Submissions

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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.
  • The submission has not been previously published, nor is it currently before another journal for consideration.
  • If your study involves surveys, interviews, focus groups, etc. (i.e., human subjects research), you have obtained the required institutional review (IRB) approvals or other required institutional approvals. It is recommended that you explicitly state this somewhere in your manuscript.
  • Any competing interests have been identified or disclosed in the manuscript. Competing interests are situations that have the potential to influence people’s judgments. Competing interests may be personal, financial, intellectual, professional, political or religious in nature. Questions about what counts as a competing interest may be directed to the Editor-in-chief (edward.eckel@wmich.edu).
  • The submission file is in Microsoft Word or RTF document file format.
  • Where available, URLs or DOIs for all references have been provided. All references are formatted in APA 7th edition style (see Submission Guidelines for examples).
  • The text is double-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. It may be necessary to request image files for all figures later in the editing process.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.

Author Guidelines

SCOPE

ISTL publishes substantive material of interest to science and technology librarians and information specialists. It serves as a vehicle to share details of successful programs, background information, and opinions on topics of current interest, to publish research and bibliographies on issues relevant to science and technology libraries, and to communicate in more depth than the STS-L mailing list.

Manuscripts submitted to the peer-reviewed Refereed Articles section should fully report the results of substantive research relevant to topics within the scope of ISTL. They should include a clearly stated research question(s), hypothesis/es, a succinct and current literature review, method description, presentation of results and data, discussion, and a conclusion. Submissions that are primarily descriptive (including local case studies), preliminary, expository, advisory, or bibliographic in nature may be referred instead to other sections of ISTL.

SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS

  • Authors will register on the ISTL site and submit manuscripts directly in the OJS system.
  • Microsoft Word is the preferred format for text submissions. We do not accept hardcopy submissions.
  • Submissions may be made at any time. Since the review process can be open-ended, ISTL cannot guarantee publication of an accepted article in a specific issue. It will be published in the next issue scheduled after the review and editing process is complete.
  • No Article Processing Charges (APCs) or publication fees are charged for submitting or for accepted manuscripts.

Copyright Notice

Authors retain the copyright of their papers without restrictions. No Article Processing Charges (APCs) or publication fees are charged for submitting or for accepted manuscripts.

Regarding licensing, all submissions to ISTL must have some type of Creative Commons license. The standard license for ISTL manuscripts is a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc/4.0/). This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially. If you have a question about this, please contact the editor-in-chief, Edward Eckel (edward.eckel@wmich.edu).

Privacy Statement

The data collected from registered and non-registered users of this journal falls within the scope of the standard functioning of peer-reviewed journals. It includes information that makes communication possible for the editorial process; it is used to inform readers about the authorship and editing of content; it enables collecting aggregated data on readership behaviors, as well as tracking geopolitical and social elements of scholarly communication. 

This journal’s editorial team and its hosting service, the University of Alberta Libraries, use this data to guide their work in publishing and improving this journal. Data that will assist in developing this publishing platform may be shared with its developer Public Knowledge Project in an anonymized and aggregated form, with appropriate exceptions such as article metrics. The data will not be sold by this journal, the University of Alberta Libraries, or PKP nor will it be used for purposes other than those stated here. The authors published in this journal are responsible for the human subject data that figures in the research reported here. 

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Those involved in editing this journal seek to be compliant with industry standards for data privacy, including the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provision for “data subject rights” that include (a) breach notification; (b) right of access; (c) the right to be forgotten; (d) data portability; and (e) privacy by design. The GDPR also allows for the recognition of “the public interest in the availability of the data,” which has a particular saliency for those involved in maintaining, with the greatest integrity possible, the public record of scholarly publishing.