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See the main journal site.
Authors should closely follow the guidelines below before submitting a manuscript.
All papers have to be written in English.
We will be open for submissions of the following types:
- Research Papers: We accept as main category research papers that report on original research. Results previously published at conferences or workshops may be submitted as extended versions.
- Position Papers: We accept position papers presenting discussions and viewpoints around Data Science topics. These papers do not need an evaluation, but need to present relevant and novel discussion points in a thorough manner.
- Survey Papers: We also publish survey papers of the state of the art of topics central to the journal's scope. Survey articles should be comprehensive and balanced, and should have the potential to become well-known introductory and overview texts.
- Resource Papers: Resource papers introduce and describe a resource of value for further research, including but not limited to datasets, benchmarks, software tools/frameworks/services, methodologies, and protocols.
By submitting your manuscript you agree that it will be made available on this journal website as a preprint, and it will remain available after acceptance or rejection together with the reviews. Removal of a manuscript during or after review is not possible.
The following length limits apply for the different paper types:
- Research papers: 12 000 words
- Position papers: 8 000 words
- Survey papers: 16 000 words
- Resource papers: 12 000 words
Note that these word counts are not targets but maximum values. Papers may be significantly shorter. Exceptions for longer papers are possible if well justified (contact the editors-in-chief before submitting papers that exceed the stated word limits).
These word counts include the abstract, tables, and figure and table captions. Author lists and references, however, are not counted. Each figure counts for an additional 300 words.
We accept extended versions of works previously published at workshops or conferences under the following conditions:
- The previous publication is clearly and prominently indicated and referenced
- The additions and differences are described in the introduction
- At least 25% of the content of the extended version are new
- The extended version covers significant additional elements, and is not just a more verbose version of the previous content
It is furthermore the authors' responsibility to ensure that the publication of the extended version complies with the requirements (including copyright) of the previous publisher.
Submissions should contain the full names, affiliations, and ORCID identifiers for all authors, and email-addresses for the corresponding authors.
Every item on the list of references needs to come with exactly one of these identifiers (if multiple apply, the highest on the list should be picked):
- DOI
- PubMed ID (PMID)
- ACM Digital Library (dl.acm.org) URL
- PubMed Central ID (PMCID)
- JSTOR URL
- ISBN (only when citing an entire book)
- CEUR.org URL
- arXiv.org / biorxiv.org URL
- SSRN.com URL
- any other URL representing the referenced work
We encourage authors to submit their papers in HTML. There are various tools and templates for that, such as RASH, dokieli, and Authorea.
The Research Articles in Simplified HTML (RASH) (doc, paper) is a markup language that restricts the use of HTML elements to only 32 elements for writing academic research articles. It is possible to includes also RDFa annotations within any element of the language and other RDF statements in Turtle, JSON-LD and RDF/XML format by using the appropriate tag script.
Authors can start from this generic template, which can be also found in the convenient ZIP archive containing the whole RASH package.
Alternatively, these guidelines for OpenOffice and Word explain how to write a scholarly paper by using the basic features available in OpenOffice Writer and Microsoft Word, in a way that it can be converted into RASH by means of the RASH Online Conversion Service (ROCS) (src, paper).
As a second alternative, dokieli is a client-side editor for decentralized article publishing in HTML+RDFa, annotations and social interactions, compliant with the Linked Research initiative. There are a variety of examples in the wild, including the LNCS and ACM author guidelines as templates.
We also accept Jupyter Notebooks and other HTML-based interactive formats.
We prefer HTML, but we also accept submissions in Word or LaTeX. In that case, please use the official templates by IOS Press found here (LaTeX only) and here (Word and LaTeX).
This is optional, but we would like to encourage you to provide semantic (meta-)data with your scientific papers, but unfortunately no accepted standards, best practices, or nice tools exist for that yet. We are working to fix this. In the meantime, and if you are a bit experienced with RDF, we are very happy to receive your RDFa-enriched paper or a submission with separate RDF statements. We are also happy to help you with that, if you are not experienced with RDF.
We hope to be able to provide more general and more user-friendly guidelines for semantic publishing in the near future.
All relevant data that were used or produced for conducting the work presented in a paper must be made FAIR and compliant with the PLOS data availability guidelines prior to submission. See in particular the list of recommended data repositories. (We might provide our own data availability guidelines in the future, but we borrow the excellent PLOS guidelines for now.) In a nutshell, data have to be made openly accessible and freely reusable via established institutions and standards, unless privacy concerns forbid such a publication. In any case, metadata have to be made publicly accessible and visible.
See the reviewing guidelines for the specific criteria according to which submitted papers are evaluated.