Submitting an Article Online

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Author Guidelines

Article types | Structure | Hardware documentation |Style guide| Permissions 

Submissions should be made electronically through this website. Once submitted, the author can track the submission and communicate with the editors via the online journal management system.

Please ensure that you consider the following guidelines when preparing your manuscript. Failure to do so may delay processing your submission.

Article types

• Hardware Metapapers are structured summaries of open hardware projects. Word limit: 4,500 words
• Issues in Open Hardware outline and discuss the potential applications and significance of new techniques or critique and suggest modifications to extant methodologies and approaches. Word limit: 6,000 words
• Educational Hardware describe a piece of hardware in a specific pedagogical context focusing on its educational use. Word limit: 4,500 words
• Reviews can cover topics such as current controversies or the historical development of studies, issues of regional or temporal focus, summaries of the technological state of the art of an instrumentation type. Papers should critically engage with the relevant body of literature. Word limit: 5,000 words 

All word limits include referencing and citations.

Issues on Open Hardware and Reviews

Title page

The title page must include all of the below information, in the same order. No further information should be included:

• Title
• Full author name(s) Author names must include a forename and a surname. Forenames should preferably not include only initials.
• Affiliation(s) The affiliation should ideally include Department, Institution, City and Country, however only the Institution (if applicable) and Country are mandatory.
• Corresponding author’s email address (other author email addresses are optional)

Abstract
Research articles must have the main text prefaced by an abstract of no more than 250 words summarising the main arguments and conclusions of the article. This must have the heading ‘Abstract’ and be easily identified from the start of the main text.

A list of up to six key words may be placed below the abstract (optional).

The Abstract and Keywords should also be added to the metadata when making the initial online submission.

Main text
The body of the submission should be structured in a logical and easy to follow manner. A clear introduction section should be given that allows non-specialists in the subject an understanding of the publication and a background of the issue(s) involved. Methods, results, discussion and conclusion sections may then follow to clearly detail the information and research being presented.

Up to three level headings may be present and must be clearly identifiable using different font sizes, bold or italics. We suggest using Headings 1, 2 and 3 in MS-Word’s ‘Style’ section.

Acknowledgements (optional)

Competing interests
If any of the authors have any competing interests then these must be declared. A short paragraph should be placed before the references. Guidelines for competing interests can be found here.

Ethics and consent (if applicable)
Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Where applicable, the studies must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee and the authors should include a statement within the article text detailing this approval, including the name of the ethics committee and reference number of the approval. The identity of the research subject should be anonymised whenever possible. For research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study must be obtained from participants (or their legal guardian).

Experiments using animals must follow national standards of care. For further information, click here.

References
All references cited within the submission must be listed at the end of the main text file.

Hardware documentation

Any submission that describes one or more hardware designs requires the deposition of a detailed description and documentation of the hardware in a suitable repository (see list of recommended repositories). While the reviewers of your submission mainly assess the accuracy and quality of the metadata rather than the documentation, there will be a minimum level of quality check on this documentation. Hardware documentation must include:

• The source (e.g. schematics, modifiable CAD files, board designs, etc)
• Any useful intermediate files (e.g. fabrication-ready PCB files, STL files for 3D printing)
• An indication of the intended audience, and resources required to build it
• Description of the project’s functionality
• Explanation, where appropriate, to help the reader understand why design decisions were taken
• Complete assembly instructions, ideally with photographs, diagrams, etc.
• Calibration and testing instructions
• List of parts, ideally with supplier details
• Sufficient information to recreate any custom parts required

This list forms part of the acceptance criteria for the journal.

Openness, quality, accessibility

Submissions also have to comply with the OSHWA definition for open source hardware:

• Source files must be under an open hardware compatible license that permits others to study, modify, distribute, make, and sell your hardware. 
• You may require anyone building on your work to release their designs under the same conditions to increase a common pool of contributed hardware design files (referred more generally as reciprocal licensing). 
• You should apply either a reciprocal or a permissive license to meet the OSHWA definition to your project documentation. Reciprocal licenses include hardware-specific ones from CERN and TAPR. Permissive licenses include Solderpad license.  More information on hardware licensing is available from OSHWA.

Style guide

For detailed instructions on language and text, data and symbols, figures and tables and references, please, see the JOH style guide.

Permissions

The author is responsible for obtaining all permissions required prior to submission of the manuscript. Permission and owner details should be mentioned for all third-party content included in the submission or used in the research.

If a method or tool is introduced in the study, including software, questionnaires, and scales, the license this is available under and any requirement for permission for use should be stated. If an existing method or tool is used in the research, it is the author's responsibility to check the license and obtain the necessary permissions. Statements confirming that permission was granted should be included in the Materials and Methods section.

Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

1. The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
2. Any third-party-owned materials used have been identified with appropriate credit lines, and permission obtained from the copyright holder for all formats of the journal.

3. All authors have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper and satisfy the authorship guidelines.

   Hardware Metapapers are written in accordance with the article template.

4. The submission file is in LaTeX, OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
5. All DOIs for the references have been provided, when available.
6. Tables and figures are all cited in the text. Tables are included within the text document, whilst figure files are uploaded as supplementary files.
7. Figures/images have a resolution of at least 150dpi (300dpi or above preferred). Each file is no more than 20MB per file. The files are in one of the following formats: JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS (to maximise quality, the original source file is preferred).
8. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal. Every effort has been made to ensure that author names are removed from the manuscript (following the instructions to ensure blind peer review).

Copyright Notice

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.

Publication Fees

Articles accepted for publication will be asked to pay an Article Publication Charge (APC) to cover publication costs. This can normally be sourced from your funder or institution. This fee covers all publication costs (editorial processes; web hosting; indexing; marketing; archiving; DOI registration etc) and ensures that all of the content is fully open access. This approach maximises the potential readership of publications and allows the journal to be run in a sustainable way. For a breakdown of costs, please click here.

Many institutions have funds available to support open access publications by their staff, therefore we ask that you contact the relevant body to cover the APC.

If you do not know about your institution’s policy on open access funding, please contact your departmental/faculty administrators and institution library, as funds may be available to you.

If published, you will receive an APC request email along with information on how payment can be arranged. If you need to waive the APC, you will also have an opportunity to do it there.

Waiver Information

WAIVERS

If you do not have funds available to pay the APC (eg because your institution/funder will not cover the fee) then we may be able to offer a discount or full waiver. Please ensure that you contact the editor as early as possible should you need to discuss waiver options or the APC in general.

Editorial decisions are made independently from the ability to pay the APC.