Preparing Your Final Files

There will be a long delay before we get your typeset, copyedited paper prepared and in print.

There has been a substantial increase in the number of submissions we have received in recent years. At the same time, our acceptance rate has remained fairly stable. Thus, there are many more papers that need to be carefully guided through the production process.

There are two ways to deal with this increase:

• Impose a substantial pause on accepting new papers. This option would particularly harm early-career philosophers of science, who have a limited number of suitable venues for their work and can’t afford to wait as long as later-career folks.

• Substantially increase the cost of the journal to cover the labour costs involved in publishing more pages per year. This option would particularly harm low-income readers and institutions. Because a delay in production is closer to an inconvenience than a harm, we’ve chosen this path.

You can see how many papers are ahead of yours in the queue here.

We do aim to get your final draft online as soon as possible, usually within a few weeks. This means that your paper will be issued with a DOI, and should count as published for the purposes of your CV, hiring/promotion boards, grant committees, and so on.

Because the final version you send us will appear online for some time before you can ask for corrections, it is vital that you closely follow the instructions below. If we have to intervene in your manuscript to make it meet the required amendments, this increases the chance of errors being introduced into your paper.

• We cannot publish your paper without a signed publication agreement.

• You can find a copy of the publication agreement here. This must be uploaded with your final files.

• Please provide all information requested on page 1 and your signature on page 4.

• Co-authors may grant one author permission to sign on their behalf. The signing author must tick ‘Author signing on behalf of joint author(s)’ and list the names of all co-authors.

• There are three OA routes: Green, Gold CC BY-NC, or Gold CC BY. More details on each of these options below.

• The BJPS is already Green OA compliant, so you do not need to request this option. Note that many funders, such as the ERC, only require Green OA. To comply with ERC guidelines, you must simply deposit a copy your paper in an online repository after the BJPS’s 12-month embargo period elapses.

• However, you must let us know if you wish to pursue open access via the Gold CC BY-NC or Gold CC BY routes. You can do this in the ‘Your Response’ box below the decision letter.

There will be a long delay before we get your typeset, copyedited paper in print, we aim to get your final draft online within a few weeks. This means that your paper will be issued with a DOI, and will usually count as published for the purposes of your CV, hiring/promotion boards, grant committees, and so on.

• Note that it is very important to follow these instructions carefully. Failing to do so will require us to intervene with your manuscript to make the required amendments. This increases the chance of errors being introduced into your paper, which will then sit online for some time before you get a chance to fix things.

• Anonymization: This version should not be anonymized. Add your name, fix/restore citations to your own work, and add any acknowledgements. (NB: Do not forgot to thank your referees!)

• Accessibility: Increasingly, papers are read via electronic devices and using text-to-voice readers. In order to ensure your paper is intelligible to all readers via these different formats, we ask you to ensure the following:
  • Remove italics or other font styles where these are used to convey meaning (if you don’t, we will). If the font styling is important to convey meaning, then the sentence may need to be re-written. These styles are often stripped out in electronic formats and, more importantly, will not be conveyed at all by text-to-voice software, rendering your paper difficult or impossible to follow for many.
  • For similar reasons, refrain from using font styles as shorthand (again, if you don’t, we will—and you may not like our alternatives!). This is of particular importance for definitions, laws, and similar. For example:
    • ‘The principal principle’ is acceptable; ‘principal’, ‘principal’, and ‘PRINCIPAL’ are not.
    • ‘Ohm’s law’ is acceptable; ‘Ohm’, ‘Ohm’, and ‘Ohm’ are not.

• Check your citations: Our copyeditors will contact you in due course, asking you to provide missing details, most commonly the page number associated with a quotation. Doing this months, even years, after you have written the paper is a much bigger headache than ensuring this information is in place now.

Full details below on how to handle specific types of work you might want to cite, but this image highlights some of the key features of our referencing style

• Figures will be printed in black and white by default. Colour printing can be arranged for a fee (please the editorial office for a quote). We can make colour versions available as an online-only enhancement at no cost, but because they will appear in black and white in the print edition, the figures’ captions and the main text should avoid using colour terms to describe the figure.

• The main text should make explicit reference to the figures (for example, ‘see figure 1’).

• Please provide figures in their original files (and not embedded in a word document, for example).

• Photographs need to be 20–26 picas wide at 300 DPI to meet minimum quality standards for print.

• Where permission to reprint is required, it is the author’s responsibility to obtain it. Evidence of permission to reprint should be included as part of your final files. It is also the author’s responsibility to include acknowledgements as stipulated by particular institutions or publishers for the reproduction of such figures or tables.

Overview

• Parochial references such as ‘this country’, ‘our legal system’, and so on should be avoided. Be specific in identifying people, places, institutions, and other entities in full so it is clear for international readers.

• No form of language or expression should be used that could be interpreted by a reader as being racist, sexist, derogatory of a particular religion or creed, or otherwise offensive.

Specifics

• Please consider your life choices.

• You will need to upload both the LaTeX file and the pdf, since we’ll need the latter for reference.

• The TeX file should be complete as is—compiling the .TeX file alone should output a complete paper with all bibliographic information included (minus figures except those drawn with, for example, TikZ).

• Compile your .TeX file over on Overleaf to determine if it will compile in its entirety for us.