1. For authors

For authors

Submission

Detailed information on the article submission procedure is available in the Épisciences documentation. The main steps are summarized below.

  1. If any, authors are invited to submit the supplementary material coming together with their article to a dedicated open archive (Zenodo, SoftwareHeritage...). See the last section of this page for more information.
  2. If not already done, the author submitting a manuscript to JTCAM has to create an account on the Épisciences platform.
  3. Prior to submission to JTCAM, the authors are invited to share their manuscript as a pdf document on an Open Archive of their choice (arXiv, HAL, Zenodo or CWI) using a valid Open Access license.
  4. Once an Open Archive identifier has been assigned to the manuscript, the manuscript can be submitted to JTCAM.
  5. The review procedure is then initiated and final decision is communicated to the authors.
  6. If revisions are requested, authors should update the manuscript on the Open Archive and use the JTCAM platform to communicate this along with a detailed response to the reviewers.
  7. Once an article is accepted for publication, the final version is prepared internally and sent to the authors for final submission on the Open Archive.
  8. An open review history is also prepared with the review content and the author's response.
  9. The link to the paper is indicated in the list of published papers on JTCAM's webpage.

Preprint template

LaTeX users

Authors are free to use the LaTeX class of their choice when they first submit an article to JTCAM for review. However, accepted articles will have to comply with the JTCAM LaTeX template for preprints which comprises the main_preprint.tex file, a refs.bib file (and a refsbibtex.bib file for BibTeX users), a jtcam_preprint.cls file together with exemplary figures and plots. The layout of accepted publications will take a more elaborated form. Authors should be aware of the following:

  1. The JTCAM LaTeX template for preprints is compatible with the standard LaTeX article class and BibTeX engine for bibliography generation.
  2. The default engine for compilation is pdfLaTeX. Accordingly, graphics with .eps or .ps file extensions should first be converted into the .pdf format.
  3. The default engine for bibliography generation is BibTeX. However, the more recent Biber engine is recommended. See the `OptBiber' option in the template.
  4. In the cited bibliographic entries, full journal names are mandatory. Abbreviated journal names are not accepted. DOI links or any permanent electronic identifiers assigned to a cited document should be indicated.
  5. A very recent LaTeX distribution (like Texlive 2020) is highly recommended to avoid compilation glitches.
  6. Newly introduced `software' bibligraphic entries, defined through the advanced softwate-biblatex package which requires the Biber engine, can be used in the .bib file. See the `OptSoft' option in the template and a video tutorial.
  7. The base color of an accepted paper in JTCAM is (RGB)=(10,40,80) which is the dark blue used in the header of this webpage. Authors are welcome to choose colors (for instance, in their graphics) in harmony with this dark blue.

As already explained in the JTCAM LaTeX template for preprints, authors should be aware of the following:

  1. They are responsible for creating a .bib file of the cited bibliographic entries. In addition to authors' names, full journal name, volume, issue/number, page range, year and DOI (when available) are requested. For books, the edition, publisher and ISBN identifier entries are requested as well.
  2. They are responsible for creating high quality vector graphics when appropriate. For complete integration within the JTCAM template, they will be asked to export their graphics to the TikZ/PGFPlots format:
    • For Matlab users, please see the matlab2tikz plugin.
    • For Python users, please see the tikzplotlib plugin.
    • For other graphical solutions, please see how to export to the PGFPlots/Tikz format.

Non-LaTeX users

It is highly suggested to prepare a manuscript to be submitted to JTCAM with LaTeX. However, manuscripts prepared in Word/OpenOffice will also be considered and will be internally reformatted using the official LaTeX template. Authors should be aware of the following:

  1. They are responsible for creating a .bib (also called bibtex format) file of the cited bibliographic entries. See for instance text2bib, jabref, Zotero, or Endnote2bib. Most publishers can export citations in the bibtex format. In addition to authors' names, full journal name, volume, issue/number, page range, year and DOI (when available) are requested. For books, the edition, publisher and ISBN identifier entries are requested as well.
  2. They are responsible for creating high quality vector graphics when appropriate. For complete integration within the JTCAM template, they will be asked to export their graphics to the TikZ/PGFPlots format:
    • For Matlab users, please see the matlab2tikz plugin.
    • For Python users, please see the tikzplotlib plugin.
    • For other graphical solutions, please see how to export to the PGFPlots/Tikz format.

Graphics and Colors

Open Science

Open access

When the article is submitted on the Open Archive, one of the Creative Commons (CC) licenses has to be selected unless otherwise required by employers or funding agencies. Many science funders specifically require the CC-BY license. There will be no copyright transfer to the journal: authors retain the copyright and merely grant the journal the right to publish the article through the CC Open Access license.

Supplementary material

Although not a requirement for publication, the journal recommends that any research software source code and data sets associated with the submitted manuscript be made publicly available. This can be done, and a citable DOI identifier obtained, through repositories such as

  • Zenodo for large data sets, algorithms or research software,
  • PANGEA, Data Publisher for Earth & Environmental Science,
  • SoftwareHeritage for research software.

Long term archiving as well as reproducibility of the results exposed in a research article are equally important. Accordingly, any link to a personal professional webpage is not recommended since durability is in general not guaranteed. Both repositories cited above assign a permanent identifier to all their deposits which can then be cited in articles submitted to the journal. All other institutional repositories offering long-term archiving facilities are also acceptable.

FAIR guiding principles

Good data and software management is key to ensure dissemination of knowledge and innovation. Possible reuse by the scientific community after publication is made possible through the four foundational FAIR principles, namely: Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability. Contributors should be aware of these principles when submitting a paper to JTCAM.