display submission instructions to authors):

In addition the references included within your submission, we also require that references be entered into the article metadata as part of the submission process. Essential requirements for formatting references for metadata:

• • • We suggest working in a text editor (TextEdit on a mac, Notepad on a PC) to prepare this reference list. These programs work better than MS-Word, which can have trouble with diacritics and some symbols and punctuation.
    • References must be in alphabetical order, or presented as a numbered list. (MODIFY THIS if your journal has more specific requirements, but it must be one or the other.)
    • No line breaks within a reference.
    • Spell out author names each time. Do not use "____" or "ibid." or other, similar conventions.
    • If references already include DOIs, include them at the end of the reference, prefaced by "DOI: "(https://doi.org/...)
    • Any reference style is allowable, but whatever is used, within an article, it should be used consistently. (MODIFY THIS if your journal requires a particular citation style, or remove entirely if there are already instructions regarding citation format.)

Creative Commons licenses

Some journals apply a Creative Commons license to all papers, and usually the same license is applied to all papers. If this is the case, embed the appropriate text and, if possible, the graphic, for the applicable license in each paper. This is done most commonly in the footer of a document, on the first or last page. How to obtain the license text and image to apply to an article:

• Please check the production workflow page for your journal to confirm the journal's licensing practice and standard Creative Commons license. If your journal uses a template, embed the standard license information in the template.
• If your journal does not use a standard license across all articles, use the license chooser to select your journal's standard license. If you are using the standard chooser, for the selected license, under the "Help others attribute you!" box, select "Offline" in the drop-down menu for "License mark." There is also a beta chooser, that we think is easier to use.
• Under "Non-digital works" (meaning works not encoded in HTML, such as PDFs) the appropriate license text is displayed.
• Obtain the appropriate graphic, and embed both in the article.
• Full instructions for applying a Creative Commons licenses are available. Please don't hesitate to contact us if you have questions.

Non-article content

Front and end matter, masthead, editorial notes, tables of contents, advertisements, etc. can either be treated as articles, or can be included in a complete issue. In either case, an author is required. An abstract is optional.

Metadata

Guidelines for users using a metadata template

If you create metadata for multiple articles at one time (i.e. for a full issue) and the agreed upon workflow for your journal is for journal staff to use our metadata template, it is available in Box. Include all the metadata for a full issue in a single metadata spreadsheet, one article per row. If you also post a complete/single file of the entire issue, include that in one the rows too. When metadata and content files are ready, contact us, and we will invite you to a folder in Box where you may upload content files and the completed metadata template.

Guidelines for users entering metadata directly

Currently no CUL journal editors enter metadata directly.

Uploading content

• For journals using the OJS review and/or production workflows, journal staff will generally upload final, formatted articles and enter additional metadata, as needed.
• For journals that do not use OJS workflows, CUL program staff will generally upload articles and metadata. Metadata will be provided by journal staff via an excel template (see Metadata, above), and content files will be transferred via Box. Contact us to ask us to set up and invite you to a shared folder for this purpose.

Contact us

We are happy to help: cul-publishing@cornell.edu