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Publications: BSSA: Submissions |
Guidelines for Submitting Your Initial and Revised Manuscripts
Submission to BSSA is understood to imply that the article is original, unpublished, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere.
PREPARATION
Prepare your manuscript following our guidelines for preparing manuscripts. Failing to follow these guidelines can cause a delay to the processing of your manuscript.
Before you submit your manuscript please proofread it carefully. If necessary, ask a colleague whose first language is English for help in preparing the paper. Well-written manuscripts generally spend less time in the review process. Ideas that have not been expressed clearly and concisely are likely to be misunderstood by referees, and this could lead to rejection of a manuscript that might otherwise have been of interest to readers.
Download the copyright form, print it out, fill it out, and scan it into a file. You will upload the form as part of the submission process. If you cannot scan the copyright form into a file, you will be given the opportunity to indicate that you will send it offline and then you can either fax it or mail it to the Editorial Office.
SUBMISSION
Submissions to BSSA are now done through an online submission system.Save your manuscript in a form ready to be uploaded to our online submission system at bssa.edmgr.com. The system can accept Microsoft Word, LaTeX, WordPerfect, AMSTex, Rich Text Format (.rtf), or plain text files. However, if your paper is accepted for publication our compsitor prefers Microsoft Word or LaTeX files. For other formats, consult the HELP link near the top of the page at bssa.edmgr.com. Figures can be uploaded either as a single pdf file or as separate figure files in a wide variety of formats (e.g., pdf, eps, Adobe Illustrator, tiff, gif, jpeg, PICT, Excel and Powerpoint). Again, not all of these formats are best for publication, so please see our art submission guidelines for more information. If you submit individual files then the pdf file created by the online submission system will use downsampled versions of your figures to reduce the file size and if you submit individual figure files the pdf will contain links to the full-resolution figure files in case the editors or reviewers need to view them. If you submit your manuscript as a single pdf file or the figures as pdfs, then the figures will not be downsampled by the system and while this may improve how they look in the file you should be careful that they aren't excessively large.
If you have additional material that you wish the reviewers to see, upload this as "Supplemental Material."
To ease the uploading of multiple files, you may place the files in a zip archive and upload that. If the files have easy-to-figure-out names (e.g., text.doc, Figure 1.eps, Figure 2.eps) then the system will properly order them for you. If not, you can rearrange them during the submission process.
During the submission process you will be asked to provide contact information; background information that might be helpful to the Editor, Associate Editor, and referees; the type of article (article, short note, comment, reply, or erratum); if the paper is meant for a regular or special issue; names of potential referees (optional but helpful), names of people you wish to exclude as referees (optional), and up to 4 classification terms from this list, a new classification term if an appropriate one is not available, the Flinn-Engdahl region most appropriate for your paper, the name of a major earthquake if your paper focuses on one, and the location of your electronic supplement if one is being submitted.
The online submission system creates two pdf files of your manuscript. The first is for the authors and editors and may contain some information (such as suggested and excluded referees and letters to the editor) that would not be appropriate to show the referees. The second version is for the referees and does not include this information.
Once you have all of the necessary files prepared, log in to the submission system at bssa.edmgr.com as an author. If you start the process, but do not complete it, the system will save your submission and you can log back in at a later time and finish the process.
Initial Submissions: The entire document (including the text, tables, references, and figures) can be saved as a Portable Document Format (.pdf) file, or you may upload individual files as described above. Materials for electronic supplements can be uploaded as "Supplemental Material" files with descriptions after the Figure Captions. However, before acceptance these materials must be placed on a web site as described in our electronic supplement guidelines.
Submission of Revised Manuscripts When submitting a revised paper, you must upload the text (including references, tables, and figure captions) as a separate file from the figures and it must be in its source format (e.g., MS Word or LaTex and not pdf). You must also provide information on what revisions you made. These are uploaded as a "Letter to the Editor" which will only be seen by the editorial board and as "Response to Reviews" which may be shared with reviewers of your revised paper. You may upload multiple files as "Response to the Reviews" and these may include a description of the revisions and/or an annotated manuscript as requested by the editor. When submitting revisions, please submit electronic supplements as a web site as described in our electronic supplement guidelines. Failing to do so could delay acceptance of your manuscript while time is taken to format and review your supplement.
When submitting final files for an already accepted paper (if very minor changes are needed), you may need to upload very brief or empty files for required categories such as "Response to Reviews."
Submission Status: For updates on your submission's status, you can log in to the submission system. If you have further questions, please contact Managing Editor Carol Mark at the Editorial Office.
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Last Update: 28 March 2008