Submissions

Author Guidelines

Submissions to KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies must be uploaded on this website. Authors can track their submissions and communicate with the editorial team through the online journal management system. We do our best to move submissions through review and editing as quickly as possible, but please note that KULA has a very small editorial team, with most of the work done by one of the co-editors-in-chief, so this process may take longer than at journals with larger editorial teams. If you have any issues or questions about submitting your work, please reach out at kulajournal@uvic.ca.

Eligibility

Submissions cannot have been previously published nor be under consideration at another journal, but we welcome submissions of papers that have been loaded onto preprint servers as long as authors retain copyright to the preprint and any works developed from it. When you submit to KULA, you should declare that a preprint is available and provide the link to the preprint. If your submission is published, please update the information associated with the preprint to indicate that the final version has been published in KULA and link to the final published version using the assigned DOI.

Contributors are also welcome to deposit versions of their work in institutional or other repositories. 

We reserve the right to reject submissions that do not demonstrate respect and sensitivity in addressing subjects that pose a risk of harm to marginalized communities. We also reserve the right to remove articles after publication if we learn that an author has expressed discriminatory views that conflict with our commitment to equity, diversity, inclusion, decolonization, and reconciliation. 

User Registration

To submit your work, please register on the journal website with your name, affiliation (e.g., academic institution, non-profit), and country. If you have an ORCID iD, please connect your ORCID iD to your user account.

Once you have created your account, you can edit it to include a brief biographical statement. We encourage contributors to include positionality statements, in which they situate themselves in relation to land/place and community, in their biographical statements. 

Authorship

Contributors are free to decide what constitutes authorship for their submissions. We recognize that much knowledge is social and community-based and that scholarship is often a collective activity. Contributors listed, therefore, might include collaborators who did not necessarily contribute to the writing of the manuscript but who were co-creators in other valuable ways (e.g., student research assistants, community partners, Elders and Knowledge Keepers). We also do not expect authors’ names to be listed in terms of ranked authorship. We invite authors to state explicitly in their submission how each author contributed to the work using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy (CrediT).

However, all contributors listed must have agreed to publish the manuscript and given approval to have their names appear on it. The corresponding author is the primary contact for the editorial team and is responsible for ensuring that all contributors have agreed to be listed as co-authors on the submission. The corresponding author is also responsible for keeping their collaborators updated on developments during review, editing, and production.

Formatting Submissions

Please format your submission with information in the following order

• Title
  • We recommend formatting the title with the title heading in Microsoft Word.
• Contributor name(s) and affiliation(s)
• Abstract
  • Please identify abstract with the heading “Abstract.” Abstracts can be a maximum of 500 words.
• Keywords
  • Please identify one to six keywords with the heading “Keywords” and separate keywords with semicolons.
• Main text
  • The main text of the submission should include section headings to organize content clearly. We recommend using the heading levels provided in Microsoft Word.
• CRediT Author Statement
  • For collaborative submissions, we encourage contributors to include a CRediT statement to identify the different ways in which each person contributed to the submission.
  • CRediT lists fourteen roles. Contributors may have contributed in multiple ways. The corresponding author is responsible for making sure that all contributors approve the roles listed for each person.
  • You may consider using a tool such as tenzing to document each person’s contributions in a structured format. For more information about tenzing, see Holcombe A. O., Kovacs, M., Aust, F., and Aczel, B. (2020). “Documenting Contributions to Scholarly Articles Using CRediT and tenzing. PLoS ONE 15(12): e0244611. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0244611.
  • The CRediT author statement will appear above the acknowledgements section. Please include the heading “CRediT Author Statement.”
• Acknowledgements
  • Acknowledgements should appear in a separate paragraph with the heading “Acknowledgements” after the CRediT statement. If you received grant funding for the work discussed in your submission, please identify the grant provider in the acknowledgements section.
• Competing interests
  • You must state if you have any competing interests, including gifts, private funding, or payment from an organization or person related to the subject of your work; ownership of stocks or shares in organizations directly related to your work; applications for patents; relevant board memberships; or close relationships.
  • The competing interests statement should appear in a paragraph after the acknowledgements (if there are any) with the heading “Competing Interests.”
  • If you have no competing interests, please add a version of this statement: “The author declares that they have no competing interests.”
• Ethics
  • If applicable, you should include a statement explaining the process you undertook to receive ethics approval for your work. You can include this information in the main text, in a footnote, or in a statement at the end of the paper (with the heading “Ethics”) after the competing interests statement.
  • References
    • References should come at the very end of your submission under the heading “References.” Please format references according to the Chicago Manual of Style author-date citation system. See “References Guidelines” for common types of reference entries and in-text citations.

*Please number all pages.

Preparing Manuscript for Anonymous Peer Review

For research articles, methods articles, commentaries, and teaching reflections, the editors will remove identifying information such as your name, affiliation, acknowledgements, etc. for anonymous peer review.

If you refer to or cite your own work in your submission, please try to do so in the third person.

Permissions

Contributors are responsible for obtaining necessary permissions for material included in their work. Where relevant, please include statements that permissions were secured or identifying the license under which the work is allowed to be reproduced.

Editing Process

1. When a submission is accepted for publication, the editor first completes a round of structural and stylistic edits (using track changes in Microsoft Word) and returns the submission to the contributor(s). We try to make the editing process as constructive as possible. The editor will try to limit editorial intervention and will suggest edits in comments to encourage a productive, conversational exchange with the contributor(s). The editor may also make edits related to house style using track changes. The editor will not make silent changes (i.e., changes without indicating them in track changes).
2. The contributor(s) review these edits and make revisions. If edits are in track changes, please accept the changes or, if you disagree with the edits, please add a comment to that effect (please do not simply reject the changes). For more substantial structural or stylistic changes, please make sure to make edits with track changes on so that the editor can see new or revised content. If any edits are unclear, we encourage contributors to follow up with the editor. We typically request that contributors submit revisions within four weeks, but a longer deadline can be coordinated with the editor.
3. The editor reviews revisions and may request follow-up revisions before accepting the submission and moving it to the final copyediting stage.
4. The editor copyedits the submission, including checking the formatting of citations and references. Please note that the editor will try to catch inaccuracies in citations whenever possible, but responsibility for the accuracy of citations ultimately rests with contributors.
5. Contributors review and approve copyedits.
6. Once contributors have approved all edits, the editor sends the submission to production.
7. When the PDF proof is ready, the editor will do a first round of proofreading and then send it to the contributor(s) for their review. The editor asks contributors to proofread the submission and mark any necessary changes within ten days.
8. Before publication, authors should review all metadata (including author affiliations and biographical statements) and references in OJS. Authors should also make sure that, if applicable, they have linked their submissions to their ORCID profiles.

Please note that we are a very small editorial team, so while we try to put submissions through review and editing as expediently as possible, we are grateful for contributors’ patience if we encounter delays.

Corrections

Contributors will always have the opportunity to approve the final copyedited version of their submission and its metadata before it goes to typesetting. They will also be asked to sign off on the proofs of their submission once it has been typeset. Requests for minor changes post-publication can be accommodated in some cases but should not be for stylistic reasons. Major changes that would require a submission to be re-typeset cannot be accommodated.

Please contact kulajournal@uvic.ca if you believe that an article requires a correction.

Article Types