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.
All submissions must meet the following requirements.
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).
The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, or RTF document file format.
Manuscript length is 1000 - 5000 words. The editorial team reserves the right to negotiate a word limit depending on the type and quality of the work.
Manuscript includes an abstract of 200-250 words and a short author biography of about 50 words.
The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
Citation style is consistent and conforms to the author's discipline. Otherwise, the submission adheres to the Harvard Citation Style. Where available, URLs for the references are provided.
All figures are of high resolution (300 dpi minimum) and, if possible, vector images have been supplied. All images, figures, graphs and tabulated data are appropriately referenced.
Author guidelines have been read and adhered to.
Author Guidelines
Author affiliation
Current or immediate-past ANU undergraduate students may submit manuscripts to the journal. Manuscripts must be submitted no more than a year after the author's graduation. Occasionally, the journal’s editors may invite undergraduate students from other universities to submit papers, such as exchange students or visitors to the Australian National University.
Submission types
FES publishes exemplary essays and research arising from field courses in ecology and related disciplines within ANU and welcomes the submission of high-quality research and perspective pieces at the undergraduate level. Papers should be well-reasoned and well-supported, provide a clear argument and offer a clear and readable analysis.
Publishing manuscripts in more than one journal
Simultaneous submissions to other publications are not accepted. FES does not reprint manuscripts that have previously been published in whole or in part, excluding in the form of academic assignments for assessment and theses.
Manuscript length
Manuscript length should be 1000 - 5000 words and must include an abstract of 200–250 words and a short biography of about 50 words. The editors of FES reserve the right to edit manuscripts for length and, if this is necessary, will correspond with the author prior to compiling the volume for publication.
Formatting images for submission
All figures must be of high resolution (300 dpi minimum) and, if possible, supply vector images. Even the simplest image processing software usually includes a way of checking image quality. For example, in Paint, open the image file, go to Image in the tool bar, then down to Attributes. The Attributes window should give you the resolution in dots per inch (dpi) and the size of the image. The image resolution should be 300 dpi minimum when the image is the size it will be when printed. Images sourced from websites are usually low resolution (72 dpi) so they load quickly; the quality of these images is not high enough for printed publications.
Authors will be contacted during the review process if a figure does not meet the standard required for print publishing; manuscripts with substantial problems with figure quality and referencing will not be published.
Submission process
The FES submission process has three steps:
STEP 1. Obtain permission to publish from:
Your supervisor or course convenor (this is required in case they recommend your work be submitted for publication to a journal with a higher profile than FES),
Any co-authors that must be listed on your manuscript.
The artists/illustrators/copyright owners of any images/photographs/graphs/etc you wish to include as part of your manuscript.
STEP 2. Prepare your manuscript and associated documents for submission. This includes:
Check that you have correctly referenced your manuscript and all figures using the style used in your discipline.
NOTE: from experience, the following issues cause long publication delays or cause manuscripts to be withdrawn from publication:
Poor referencing and proof reading prior to submitting your work. Copy editing is expensive and if your manuscript includes many errors it may be too expensive for us to copy edit to the required ANU Press standard – so we can’t publish your manuscript.
You haven’t talked to your lecturer/supervisor/co-authors before submitting the work for publication and then discover they recommend you publish it in a more prominent journal or that one of your co-authors is already working towards publication of the data.
Your manuscript includes images/graphs etc. you have correctly referenced but don’t have written permission to republish. This means we can’t publish your manuscript.
Your manuscript includes image/graphs/etc. that you have permission to publish but which are poor quality, hard or confusing to read and which won’t reproduce properly in printed form. Many images which look good on screen do not print well. FES requires high quality images and if yours are not good enough we can’t publish your manuscript.
Because of these issues, your submission will not be processed until you have completed all three steps above.
Copyright Notice
It is the author’s responsibility to obtain permission to reproduce any work still under copyright in their upcoming submissions. Copyright can apply to any original work of art or text and could include such items as: textual works; artistic works; sound recordings; cinematograph films; broadcasts; web content; maps; photographs; and architectural drawings.
Generally in academic work, most work is attributed by acknowledging the original source via citations. However, this does not allow authors to reuse other's work without permission, particularly if they are reusing a 'substantial' part of a work.
In practice, whilst this could occur across a range of work types, it is most likely to occur with the use of images, graphs and tables.
If a submission contains copyrighted images from other published sources, permission will be needed before the image can be used in a published article.
once the article has been accepted, contact the authors or journal to request permission
provide a copy of the approval email/form
If all images, graphs, and tables are the author’s own creation, authors will need to explain somewhere in the document that no permissions were necessary as the figures/tables are original and were created by the author.
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