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Journal Policies

Table of Contents

When submitting a manuscript to JGL, authors agree to share the work under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0) if the work is accepted for publication. Authors retain all copyrights to their works but grant JGL first publication rights to works accepted for publication. The full article submission agreement is available for pre-submission review.

JGL policies and other non-article website text, as well as all JGL graphics, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

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Section Policies

Articles (peer reviewed): Scholarly articles about graduate librarianship that report on empirical research, present case studies, report on professional practice, or engage deeply with theory and/or existing scholarly literature. All manuscripts must provide an introduction and conclusion, and must address the relevant literature. Manuscripts reporting on empirical research (quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods) should generally be divided into the following sections: Literature Review, Methods, Results, and Discussion. Practice and theory manuscripts may be divided into whatever sections suit the manuscript’s topic and arguments. As a rule, manuscripts submitted to the Articles section should be 3,000–6,000 words, though exceptions will be considered. An abstract of up to 250 words must also be provided. Submissions go through double-anonymous peer review; see Submission Guidelines for anonymization instructions.

Sharing Our Stories (editor reviewed): Brief reports on personal experiences in graduate librarianship, including (but not limited to) initiatives, successes, lessons learned, reflections, epiphanies, and professional development. In this section, authors have more freedom with regard to tone and may or may not include citations, but all manuscripts should present a central point or argument and include meaningful subheadings that guide the reader through the piece in a logical fashion. Sharing Our Stories manuscripts should be 1,500–3,000 words, though exceptions will be considered. A brief abstract of up to 100 words must also be provided. Submissions are reviewed by JGL editors and do not undergo a full peer-review process or need to be anonymized.

Practitioner Panel: Comments from multiple contributors on a given topic, collected and compiled by JGL editors. Comments are solicited in a variety of ways (e.g., email lists, social media) and not typically submitted via the journal website.

From the Editors: Introduction to each issue, with reflections, commentary, or updates from one or more members of JGL’s editorial team. Not open for submissions.

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Peer Review

JGL editors perform an initial review of all submitted manuscripts and may reject papers that are clearly outside of the journal’s scope. Submissions to the Articles section of the journal that are determined to be within scope are sent to at least two reviewers. (See Section Policies for information about JGL's sections.) JGL uses a double-anonymous review process: authors' identities are not revealed to reviewers during review, and reviewers’ identities are at no time revealed to authors.

JGL understands that timely peer review is important to authors and aims to render initial decisions about acceptance approximately six weeks after the submission deadline for a given issue, but cannot guarantee this time frame. Authors may not submit their manuscript to other publications while a review is in progress.

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Turnaround Times

JGL editors strive to avoid publication backlogs and long periods of uncertainty for authors. To this end, peer reviewers are typically asked to submit their reviews within 21 days. When a manuscript is conditionally accepted pending revisions, authors are typically asked to make the requested changes within 28 days. Of course, any additional rounds of peer review and/or revision require additional time.

Once a manuscript is accepted, it enters the production process, which involves light copyediting (see below), proofreading, layout, and formatting. Production timeframes vary depending on manuscript length and complexity, but the editors aim to send article proofs to authors within 28 days of acceptance. Authors are then typically asked to check the proofs and respond to any questions within 14 days. Beginning with Volume 2, Issue 1, articles will be published as they become ready.

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Copyediting

Because JGL does not charge fees or have other forms of funding, there is no budget for professional copyediting or proofreading of manuscripts. Authors are expected to carefully review their submissions in order to maximize clarity, minimize typographical and grammatical errors, and ensure adherence to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, Seventh Edition (APA 7).

If the editors deem it necessary, they may ask authors to perform additional editing on their manuscript, and may encourage them to employ a colleague or professional reader to review the manuscript. Final acceptance may be contingent on satisfactory revisions. The editors perform only light copyediting on accepted manuscripts before publication, primarily focusing on clarity and conformity with standards for academic writing.

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Originality and Plagiarism

JGL does not in general publish work that has been or will be published elsewhere. At the time of submission, authors must attest that their submission has not been previously published, is not under review at another publication, and will not be submitted to another publication while being reviewed by JGL.

Further, JGL does not accept work containing material plagiarized from other publications or authors. For the purposes of this policy, plagiarism is defined as copying of or reliance on work—including text, images, and data—by others or yourself without proper attribution.

If plagiarism is detected prior to publication, the manuscript will be rejected. If plagiarism is detected after publication, the article will be corrected to state that it contains plagiarized material. In extreme cases of plagiarism, as determined by the Editor-in-Chief, the published article will be retracted, with the reason for retraction stated.

JGL does not deem the following situations to be plagiarism or violations of its originality policy, and will consider such submissions provided that all copyrights still reside with the author(s) and that proper attribution is made:

  • Translations into English of a previously published paper not in English;
  • Publication of all or part of a revised thesis or dissertation;
  • Publication of work previously made public as a conference presentation, white paper, technical report, preprint, blog post, or similar.

JGL follows workflows developed by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) to deal with cases of plagiarism.

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Artificial Intelligence Tools

JGL is currently working on a policy regarding the use of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence (AI) tools. In the interim (as of March 2024), we adhere to COPE’s position statement on AI tools: we require authors to disclose the use of any AI tools in the creation of their manuscript, images, and/or data, and we do not allow AI tools to be listed as authors. Further, while we finalize our policy, we will only consider manuscripts that employ AI for methodologically or experimentally necessary purposes. Additionally, JGL peer reviewers are expected not to employ AI tools in their review or written assessment of manuscripts.

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Criteria for Authorship

It is important that a work is published with the correct list of authors. As the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) notes, “Authorship confers credit and has important academic, social, and financial implications.”

All authors listed on a submission to JGL must qualify for authorship (see below) and must have given prior approval to have their name attached to the submitted file(s). The submitting author is responsible for verifying these requirements.

JGL follows ICMJE’s criteria for authorship. Individuals qualify as authors of a work if they have:

  • made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or to the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data for the work;
  • contributed to drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content;
  • provided final approval of the version to be published; and
  • agreed 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.

Those who meet some but not all of the above criteria may be acknowledged in the work but should not be listed as an author. Activities that do not alone qualify a contributor for authorship but should be acknowledged include acquisition of funding, supervision of research groups, administrative support, language editing, and proofreading. Authors may wish to seek written permission from those being acknowledged, as in some cases being named in such a way may be seen as an endorsement of the work.

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Submitting and Corresponding Author

When a manuscript is submitted, the author performing the submission must affirm that all coauthors approve the manuscript’s content, submission, list of authors, and order of authorship (see Authorship Policy). The submitting author must also provide email addresses for all coauthors.

JGL sends communications about submitted manuscripts to all coauthors. Nevertheless, JGL recommends that one author serve as the corresponding author, acting as the journal’s primary correspondent and ensuring that all coauthors are aware of relevant editorial information during the review and publication process.

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Competing Interests and Recusal

JGL is committed to transparent and bias-free publications as much as is possible. To that end, all authors of a manuscript are required to declare any competing interests—i.e., past or present personal or financial relationships that may have influenced, or could reasonably be perceived by others as having influenced, the information or arguments being presented. All peer reviewers and editors of a manuscript must also declare all competing interests, and recuse themselves as appropriate from the review and/or decision-making process. Competing interests should be declared as early as possible.

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Human Subjects Research

All research involving human participants must have been approved by the authors’ institutional review board or equivalent ethics committee(s), and that board must be named by the authors in the manuscript.

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Correction, Retraction, and Removal

Correction: Despite the best of efforts, errors occur and their timely and effective remedy are considered the mark of responsible authors and editors. JGL will issue a correction if the scholarly record is seriously affected by errors in a work (e.g., if accuracy/intended meaning, scientific reproducibility, author reputation, or journal reputation is judged to be compromised). JGL will not issue a correction for errors that do not affect the work in a material way or significantly alter the reader’s understanding of the work (e.g., misspellings, grammatical errors); the pre-publication review of article proofs is the final opportunity to correct such errors. When a correction is issued, it will link to the published article and also be added to the published article. All corrections will be as concise as possible.

Retraction: JGL reserves the right to retract articles, with a retraction defined as a public disavowal, not an erasure or removal. A retraction will occur if the editors and editorial board find that the integrity of the article is undermined due to errors or infringements of research ethics (see the retraction guidelines from the Committee on Publication Ethics).

Removal: Some circumstances may necessitate removal of an article from JGL. This will occur when the article is judged by the editors and editorial board to be defamatory, if it infringes on legal rights, or if there is a reasonable expectation that it will be subject to a court order. The bibliographic information about the article will be retained online, but the article will no longer be available through JGL. A note will be added to indicate that the item was removed for legal reasons.

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Data Sharing and Citation

Data Sharing: Authors reporting on empirical research are encouraged, whenever legally and ethically possible, to upload their datasets to an appropriate public repository that provides a persistent identifier, assures long-term access, and provides sufficient documentation and metadata to support re-use by others (e.g., institutional repository, data repository, Zenodo), and to cite the publicly posted dataset. If citations to author-created datasets would compromise author anonymity during the review process, those citations should be anonymized in the manuscript before submission. Authors who do not publicly share their datasets should indicate in the manuscript that the data is privately held by the author, and state if it is available upon request.

Data Citation: Authors of research manuscripts are expected to cite both in their text and in their references list all publicly accessible datasets used in their research. This expectation applies both to author-created datasets and to datasets created by others.

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General Terms and Conditions of Use

Users of the Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University website and/or software agree not to misuse the Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University service or software in any way.

The failure of Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University to exercise or enforce any right or provision in the policies or the Submission Agreement does not constitute a waiver of such right or provision. If any term of the Submission Agreement or these policies is found to be invalid, the parties nevertheless agree that the court should endeavor to give effect to the parties' intentions as reflected in the provision, and the other provisions of the Submission Agreement and these policies remain in full force and effect. These policies and the Submission Agreement constitute the entire agreement between Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University and the Author(s) regarding submission of the Work.

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Acknowledgments

JGL’s editors gratefully acknowledge the other editorial models and policies that have informed our work. In particular, many of JGL's policies are adapted, with permission, from the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

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