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Tangentium

 

All material on this site remains © the original authors: please see our submission guidelines for more information. If no author is shown material is © Drew Whitworth. For any reproduction beyond fair dealing, permission must be sought: e-mail drew@comp.leeds.ac.uk.

ISSN number: 1746-4757

  

Submission Guidelines

Editorial policy

Tangentium exists to discuss the political, philosophical, educational and sociological impact of information and communication technologies. If you have not yet read the site introduction, it is probably best to do so at this point, as it outlines the particular perspective towards which we are oriented. If you are unsure whether your paper is suitable, the best thing to do is check first by e-mailing the Editor.

You may note, however, that some of our published articles provide supplementary or "background" information and are not directly relevant to ICT. If you wish to submit such an article we welcome this but it will be necessary to relate it to another piece which has ICT-related content (which may or may not have been written by you). Again, please e-mail the editor for guidance.

Articles should be written to a high academic standard and be fully referenced where appropriate. All papers will be reviewed anonymously by two members of our editorial board (you may be asked to revise your paper in response to reviewers' comments before publication). At the same time we are keen that papers be accessible to a general audience. We therefore encourage the submission of papers which introduce new or difficult ideas to such an audience. Similarly, although we are not a "computer science" journal, we are interested in articles which make connections between technicalities and the social, political and philosophical background to IT. These are too often separated, meaning that "developers" and "users" of the technologies do not always understand the needs and interests of one another. Technical concepts should be introduced to a non-technical audience whenever possible although this might be best done by means of a hyperlink to another site.

Finally, we have a particular interest in receiving papers from postgraduates and other "non-traditional" authors who may not have published before and/or do not hold a teaching or research post in an educational institution.

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Technical and style requirements

Attribution: Please include the following information with your paper:

  • your full name
  • the name under which you would like your paper to appear, if different
  • your departmental and institutional affiliation if you have one
  • a contact e-mail address
  • a brief biography (100-200 words).

Papers are reviewed anonymously so we will remove all of this information before sending it out to reivew. We ask that you do not use self-referencing text (e.g., "In a previous paper I argued that...").

Word limit: the word limit is 7,000 words, although unless the contribution of a paper is really substantial we would encourage you to limit the word count to around 4,000 - 5,000 words. If you have a particularly short contribution you are interested in making (say around 1,000 words or less) we ask that you submit it as a comment or snippet or possibly directly to our discussion board.

Formatting: All papers should be submitted by e-mail to the Editor. We cannot accept submissions on paper or disk. We will acknowledge receipt of all papers as soon as possible so if you do not receive an acknowledgement of submission within two weeks you should resubmit.

As should be obvious, all articles are published in HTML format but it is not necessary to mark up the article with HTML prior to submission, unless you wish to. We are happy to accept articles in one of the following formats: plain text (*.txt); HTML (*.html); or Microsoft Word (*.doc). Please do not submit articles in any other format (including PDF or Latex). No restrictions are otherwise placed on the structure or format of your article as details such as headings, references and so on will be converted to our house style if the article is published. Do note though that if you submit an article in plain text it will be best to note occasions where you would prefer a word to be italicised, or some text to be a sub-heading, etc.

Language and style: Tangentium publishes in English. Please ensure that your article is correctly spelt, particularly proper nouns (personal names, place names, organisations, computer systems etc.). We do not enforce particular conventions with regard to the use of, for example, British v. American English, contractions (do not v. don't), number formats (one hundred v. 100) and so on but we would ask you to be consistent within an article. Please spell out all acronyms on the first occasion they are used, unless they are in common use (WWW, BBC).

We do, however, ask you to follow certain conventions with referencing. While the format used for citations in the text is not relevant (as we will convert it to our house style), please ensure you include page numbers whenever possible. All articles must be accompanied by a full bibliography which includes every cited work, in one of the following formats:

  • Books: Jordan, Tim (1999), Cyberpower: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet, London, Routledge. or Samson, Paul R. and David Pitt, eds. (1999), The Biosphere and Noösphere Reader: Global environment, society and change, London, Routledge.
  • Chapters in edited collections: Danet, Brenda (1998), "Text as Mask: Gender, Play and Performance on the Internet", in Steven G. Jones, ed., Cybersociety 2.0: Revisiting Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, London, Sage, pp. 129-158.
  • Journal articles: Star, Susan L. (1999), "The Ethnography of Infrastructure", American Behavioral Scientist 43/3, pp. 377-91.
  • Online sources: We encourage the frequent use of online sources although if you have doubts about the long-term reliability of the source it is best to cite a printed source alongside. Please supply a full URL and, whenever available, an author, date and title as well. We will sort out the formatting for you but the following example should illustrate what we are aiming for: Subbiah Arunachalam, Reaching the unreached: How can we use ICTs to empower the rural poor?, 24 August 2002.
  • Other media (e.g. newspapers): reference at your discretion, but please try and include as much information as possible.

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"Small print"

Let us first say that we have a relaxed attitude towards copyright and other manifestations of intellectual property. Access to this journal will remain free to all for as long as we can justify this. We encourage a dynamic, evolutionary attitude to the texts on this site and hope that neither authors nor readers alike consider the current version of a text to be somehow definitive and in need of strong protection. If you have a very strict attitude towards the intellectual property of hypertext, this is probably not a site on which you would be publishing anyway (politically or intellectually).

However it remains necessary to lay out some minimal "rules of engagement" for authors and readers alike. By submitting an article for consideration to Tangentium you agree to abide by the following requirements. If you do not agree with them please find an alternative publisher for your work.

  • Articles must not have been published elsewhere (offline or online), nor be being considered for publication elsewhere, prior to their submission to Tangentium.
  • If an article, or any part thereof, is published elsewhere (offline or online) subsequent to its publication in Tangentium, it must include an acknowledgement that the work was previously published in Tangentium and this acknowledgement must include the URL of this site (http://www.tangentium.org).
  • Authors who are found to have violated either of these two simple requests will have their articles removed from this site.

Copyright on articles remains with the contributor. If the editors receive any requests to republish material elsewhere, we will pass them on to the contributors.

Comments, snippets and hyperlinks may be added to texts on this site after publication. Records will be kept of all such contributions and their authors. The original author does not acquire the right to republish any comments or hyperlinks which have been added subsequent to the original publication in Tangentium. They may, of course, seek permission from the contributors of additional material, and/or update their work to correctly cite these contributions. (Information regarding the attribution of additional material will always be sent to authors who request it.) Responsibility for seeking such permission and correctly attributing additional material rests with the author, and any violation of the rights of later contributors is not the responsibility of Tangentium or its editors/reviewers.

The interpolation of additional material into the text of this journal is done in good faith and as part of the hypertextual spirit of Tangentium. It is not intended to mount any direct legal challenge to current interpretations of intellectual property. Once again we suggest that if the possibility of additional material being displayed alongside your article is of concern to you, then this is probably not the right place for you to publish. For more information on submitting additional material, see the comments and snippets page.

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