Production best practices

Journal issues

• 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 a complete issue PDF, if you want that to be available to your readers.
• 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.

Journal articles

Files

• Check files for web accessibility. Web accessibility is a requirement.
• Provide each article as a separate PDF, with references contained within. 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.
• 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. For reference linking:

• We advise you to make reference formatting requirements known to your authors, to make your work easier. The essential requirements are that:
  • 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 conventions).
  • If references already include DOIs, include them at the end of the reference, refaced 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.
• For each paper, paste the list of references into Crossref's simple text query tool. References MUST be in alphabetical order, or numbered.
• 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.
• ALSO save the Crossref list as a plain text file, giving it the same file name as the paper containing the references (but with file extension .txt).
• References MUST be in alphabetical order, or numbered, in the text file, if not in the article itself.
• Transfer the plain text files to us, using whatever your journal's agreed upon workflow is.

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 reference the "Ownership and IP" section on the documentation page for your journal to confirm the journal's licensing practice.
• Use the license chooser to select your journal's standard license. There is also a beta chooser, that we think is easier to use.
• 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."
• 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 one 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

Coming soon.

Uploading content

• For journals using the OJS review and/or production workflows, journal staff will generally upload 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