Submissions

Author Guidelines

Manuscript Types Published:
The Journal accepts original research articles, review articles, letters and short communications written in English. Supplements, proceedings of conferences, and book reviews may also be considered for publication.

Manuscript Preparation:
Manuscripts must be written in English in a clear, direct and active style. All pages must be numbered sequentially. The manuscript should be submitted as a PDF file. For accepted manuscripts, complete article sources are required in Latex format, with each figure supplied as separate files in .eps, .png, or similar format. Although papers under review do not need to be  formatted using Latex at the time of submission, authors of accepted papers must agree to convert their submission to Latex prior to final copyediting and typesetting by the journal editors. Latex journal templates for manuscript submission are available below. Your submission must be prepared using one of these style files.

Style files:
Latex journal style files are available though Overleaf.

• Latex template on Overleaf

JOSIS strongly encourages the use of latex for document preparation. Using latex significantly reduces our production costs. As a community led and run journal, we rely on contributions from the community to meet these costs.

However, we still accept submissions prepared using Microsoft Word, formatted using the following template:

• Microsoft Word template

Academic honesty:
Authors must certify that the manuscript is the authors' own work and certify that the article has not been previously published, nor currently submitted for publication to any other outlet (print or electronic). Submissions mustbe written entirely by the authors without the help of AI writing tools, except for minor improvement of grammar (not content). Corresponding authors of manuscripts are required to certify that these conditions apply on behalf of all paper authors as part of the online submission process.

Conflict of Interest:
Any potential conflicts of interest should be clearly acknowledged in the covering letter. Any financial contributions or support for the work being reported should be listed in the manuscript acknowledgments.

Manuscript Sections:
Manuscripts for research articles and letters submitted to the respective journals should be divided into the following sections. Some variations to this model are acceptable where appropriate, for example in review articles in accordance with the requirements of the topic.

Title
Authors and affiliations
Abstract
Keywords
Main text
Acknowledgments
References

Title:
The title should be concise, and must not be more than 20 words. Authors should also provide a short "running title".

Authors and Institutional Affiliations:
Authors are required to provide their full names and their institutional affiliations and addresses.

Abstract:
The abstract should summarize the essential features of the article, and must not exceed 250 words for review and research papers or 150 words for short papers or letters. Abbreviations should be avoided in the abstract, and references should not be cited in the abstract.

Keywords:
Your submission must include between five and ten keywords for your article. Accepted manuscripts must additionally specify further index terms as appropriate.

Main Text:
The main text should be divided into separate sections, and may be further subdivided according to the areas to be discussed. The manuscript style must be uniform throughout the text using 11pt Palatino font. The first appearance of any abbreviations in the text should be preceded by the full term, unless it is a standard abbreviation or unit of measurement. Reference numbers should be given in square brackets in the text.

Figures and tables:
Figures and tables must be numbered consecutively with a concise explanatory caption, and must be referred to in the main text with capitalized reference (e.g., ``Figure 4'' or ``Table 2''). Figures and tables must appear in the text close to where they are first referred to in the main text. Do not collect figures together at the end of the article. Authors of accepted articles will need to supply high quality versions of all figures as separate .eps (encapsulated postscript) files.

Footnotes:
Footnotes are strongly discouraged in text. Where footnotes must be used, they should be numbered consecutively.

Acknowledgments:
Please acknowledge anyone (individual/company/institution) who has contributed to the study, including substantial contributions to the conception, design, acquisition of data; analysis and interpretation of data; drafting the manuscript; or provided critical comments resulting in revisions to content. For each author, please list the source(s) of any funding or financial contributions related to the study.

References:
References must be listed in the numerical system (ACM). Citations must be numbered sequentially [in square brackets] in the main text. Full numbered references must be listed in the reference section in alphabetical order. The reference numbers must be finalized and the bibliography must be fully formatted before submission. Examples of citation styles included in the bibliography for this document include journal articles [1,2], edited and authored books [5,6], articles in proceedings and collections [4,7], technical reports and booklets [3,8]. All references must also include DOIs, where one exists.

[1] DIJKSTRA, E. A note on two problems in connexion with graphs. Numerische Mathematik 1 (1959), 269–271. doi:10.1007/BF01386390.
[2] EGENHOFER, M., AND FRANSOZA, R. Point-set topological spatial relations. International Journal of Geographical Information Science 5, 2 (1991), 161–174. doi:10.1080/02693799108927841.
[3] GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE UNITED NATIONS. Universal declaration of human rights. United Nations Resolution 217 A (III), December 1948.
[4] KARP, B., AND KUNG, H. T. GPSR: Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing for Wireless Networks. In MobiCom ’00: Proceedings of the 6th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (New York, NY, USA, 2000), ACM Press, pp. 243–254.
[5] MANDELBROT, B. Fractals, Form, Chance and Dimension. Freeman, San Francisco, 1977. doi:10.1063/1.2995555.
[6] MILLER, H. J., AND HAN, J., Eds. Geographic DataMining and Knowledge Discovery. CRC Press, 2001.
[7] MONTELLO, D. R. A new framework for understanding the acquistion of spatial knowledge in large-scale environments. In Spatial and Temporal Reasoning in Geographic Information Systems, M. J. Egenhofer and R. G. Golledge, Eds. Oxford University Press, New York, 1998, ch. 11, pp. 143–154.
[8] RODDEN, T., FRIDAY, A., MULLER, H., AND DIX, A. A lightweight approach to managing privacy in location-based services. Tech. Rep. Equator-02-058, University of Nottingham, Lancaster University, University of Bristol, 2002.

Some important points to remember:

• References must be complete and accurate.
• Online citations should include the date of access.
• Journal titles should be given in full.
• Take special care of the punctuation convention as described in the above-mentioned examples.
• For Latex users, use the ACM bibtex style for automatically formatting references correctly.
• For Word users, the ACM Portal (http://portal.acm.org/) can generate correctly formatted references in many cases (search for reference and then display reference in ACM Ref format).
• CrossRef has a guest search query that can be used to local DOIs

Supportive/Supplementary Material:
We strongly encourage to append supportive material, for example a Power-point file containing a talk about the study, a Power-point file containing additional screenshots, a Word, RTF, or PDF document showing the original instrument(s) used, a video, or the original data (SAS/SPSS files, Excel files, Access Db files etc.).

Supportive/ Supplementary material must be provided in a single zipped file, uploaded to the server, along with the submission, and will be included in the review process.

Permission For Reproduction:
Published/reproduced material should not be included unless you have obtained written permission from the copyright holder. This must be acknowledged.