Guidelines for Article Preparation for Submission
Preparing a Software Tool Article
This page provides information about writing a Software Tool Article in a social science discipline for Open Research Europe, including the key sections that must be present in the article and details of figure and table formats.
Criteria
Open Research Europe’s scope covers any scholarly work in a social science discipline resulting from studies that have Horizon 2020 funding, regardless of the perceived interest and the extent of novelty. The peer review focuses on the work presented in the article, not on the likely impact of the work.
We welcome the description of new software tools. A Software Tool Article should include the rationale for the development of the tool and details of the code used for its construction. The article should provide examples of suitable input data sets and include an example of the output that can be expected from the tool and how this output should be interpreted. Software Tool Articles submitted to Open Research Europe should be written in open-access programming languages.
The peer review focuses on whether the paper is scientifically sound and whether adequate detail has been provided to enable others to reproduce and use the software tool.
Submissions to Open Research Europe must have at least one author who is involved in an ongoing or finished Horizon 2020 project and articles must be a result of that project. Please review the details of ORE’s post-publication peer review model and our policies before you submit.
Language
All articles must be written in good English. Please note that the article will not undergo editing by Open Research Europe before publication and an article may be rejected during the initial checking process if it is deemed unintelligible and hence not suitable for peer review.
For authors whose first language is not English, it may be beneficial to have the manuscript read by a native English speaker with subject level expertise.
Main Sections
- Authors
- Title
- Abstract
- Keywords
- Plain Language Summary (recommended)
- Main Body
- Data and Software Availability
- Reporting Guidelines (if applicable)
- Author Contributions
- Competing Interests
- Grant Information
- Acknowledgments (optional)
- Supplementary Material
- References and Footnotes
- Figures and Tables (if applicable)
- Images (if applicable)
Authors
Please list all authors who played a significant role in developing the points presented in the article.
Please:
Please:
- complete the submission using your ORCID iD
- provide full affiliation information (full institutional address and ZIP code, and e-mail address) for all authors, and
- indicate who is/are the corresponding author(s).
Criteria for authorship are based on guidance provided by the Committee of Publication Ethics. Being an author implies full responsibility for the article’s content and that the work conforms to our editorial policies. For large, multi-centre collaborations, the individuals who accept direct responsibility for the manuscript must be listed as authors.
Details of each author’s contribution must be listed in the Author contributions section.
Anyone who has contributed but does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgments section. The involvement of any writing assistance must be declared.
Title
Please provide a concise and specific title that clearly reflects the content of the article.
Abstract
Abstracts should be up to 300 words long and provide a succinct summary of the article. Although the abstract should explain why the article might be interesting, the importance of the work should not be over-emphasized. Citations should not be used in the abstract. Abbreviations, if needed, should be spelled out.
Keywords
Authors should supply up to eight relevant keywords that describe the subject of their article. These will improve the visibility of your article. Using standard classifications, in fields where they exist, will further improve the visibility of your article.
Plain Language Summary
Authors are recommended to include a plain language summary in their article. Advice for writing a plain language summary can be found here.
Main Body
Software Tool Articles typically contain the following sections:
- Introduction
- Methods, providing details of Implementation and Operation
- Results (optional)
- Use Cases (optional)
- Conclusions/Discussion
The Introduction should provide context as to why the software tool was developed and what need it addresses. It is good scholarly practice to mention previously developed tools that address similar needs, and why the current tool is needed.
The Methods should include a subsection on Implementation describing how the tool works and any relevant technical details required for implementation; and a subsection on Operation, which should include the minimal system requirements needed to run the software and an overview of the workflow.
A Results section is only required if the paper includes novel data or analyses and should be written as a traditional results section.
Please include a section on Use Cases if the paper does not include novel data or analyses. Examples of input and output files should be provided with some explanatory context. Any novel or complex variable parameters should be explained in sufficient detail to enable users to understand and use the tool's functionality.
A Discussion (e.g. if the paper includes novel data or analyses) or Conclusions should include a brief discussion of allowances made (if any) for controlling bias or unwanted sources of variability, and the limitations of any novel datasets.
If the article could benefit from including supporting interactive visualisations or resources that are necessary to convey an argument or point of view such as any form of multimedia, video, artistic representations etc. then please contact the editorial team to see how that may be incorporated into the body of the article.
Reproducibility: Open Research Europe is committed to serving the research community by ensuring that all articles include sufficient information to allow others to reproduce the work. With this in mind, Methods sections should provide sufficient details of the materials and methods used so that the work can be repeated by others. The section should also include a brief discussion of allowances made (if any) for controlling bias or unwanted sources of variability. Any limitations of the datasets should be discussed.
Data and Software Availability
Data
Underlying data
All articles must include a Data Availability statement, even where there is no data associated with the article - see our data guidelines and policies for more information.
The Data Availability statement should provide full details of how, where, and under what conditions data and materials can be accessed; for practical guidance please see Add a Data Availability statement to your manuscript. See also Prepare your Data and Select a Repository for further guidance on data presentation, formatting and deposition.
If you have deposited datasets or materials or used data that are already available in a repository, please include the name of the repository, the DOI or accession number, and license. This should be done in the style of, for example:
All articles must include a Data Availability statement, even where there is no data associated with the article - see our data guidelines and policies for more information.
The Data Availability statement should provide full details of how, where, and under what conditions data and materials can be accessed; for practical guidance please see Add a Data Availability statement to your manuscript. See also Prepare your Data and Select a Repository for further guidance on data presentation, formatting and deposition.
If you have deposited datasets or materials or used data that are already available in a repository, please include the name of the repository, the DOI or accession number, and license. This should be done in the style of, for example:
All data and materials are available on Open Science Framework
DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/Z3ST5 (Lee, 2019). Confounding factors considered by studies of vaping as a possible gateway to smoking
This project contains the following underlying data:
- Data file 1. (Description of data.)
- Data file 2. (Description of data.)
Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Zero “No rights reserved” data waiver (CC0 1.0 Public domain dedication).
Extended data
There are no figure or table limits for articles in Open Research Europe. Additional materials that support the key claims in the paper but are not absolutely required to follow the study design and analysis of the results, e.g. questionnaires, supporting images or tables, can be included as extended data; descriptions of the materials and methods should be in the main article. Extended data should be in a format the supports reuse under a CC0 license. Care should be taken to ensure that the publication of extended data in this instance does not preclude primary publication elsewhere.
There are no figure or table limits for articles in Open Research Europe. Additional materials that support the key claims in the paper but are not absolutely required to follow the study design and analysis of the results, e.g. questionnaires, supporting images or tables, can be included as extended data; descriptions of the materials and methods should be in the main article. Extended data should be in a format the supports reuse under a CC0 license. Care should be taken to ensure that the publication of extended data in this instance does not preclude primary publication elsewhere.
If you have any extended data, please deposit these materials in an approved repository and include the title, the name of the repository, the DOI or accession number, and license in the manuscript under the subheading ‘Extended data’. Please also include citations to extended data in the main body of the article. For practical guidance please see Add a Data Availability statement to your manuscript. See also Prepare your Data and Select a Repository for further guidance on data presentation, formatting and deposition.
Please note, information which can be used to directly identify participants should not be included in underlying and extended datasets, unless they have provided explicit permission to share their details. Please see our data guidelines for further information.
Software
Source code for new software must be made openly, and permanently available in a structured repository such as Zenodo (see ‘Making Your Code Citable’ for more information). We also encourage code to be uploaded to a Version Control System (VCS) such as GitHub, BitBucket or SourceForge. Please provide details in a section entitled “Software availability”, listing the repository and the license under which the software can be used in the article. Source code must be assigned an open license; we strongly encourage the use of an OSS approved license, but will accept other open licenses including Creative Commons. Software papers describing non-open software, code and/or web tools will be rejected. For those who wish to also use commercial licenses, we suggest co-licensing with the open GNU GPL license.
Reporting Guidelines
Articles in Open Research Europe must comply with consensus-based minimum reporting guidelines for the relevant subject area.
If completed, please deposit any reporting checklists and flow charts in an approved general repository; include the guideline type, name of the repository, the DOI, and license in the manuscript’s Data availability statement in the style of, for example:
Repository: specific checklist and flow chart for ‘Title of paper’. https://doi.org/10.5256/repository.4591.d34639.
Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Zero “No rights reserved” data waiver (CC0 1.0 Public domain dedication).
Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Zero “No rights reserved” data waiver (CC0 1.0 Public domain dedication).
Author Contributions
We are using the CRediT Taxonomy to capture author contributions as we believe that having more detail of who did what brings transparency, enables recognition for researchers, and provides greater accountability for all involved. For more information click here.
You do not need to include an Author Contributions section in your manuscript: on submission, you will be asked for the contributions made by each author, to be selected from the list below. Anyone who has contributed but does not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in the Acknowledgments section.
| Contributor Role | Role Definition |
| Conceptualization | Ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims. |
| Data Curation | Management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later reuse. |
| Formal Analysis | Application of statistical, mathematical, computational, or other formal techniques to analyze or synthesize study data. |
| Funding Acquisition | Acquisition of the financial support for the project leading to this publication. |
| Investigation | Conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments, or data/evidence collection. |
| Methodology | Development or design of methodology; creation of models. |
| Project Administration | Management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution. |
| Resources | Provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources, or other analysis tools. |
| Software | Programming, software development; designing computer programs; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components. |
| Supervision | Oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team. |
| Validation | Verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs. |
| Visualization | Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualization/data presentation. |
| Writing – Original Draft Preparation | Creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation). |
| Writing – Review & Editing | Preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision – including pre- or post-publication stages. |
Competing Interests
Articles published in Open Research Europe must not contain content that could be perceived as ‘advertising’ and must include a Competing Interests section. Any financial, personal, or professional competing interests for any of the authors that could be construed to unduly influence the content of the article must be disclosed and will be displayed alongside the article. More information on what might be construed as a competing interest is available in our editorial policies.
If you do not have any competing interests, add the text ‘No competing interests were disclosed’.
Grant Information
Please provide details of the Horizon 2020 project ID and project title that supported the work presented in your article, and, if applicable, of any other funders or employers who funded the work. For each funder, please state the funder’s name, the grant number where applicable and known, and the individual to whom the grant was assigned.
Please do not list funding that you have that is not relevant to this specific piece of research.
Acknowledgments
This section should acknowledge anyone who contributed to the research or the writing of the article but who does not qualify as an author; please clearly state how they contributed. Authors should obtain permission to include the name and affiliation, from all those mentioned in the Acknowledgments section. Please note that grant funding should not be listed here.
Supplementary Material
To ensure all materials associated with a manuscript are visible, FAIR, and subject to peer review, Open Research Europe does not accept supplementary material. Additional materials that support the key claims in the paper but are not absolutely required to follow the study design and analysis of the results, e.g. questionnaires, or supporting images or tables, can be included as extended data. Extended data should be deposited in an approved repository and listed as part of the data availability statement. For more information, please see extended data.
References and Footnotes
References and footnotes can be listed in any standard style if it is consistent within a given article. We allow both references and footnotes within an article (a full reference list within text citations, and explanatory footnotes).
Our basic requirements include:
- Abbreviations should align with discipline specific standards.
- Preprints can be cited and listed in the reference list.
- Unpublished abstracts, papers that have been submitted to a journal but not yet accepted, and personal communications should instead be included in the text; they should be referred to as ‘personal communications’ or ‘unpublished work’ and the researchers involved should be named. Authors are responsible for getting permission to quote any personal communications from the cited individuals.
- Web links, URLs, and links to the authors’ own websites should be included as hyperlinks within the main body of the article, and not as references.
- Datasets published or deposited elsewhere (for example, in a general repository) should be listed in the "References" section and the citation to the dataset should follow one of these examples.
Figures and Tables (if applicable)
All figures and tables should be cited and discussed in the article text. Figure legends and tables should be added at the end of the manuscript. Tables should be formatted using the ‘insert table’ function in Word or provided as an Excel file. For larger tables or spreadsheets, please see our data guidelines. Files for figures are usually best uploaded as separate files through the submission system (see below for information on formats).
Any photographs must be accompanied by written consent to publish from the individuals involved.
Any distinguishing features, including medical record numbers or codes in the case of clinical images that could be used to identify the patient or participant concerned must be removed from the images.
Any distinguishing features, including medical record numbers or codes in the case of clinical images that could be used to identify the patient or participant concerned must be removed from the images.
Titles and legends: Each figure or table should have a concise title of no more than 15 words. A legend for each figure and table should also be provided that briefly describes the key points and explains any symbols and abbreviations used. The legend should be sufficiently detailed so that the figure or table can stand alone from the main text.
Permissions: If reusing a figure or table from a previous publication, the authors are responsible for obtaining permission from the copyright holder and for the payment of any fees (if applicable). Please include a note in the legend to state that: ‘This figure/table has been reproduced with permission from [include original publication citation]’ or the acknowledgement line specified in your permissions documentation if different.
Figure formats: For all figures, the color mode should be RGB or grayscale.
Line art: Examples of line art include graphs, diagrams, and flow charts. Please make sure that text is at least 8pt, the lines are thick enough to be clearly seen at the size the image will likely be displayed (between 75-150 mm width, which converts to one or two columns width, respectively), and that the font size and type is consistent between images. Figures should be created using a white background to ensure that they display correctly online.
If you submit a graph, please export the graph as an EPS file using the program you used to create the graph (e.g. SPSS). If this is not possible, please send us the original file in which the graph was created (e.g. if you created the graph in Excel, send us the Excel file with the embedded graph).
If you submit other forms of line art such as flow charts, diagrams or text to be displayed as an image, please export the image as an EPS file or send us the original file that was used to create the image (e.g. EPS or AI files if Adobe Illustrator was used, or a DOC, DOCX, PPT, PPTX or equivalent file if Word or PowerPoint was used).
If none of the above options is possible then we also accept uncompressed TIFFs with a resolution of at least 600dpi at the size they are likely to be displayed at (see above).
Images and using third-party material (if applicable)
Photographs and images: Photographs should be submitted as uncompressed TIFFs with a resolution of at least 300dpi at the size they are likely to be displayed (see above).
Mixed images: Images that are a mix of half-tone images and line art should be submitted as TIFF files at a resolution of at least 300dpi or vector files (e.g. EPS or Adobe Illustrator files). Please ensure that the text size is at least 8pt and lines are thick enough to be clearly visible at the size the image will be displayed.
Images to be used as data: If you are submitting photographic images as part of your raw dataset, please submit them as uncompressed TIFF files.
Using third-party material: If you plan to use any third-party material (for example but not limited to data, audio, video, film stills, screenshots, musical notation) please ensure you have requested and received the appropriate rights for republishing these. Please see our policies for more information.