Submission 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 for journals with larger editorial teams. If you have any issues or questions about submitting your work, please reach out at kulajournal@uvic.ca.

For eligibility and authorship criteria, see Publication Ethics. 

Formatting Submissions

Submissions should be double spaced and use a 12-point font. Please format your submission with elements in the following order:

• Title
  • Format 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.
• Categories. Please do not select a category unless you have been invited to submit to one of our Sections by the section editor.

*Please number all pages.

Submission Instructions

1. Create a user account on the KULA website with with your name, affiliation (e.g., academic institution, non-profit), and country. If you have an ORCID iD, you can connect your ORCID iD to your user account. ORCID numbers should be added to the author data for the corresponding author and any co-authors upon submission and will be published alongside the submitted paper, should it be accepted. 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. 
2. Go to the submission wizard to submit your work.

• Choose the relevant section for your submission (e.g., research article, project report, etc.).
• Unless you are submitting to a section, please do not check any of the boxes for categories (e.g., “AI and Academic Publishing”). Leave these blank.
• Read and acknowledge submission requirements.
• If applicable, add any additional information for the editors-in-chief in the “Comments for the Editor” box. 
• Acknowledge copyright statement.
• Click “Save and continue.”
• Upload your submission. If you are submitting something for double-anonymized review, please remove any identifying information from your submission before uploading it.
• Enter the metadata for your submission, including an abstract, keywords, etc.
• Review your submission and submit.

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. For more information about peer review, please see our page on Peer Review.

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.