There will be a long delay before we get your typeset, copyedited paper prepared and in print.
There has been a substantial increase in the number of submissions we have received in recent years. At the same time, our acceptance rate has remained fairly stable. Thus, there are many more papers that need to be carefully guided through the production process.
There are two ways to deal with this increase:
- Impose a substantial pause on accepting new papers. This option would particularly harm early-career philosophers of science, who have a limited number of suitable venues for their work and can’t afford to wait as long as later-career folks.
- Substantially increase the cost of the journal to cover the labour costs involved in publishing more pages per year. This option would particularly harm low-income readers and institutions. Because a delay in production is closer to an inconvenience than a harm, we’ve chosen this path.
You can see how many papers are ahead of yours in the queue here.
We do aim to get your final draft online as soon as possible, usually within a few weeks. This means that your paper will be issued with a DOI, and should count as published for the purposes of your CV, hiring/promotion boards, grant committees, and so on.
IMPORTANT Because the final version you send us will appear online for some time before you can ask for corrections, it is vital that you closely follow the instructions below. If we have to intervene in your manuscript to meet the requirements below, this increases the chance of errors being introduced into your paper.
- We cannot publish your paper without a signed publication agreement.
- You can find a copy of the publication agreement here. This must be uploaded with your final files.
- Please provide all information requested on page 1 and your signature on page 4.
- Co-authors may grant one author permission to sign on their behalf. The signing author must tick ‘Author signing on behalf of joint author(s)’ and list the names of all co-authors.
- There are three OA routes: Green, Gold CC BY-NC, or Gold CC BY. More details on each of these options below.
- The BJPS is already Green OA compliant, so you do not need to request this option. Note that many funders, such as the ERC, only require Green OA. To comply with ERC guidelines, you must simply deposit a copy your paper in an online repository after the BJPS’s 12-month embargo period elapses.
- Please contact the BJPS Editorial Office directly if you wish to pursue open access via the Gold CC BY-NC or Gold CC BY routes when sending us your final files.
- Anonymization: This version should not be anonymized. Add your name, fix/restore citations to your own work, and add any acknowledgements. (Note: Do not forgot to thank your referees!)
- Citations: Check your citations, especially that you have provided page numbers for direct quotations. You will be required to provide this information during the copyediting process, but it will be considerably easier on you to source this information now. It will also be less annoying for readers of this version of your paper! (But don’t confuse page range with page numbers, and online-only sources don’t need page numbers.)
- Accessibility: Lots of the measures we ask you to take below concern making your paper accessible to all readers. These measures are non-negotiable.
- Title. Set in title case (see details about capitalization below).
- Author Name(s). The ordering of names is left to co-authors to determine (and notes on this matter should be included in the acknowledgements section).
- Abstract. No more than 300 words, and ideally fewer. Less is more.
- ORCID. If you and/or your co-authors have ORCID numbers, include it next.
- Main text comes next.
- Appendix. Any appendices are placed immediately after the main text.
- Acknowledgements. Don’t forget to thank your referees (or risk an enemy for life). Include details of any funders. Avoid abbreviations.
- Conflicts of Interest. This section must be included, even if only to state that the author has no conflicts of interest. Your paper will not be published without this statement.
- Next list your department, university, city, country, and email address. Only include author name where there are multiple authors.
- References. List all and only those sources cited in the paper. Details of citation style below.
- Unless you tell us otherwise, we will assume that you are happy with black and white printing. If you want to pay for colour printing, get in touch with the editorial office for a quotation as soon as possible.
- I want black and white printing: Make sure the images you send us make sense in black and white. Also, make sure the paper makes sense if you began with colour images (e.g. that it does not refer to colour terms like ‘blue lines’ or ‘red squares’).
- I want colour printing: Make sure as far as possible that the images are optimized for colour-blindness.
- Your paper contains figures: Include both a caption and an alt text description. label each clearly. Alt text is not simply a longer label but rather a pretty literal description of the image for those who rely on text-to-voice readers; advice on how to write effective alt text can be found here.
- Your figures contain text: Use Times New Roman for any text.
- Your figures won’t appear where you placed them: Include a reference at the relevant point in the text (for example, ‘see figure 1’). The figure will be placed as close as possible to its first in-text mention, rather than exactly where you put them in your final files.
- Sending us your figures: We need them their original formats (.jpg, .png, .tiff) and not, for example, embedded in a word document.
- Your paper includes photographs: Photographs need to be 20–26 picas wide at 300 DPI to meet minimum quality standards for print.
- Your figures require permission: Where permission to reprint images that are not your own is required, it is the your responsibility to obtain it. Evidence of permission to reprint should be included as part of the final files you submit. It is also the your responsibility to include any acknowledgements stipulated by particular institutions, publishers, or copyright licence for the reproduction of such figures or tables.
The big picture: There are a number of steps we ask you to take in order to make your paper more accessible (for example, for people who rely on text-to-voice readers). For the most part, this amounts to the advice: use your words!
- Outside of mathematical notation, avoid using typefaces to convey meaning. Typefaces such as italics are not preserved by text-to-voice readers, so if they are doing any heavy lifting in your sentence, that meaning will be lost to listeners. Rephrase so your point can be understood.
- For similar reasons, refrain from using font styles as shorthand (if you don’t, we will—and you may not like our alternatives). For example, if you introduce a definition, law, or similar, give it a ‘readable’ name. For example:
- ‘The principal principle’ is acceptable; ‘principal’, ‘principal’, and ‘PRINCIPAL’ are not.
- ‘Ohm’s law’ is acceptable; ‘Ohm’, ‘Ohm’, and ‘Ohm’ are not.
- ‘The concept of dog’ is acceptable; ‘Dog’ is not
- Abbreviations are mostly a convenience for writers, not readers. (They can also mask grammatical and other errors.) Keep them to a minimum, since they unnecessarily increase the cognitive load for the reader (UITCLFTR). Far fewer things need to be abbreviated than usually are and, in particular, a term that only appears a few times throughout the text does not need to be abbreviated. The fix is also easy: find and replace the relevant abbreviations before you submit your final files.
- Label only those things that you will be referring back to later in the text, whether they are points, equations, or anything else. Multiple numbered lists can lead to (1) ambiguity and (2) confusion, and (3) are mostly unnecessary. They also tend to suggest the point will be referenced later, and so again unnecessarily increase the cognitive load of the reader.
- Lists of three or more in-text citations should be moved to the footnotes.
- Parochial references—such as ‘this country’, ‘our legal system’, ‘the Department of Education’, ‘the Constitution’, and so on—should be avoided. Be specific in identifying people, places, institutions, and other entities in full so it is clear for all readers.
- No form of language or expression should be used that could be interpreted by a reader as being racist, sexist, derogatory of a particular religion or creed, or otherwise offensive.
Accommodating these points can require small changes in how you have written a given sentence, to maintain your overall argument or the flow of your writing. Again, if you don’t take these steps yourself, someone else will and you may not like the specific solutions they adopt.
In more detail…
All of these elements are formatted in the same way
Label in Title Case and Bold: Text of definition; not indented; same size as main text.
For example:
Proof 1: Here is my proof. □
Law of the Jungle: For any jungle, J, there is one king of the swingers, JVIP, where JVIP ≤ top and JVIP ≠ man.
Full details below on how to handle specific types of work you might want to cite, but this image highlights some of the key features of our referencing style
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All author names are given in the same way: last name, followed by the initials of the first and any middle names.
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Publication year in round parentheses, followed by a full stop.
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Book and journal titles are set in italics.
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Article and chapter titles are enclosed in single quotation marks.
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Page numbers exclude repeated digits except for final two.
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Online-only material should include the url or doi.
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For papers with ten authors or fewer, list all names. For papers with more than ten authors, the list may be abbreviated to the first seven authors, followed by ‘et al.’.
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List all the names of the editors.
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Papers that have been accepted for publication but have not yet been assigned an issue/appeared in print should be listed as forthcoming (the ‘published online’ date may not match the final publication date). No page numbers will be available (do not use page range), but please do provide the url or doi of the paper.
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Material in online repositories should be listed as ‘unpublished’
- Data/code made available during the peer-review process should continue to be made available to readers in an online repository.
- If there is some reason this cannot be done, contact the editorial office immediately.
- The anonymized links for peer review should now be replaced with the stable URL.
- Please consider your life choices.
- A BJPS LaTeX template can be downloaded here.
- Upload both the .tex file (plus .bib and any image files) as well as the pdf, since we’ll need the latter for reference.
- Compile your .tex file on Overleaf to determine if it will compile in its entirety for us.
Your question not answered here? Let us know.