Author Guidelines
Aims and Scope
Please refer to the Aims and Scope to ensure that your submission is suitable for the journal.
Editorial and production processes
Our typical submission-to-publication workflow is outlined below.
Initial check
Submissions initially undergo a plagiarism check and an in-house editorial check to ensure they are original and meet our requirements for style and language. Submissions that don’t fully comply with our author guidelines may be sent back to the authors for amendment or, in extreme cases, may be rejected at this stage. Only after a manuscript has passed this initial check do we pass on the manuscript to the Editor in Chief.
Editor and reviewer selection
The Editor in Chief may assign an Associate Editor. The Associate Editor or Editor in Chief are responsible for inviting reviewers. The Associate Editor or Editor in Chief are required to declare any competing interest that may influence their evaluation of the manuscript and, where appropriate, recuse themselves. Reviewers are selected on the basis of their expertise and absence of competing interests with the authors or the manuscript.
The authors may suggest reviewers for their articles during submission. They should ensure the suggested reviewers have no conflict of interest. The editor will check the suggested reviewers’ suitability and may invite them at their discretion.
Peer review and initial decision
A minimum of two reviewers evaluate original research and review articles. For other article types, the number of reviewers assigned is at the discretion of the editor. Reviewers are requested to complete their review within two weeks of accepting the invitation. The editorial criteria used for the reviews can be found below. Upon receiving all the required reviews, the editor makes one of the following initial decisions: accept, request minor or major revisions, or reject. All decisions should be adequately substantiated.
Revision and final decision
If revisions are requested, every effort is made to help authors understand and address the reviewers’ and editor’s comments. In particular, authors can contact the editorial office during revision if they need some clarifications or want to check they are going in the right direction. Authors are asked to submit their revised manuscript within four weeks of receiving the decision letter. The revision should include a point-by-point response to the peer review comments (this can be uploaded on the submission platform in the “explanation letter” section).
Revised manuscripts are evaluated by the editor, with or without the reviewers’ assistance, at his/her discretion.
Production
Accepted manuscripts are passed on to our production department for typesetting and publication. Manuscripts are not copyedited. Authors will receive proofs within five to ten working days of acceptance, and are requested to submit their corrections within 48 hours. They also need to supply any missing information such as high-resolution figures or permission to reuse copyrighted material before we can proceed to publication.
Manuscript status
Authors can track their manuscript in their author centre on our online platform at http://www.editorialsystem.com/jea/. The corresponding author will be notified by email when initial checks and decision have been made. Appeals Authors who deem that an unfair and inappropriate decision has been made on their manuscript can appeal to the Editor-in-chief by contacting the editorial office. The Editor-in-chief may, at its discretion, appoint a new editor or reviewers to adjudicate.
Editorial criteria
The Journal of Ecoacoustics welcomes all valid and robust scholarly articles. Our review process is designed to ensure that submissions are technically and ethically sound, and to gauge a manuscript’s impact or significance. We ask our reviewers and editors to use the following evaluation criteria:
Quality and soundness of the research
The statement of the problem and objectives should be clear and reasonable. The methodology should be appropriate and described in sufficient detail. Robust evidence and valid analysis must support the conclusions.
Language and presentation
Manuscripts must be written in English, clearly intelligible and well presented. As far as possible, the structure of articles should follow accepted standards. The introduction must provide sufficient background. Figures and tables must be properly labelled and of sufficient quality. References should be relevant and up to date.
Ethics and best practice
In addition, reviewers will ensure that manuscripts comply with accepted standards with regards to research integrity, experimental ethics, and data and material sharing. See our Policies section for further details.
Policies
Authorship The Journal of Ecoacoustics expects authors to use the ICMJE’s criteria for authorship. All authors should meet these requirements, and all contributors who meet these requirements should be listed as authors.
The criteria are:
• Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work; AND
• Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content; AND
• Final approval of the version to be published; AND
• Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved. Contributors who do not meet all four criteria for authorship should be mentioned in the acknowledgements.
Submitting author responsibilities
The submitting author is the journal’s primary contact before and after publication. He/she is responsible for liaising with the co-authors, for ensuring they meet the above authorship criteria and for submitting their details, declarations of interest, funding sources etc. accurately. The submitting author is also responsible for making choices throughout the publication process on behalf of all of the authors and for communicating these choices to all of the authors. The submitting author will also agree to our publishing agreement on behalf of all of the authors.
Experimental Ethics
Authors must adhere to ethical standards in their field of research, as dictated by institutional, national or international regulations and guidelines. An appropriate ethics statement detailing the approval process must be included in the methods section when applicable. This is required in particular for research involving human subjects or animals. Further information can be found on our policies page.
Redundant publications
The Journal of Ecoacoustics will not consider studies that have already been published in peer-reviewed literature or that are under consideration for publication elsewhere. We welcome the submission of manuscripts available on preprint repositories and of contributions presented at conferences.
Research integrity and publishing ethics
The Journal of Ecoacoustics adheres to the COPE recommendations and upholds the highest standards in publication ethics and research integrity. We do not tolerate data or figure manipulation, plagiarism, redundant publication, inaccurate or incomplete declarations of interest or other irregularities. We will deal with allegations of misconduct in accordance with COPE’s guidelines, and issue corrections or retractions of articles as necessary. For further details see Wager E. & Kleinert S. (2011), Responsible research publication: international standards for authors, in: Mayer T. & Steneck N. (eds) Promoting Research Integrity in a Global Environment. Imperial College Press / World Scientific Publishing, Singapore (pp 309-16).
Data and material sharing
In order to promote the transparency and reproducibility of research, the Journal of Ecoacoustics requests that, where applicable, authors make the data, method or materials underlying their paper available to readers in accordance with best practice in their discipline (e.g. through deposition in public repositories). Research data is commonly defined as “data that is collected, observed, or created, for purposes of analysis to produce original research results.” Relevant DOI, accession or reference numbers should be provided in the manuscript. When no suitable repository is available, authors can upload supporting/supplementary material to our platform. See our policies page for details.
Declaration of interest
Authors must disclose any potential conflict of interest as part of the submission. A conflict of interest, or competing interest is anything that may, or may be perceived to, influence the authors’ work. Conflicts of interest typically stem from financial, personal or professional relationships, but may have other sources as well. The declaration of interest is published with each article. Editors and reviewers are also required to declare any competing interest that may influence their evaluation of the manuscript and, where appropriate, recuse themselves.
Acknowledgements
The acknowledgements will appear in a separate section at the end of the article prior to the declaration of interest and references. However, to facilitate anonymous peer review, acknowledgements should not be included in the submitted manuscript, but supplied separately when requested in the submission process. All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, writing assistance, or a department chair who provided only general support.
Disclosure of funding sources
All sources of funding for the research submitted should be acknowledged separately from the declaration of interest and acknowledgement sections. The funding statement should contain, when applicable, the funding organisation, grant number and recipients, and will be included in the published article.
Double-blind review
We operate a double-blind review: authors and reviewers are anonymous to each other during the review process. Authors should ensure that no identifying information, such as names, institution etc. is present in the manuscript (including the file metadata) during the review period. However, in the spirit of transparency, reviewers can elect to sign their comments, thus revealing their identity to the authors.
Open Access
The Journal of Ecoacoustics publishes articles under the Open Access model. Published articles are free to download, reuse and adapt under the Creative Commons attribution licence (version 4.0) or, if required, under the Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain dedication waiver.
Article processing charge
The Journal of Ecoacoustics charges authors (or their institution or funding organisation) an article processing charge (APC) 60 € (per article) +14€ (per page published). For instance, for a paper of 10 pages the author will be charged of 60+140= 200 €.
Copyright and publishing licences
The authors retain the copyright for their article. Articles are published Open Access under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY 4.0) licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and its authors credited. If no copyright exists and articles must be in the public domain, authors should request that we apply the Creative Commons CC0 Public Domain dedication waiver.
Third-party material
Authors who reproduce non-original material in their manuscript should ensure it is appropriately attributed to the original authors and sources. The rights holder may have specific instructions on how to credit the source. If that material is under copyright, it can only be reproduced with the permission of the rights holder. Authors are responsible for obtaining such permissions and will be required to provide them to us before publication. When requesting permission to reuse content, such as figures, tables, text etc., the authors should make sure they clearly stipulate the intended use for that content.
Permissions can be uploaded during submission or sent to the production editor after acceptance.
Privacy and consent
The Journal of Ecoacoustics protects the rights of individuals taking part in a study to privacy and anonymity. Authors should make every effort to remove personal information of study participants or patients in their manuscript. When this is not possible or when images of patients or study participants (whether anonymised or not) are included, the authors must obtain written consent from the individuals or their legal guardian. They may also need releases for photographs of people in general. Please contact our editorial office if you require further guidance.
Authors must confirm during submission that they have obtained all the appropriate consents and releases.
Submission and manuscript preparation
Preparing the submission A submission comprises a number of files (manuscript, figures, tables, supporting/supplementary information) and additional information (author details, declaration of competing interests, funding sources etc.) provided by the submitting author via our submission system. The Journal of Ecoacoustics aims to be flexible and to make submission as easy as possible for authors. As such, we keep our formatting requirements to a minimum (see the “formatting” section below) and do not insist on adherence to a rigid style. However, we do ask that authors consider the readability for referees when formatting their manuscripts. The complete manuscript text should be submitted in a single file containing all the essential sections and references. Each figure and table should be submitted as a separate file. The manuscript text file should not contain author details, funding sources, declarations of interest or acknowledgements – these are provided separately during the submission process and will be included in the article if it is accepted for publication. Please make certain all figures and tables are cited in the text.
File requirements
We accept MS Word DOC and DOCX formats. Figures should be submitted as high-resolution JPEG, TIFF, PNG, or EPS for vector images. The minimum resolution required is 300 ppi with dimensions no smaller than 5 by 5 cm. The caption for figures and tables (title, legend) is added to the relevant files during submission and should not be included in the manuscript file. Supporting/supplementary information files will not be edited and can be submitted in any format readily used by readers (including audio, video, database etc.).
Article type
The following article types are considered for publication:
.Original articles should contain completely new principal research which makes a significant contribution to the field. The study should represent discoveries or new findings in a subject area that have not been published previously. The report may contain significant findings, methodology advancement, and considerable evidence to the conclusions.
. Review articles are comprised of summarised descriptions of recent findings and significant developments of a particular subject area within the journal’s scope. They should include evaluation of subject advancement, comparative analysis with substantial coverage of previous works and highlight future prospects. A review should express new points of view which are supported by existing literature from a variety of authors.
. Letters to the editor are also welcome and should be sent in the first instance to almo.farina@uniurb.it.
Length
The maximum lengths for running title, abstract and manuscripts are as follows:
Original Article; Running Title 60 characters ; Abstract 500 words, Manuscript length (excluding references) 8,000 words
Review; Running Title 60 characters ; Abstract 500 words, Manuscript length (excluding references) 8,000 words
Perspective; Running Title 60 characters ; Abstract 500 words, Manuscript length (excluding references) 8,000 words
Lettre to editor: Running Title 60 characters, Manuscript length 2000 words.
Please note, the running title is a shortened version of the full article title and will be used on the header of the article PDF and on the journal homepage online.
Style Language
Manuscripts must be written in clear English. Both US and UK spellings are acceptable but should be consistent throughout the manuscript. Articles should be thoroughly checked and proofread before submission. Authors may consult the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition, for specific guidance on grammar, spelling, punctuation etc. Articles with serious language issues may be rejected without peer review; authors who are not fluent English speakers are encouraged to use professional editing services before submission. Authors are reminded that accepted articles are not copyedited before publication.
Abstract
The abstract should concisely summarize the problem, objectives, approach, findings and conclusions. Abstracts should not contain citations.
References
The Journal of Ecoacoustics uses the Harvard reference style. All references should be cited in the text and listed in the references section in alphabetical order, except unpublished work and personal communications. The former can be included in the submission as supporting/supplementary information. The latter should be kept to a minimum and cite the name of the person and the year in the text. The authors should not cite their own work in a way that could identify them.
In-text citations
References should be cited in the text in order of appearance.
Reference section
The reference section should be ordered alphabetical using the formats below.
Articles
Guang J., Liu Q. P., Hopson R., and Williard P. G. Lithium pinacolone enolate solvated by hexamethylphosphoramide. Journal of the American Chemical Society. 2015; 137 (23), 7347–7356. doi:10.1021/jacs.5b01906
A DOI is necessary for online articles and recommended for all articles. Replace DOI or volume and page numbers by “In press” for accepted articles pending publication.
Books
Castilla N. Greenhouse Technology and Management. Wallingford: CABI Publishing, 2012.
Book chapters
Baerveldt C. and Cresswell J. Creativity and the generative approach to culture and meaning. In: Rethinking creativity, ed. Glăveanu V. P., Gillespie A. and Valsiner J. Milton Park: Psychology Press, 2015. 93–109
Theses
Cheglakov G. Growth of NiO. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 2015.
Preprints
Bachmann T. The Hurewicz and conservativity theorems for SH(k) to DM(k). Preprint, submitted 24 June 2015. http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.07375.
Websites
Committee on Publication Ethics (2015). Guidelines. Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing, version 2. Last updated 22 June 2015.
http://publicationethics.org/files/Principles_of_Transparency_and_Best_Practice_in_Scholarly_Publishingv2.pdf
International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (2015). News & Editorials. 2015 Announcement: Up-Dated ICMJE Recommendations, December 2015.
http://www.icmje.org/news-and-editorials/updated_recommendations_dec2015.html
Other
As far as possible, include author names, publication date, title, medium, publisher, URL, reference or identification number and date accessed.
Figures, tables and supporting/supplementary information
Image manipulation
Images should only be minimally edited. Adjustments to the brightness, contrast, white balance etc., if necessary, should be applied uniformly to all relevant images and controls. Any manipulation resulting in potentially misleading images is considered unethical and may warrant the rejection or retraction of the article.
Citation
Cite figures as “Figure 1” and so on; tables as “Table 1”; supporting/supplementary information as “S1.” Figures, tables and supporting/supplementary information should be cited in ascending numerical order upon first appearance in the text.
Caption
Title and legend are entered separately for each figure or table during the upload step. [every legend in a separate files, or all the legends in a specific file?] This allows us to provide a higher-quality manuscript to reviewers, and speeds up the production process upon acceptance. Captions should not be included within the figure or table files.
Nomenclature
SI units should be used, although other units can be acceptable if widely used in a specific field.
Nomenclatures should follow established practices and recommendations from authoritative bodies and committees.
Abbreviations
Abbreviations should be defined when first mentioned unless they are well known in the field and unambiguous.
Equations
For submissions in MS Word format, equations should be inserted in the manuscript text file in an editable format that can be converted to MathML, not as an image. For articles containing complex equations or many equations, commercial plugins such as MathType are strongly recommended. If we feel the conversion of equations in production may pose a problem, we may send the manuscript back to the authors. Equations can be added using MS Word equation editor or similar basic tools if they are not complex nor numerous.
Although it is possible to insert simple equations inline in plain text, please note that these equations will not be searchable on future versions of our website.
Chemical structures
Vector images or ChemDraw files are preferred for chemical structures.
Rasterized images can also be submitted, but please be aware that we will not be able to edit text elements or change their relative size when resizing the image.
Formatting
Font and headings Built-in ‘styles’ should be used for the text and headings (i.e. Normal, Heading 1 etc.). This facilitates conversions into other file formats and results in more consistently formatted and laid out manuscripts for reviewers and editors. Please use no more than three heading levels.
Layout
Manuscripts should be laid out in a single column and double-spaced.
Footnotes are not supported and should not be used.
Metadata and additional information
The following information is requested during submission and should not be included in the manuscript file:
• Author names and affiliations
• Manuscript type
• Keywords
• Declaration of interest (for each author)
• Funding sources (for the research described in the manuscript)
• Acknowledgements
• Cover letter (optional) Providing this information separately allows us to keep manuscripts anonymous as well as to achieve enhanced readability and format consistency in different output formats during the review stage.
Contact
The Editor-in-chief (Almo Farina) can be contacted by email at journalecoacoustics@gmail.com, or by post at:
Almo Farina
Editor-in-chief of JEA
International Institute of Ecoacoustics
Loc. Ortolano, 5 54013 Fivizzano, Italy
