How to submit

Submissions are handled by an Action Editor who will assign each submission to three expert reviewers. Review proceeds as a dialogue between authors and reviewers, with the goal of improving the work. Authors can expect that their submissions will not be rejected over easily fixable technicalities.

All submitted work, reviews, and discussions will by default be publicly available for other researchers to use. To encourage accountability, editors’ names are listed on the articles they accept, and reviewers may choose to be named or anonymous. All submissions and their accompanying reviews and discussions remain accessible whether or not an article is accepted.

JoVI encourages registered reports, which follow a two-stage submission and review process. In the first stage, authors submit a paper that contains all plans, methods, and research questions, prior to any data collection. Through dialogue and discussion, reviewers and authors agree on revised plans, methods, and research questions. Then authors can collect and analyze data and write the final version of the paper, which will get a lightweight second-stage review by the same reviewers (except in extenuating circumstances).

JoVI has two submission tracks: the traditional track and the experimental (“Github”) track.

Traditional track

You may prepare your paper with any academic paper template; we recommend the ACM template or the IEEE TVCG template.

Submission for the traditional track proceeds via the OJS submission system, hosted courtesy of the Aalborg University Library. Please create an OJS account, preferably using your default institutional email address, and follow the instructions on OJS to submit your paper and supplementary materials.

To submit:

  1. Please read the Author Guidelines, even if you are a seasoned HCI/VIS researcher. JoVI’s process and expectations may be a bit different from what you are used to.
  2. Start:
    • Go to JoVI’s OJS page
    • Create an account and/or log in, if needed
    • Read and tick all checkboxes
    • Click Save and continue
  3. Upload submission:
    • Click Add file, upload main PDF
    • Select “article text” as type
    • Upload other files, if desired. For example, if you are submitting anonymously, you may need to upload non-anonymous versions of some information for the editors to review. See the author guide.
    • Click Save and continue
  4. Enter Metadata:
    • Add title and abstract
    • Add co-authors: click add contributor, fill form
      • Select Author as role
      • If you create accounts for your co-authors, we recommend ticking Include contributor in browse lists so that co-authors’ accounts can be found later in search boxes.
    • Optional: fill in extra metadata
    • Click Save and continue
  5. Confirmation:
    • Click Finish submission

Experimental (“Github”) track

The experimental track is an alternative submission and review process that manifests our commitment to experimenting with review processes. This track is less well-defined, in part because we wish it to evolve with authors as we use it.

We strongly recommend papers on the “Github” track be written in Quarto, a markdown-based computational notebook format. Quarto is a plain text format that can be used with documents written in a variety of forms (RMarkdown, Jupyter notebook, Word, Latex), and supports embedded computation (in many languages, including R, Python, and Julia) and interactivity (using JavaScript / Observable, d3, etc). In keeping with the experimental nature of this track, we will also consider other formats, so long as the output contains the same required information as the Quarto template and is rendered in HTML — if you are interested in trying another format, please email submit@journalovi.org.

All review on the experimental track will proceed as Github issues and pull requests, and published papers on this track can be updated using pull requests, even after publication. The Github repository for each submission will be public throughout the process, regardless of the final decision on the submission. Therefore, while withdrawal of a submission is possible (in the sense that authors can ask for their paper not to be considered “published” at JoVI), the submitted paper and reviews will still be public even if the submission is withdrawn or is not accepted.

To submit to the experimental track, write your paper in Quarto using this template and then email us your paper information and a link to your repository at submit@journalovi.org. A live preview of the JoVI quarto template is available here.