Publication Guidelines

Higher education IT professionals and faculty (including those who are not EDUCAUSE members) may submit unsolicited manuscripts for publication consideration in EDUCAUSE Quarterly. Corporate representatives who feel they have material that meets the content guidelines below are encouraged to solicit authorship by campus representatives to retain the magazine’s "peer-to-peer" approach and avoid promotional or commercial overtones. All material published in EDUCAUSE publications must be free from endorsement of specific hardware environments and/or proprietary software or services; corporate press releases about new products or product adoptions do not meet editorial standards. The magazine’s overarching goals are to provide a vehicle for practical content on broadly innovative, nonvendor-specific IT solutions and compelling technology-related issues in higher education and to foster dialogue among campus practitioners and managers.

EQ authors receive full editorial support and gain valuable exposure and recognition in a very visible professional forum. View author testimonials.

Who Reads EDUCAUSE Quarterly?

EDUCAUSE is an international, nonprofit, professional association for managers and users of information resources on college and university campuses. The content of EDUCAUSE Quarterly relates to planning, managing, and using information resources (including technology, services, and information) in higher education -- administrative, academic, and library computing, as well as multimedia, telecommunications, and networking.

EDUCAUSE members and other subscribers are involved in many different aspects of planning for, managing, and using computing and other information resources. EDUCAUSE Quarterly readers are generally individuals who are involved in diverse areas professionally on campus, including administrative computer services, information systems development, user services, telecommunications and networking, academic computer services, institutional research and planning, database administration and data administration, and instructional technology development and coordination. Most readers are central IT organization staff, but increasingly the readership includes individuals who work in campus libraries, institutional research and planning offices, central administration and academic offices, and academic department libraries, institutional research offices, and administrative and academic offices.

Publication Content

EDUCAUSE publications deal with the subject of campus information resources from a planning, use, and management point of view. Areas of interest include:

• IT human resources issues
• organizational and management issues
• information technology planning and policy
• information resources policy issues
• data administration/information management/data warehouses
• managing a networked information environment
• industry and interinstitutional partnerships
• integrating voice, video, and data technologies
• scholarly communication issues
• library technology issues
• planning for and use of new technologies on campus
• hardware/software strategies and architectures
• funding information technology
• supporting use of technology in teaching and learning
• electronic classroom and multimedia management
• training and re-training of staff and users
• standards
• information services delivery models
• leveraging/value of information technology
• distributed support issues
• distance education and distributed learning challenges
• e-commerce / e-business challenges

See the top ten issues identified in the EDUCAUSE Current Issues survey.

Copyright

Once material has been accepted for publication, authors are asked to sign an author agreement form that assures EDUCAUSE that the authors have the right to publish the material and that they grant permission to EDUCAUSE to publish the material, both in print and online. The authors retain copyright of the material. Also,

• the authors retain the right to publish the material elsewhere, providing the original publication is acknowledged;
• EDUCAUSE does not pay honoraria to authors; and
• EDUCAUSE has the right to edit the material to meet the association’s standards.

EDUCAUSE Quarterly Publication

EDUCAUSE Quarterly is a practitioner's journal of EDUCAUSE, published four times a year (approximately in March, June, September, and December). Articles may be contributed at any time for publication consideration. Potential articles are reviewed by members of an editorial review committee, and those published in EDUCAUSE Quarterly are referenced in such indexing services as ERIC, Computer Literature Index, and Higher Education Abstracts. The reviewing process usually takes from six to eight weeks; author revision and the editorial/production cycle may take up to six months.

Articles in EDUCAUSE Quarterly fall into several categories. A Feature is an in-depth article that may take one of the forms listed in the previous section under Publication Content. Feature articles fall in the range of 3,500 to 6,000 words. Other types of articles (800 to 3,000 words) include Current Issues, Viewpoints, and Good Ideas.

• A Current Issues article is a brief overview of a timely issue facing the profession; such an article puts the designated issue into perspective, offers insights, and may propose solutions.
• A Viewpoint article is one that expresses an author's opinion on a subject related to the field, often one about which there is some debate.
• A Good Ideas article briefly describes an application or management technique that has been successful on a campus and could be implemented by colleagues on other campuses.
• We also publish book reviews in the Recommended Reading department. Although as a rule we solicit these from members with a known expertise on the book topic, any reader may volunteer to write a review of a book that he or she would recommend for professional reading. These recommendations should not exceed 1,500 words.

Specifications for Submitting Articles for Publication Consideration

Ideally, papers should be submitted to Nancy Hays (eqeditor@educause.edu) electronically, as a word-processed file. Figures and graphics should be submitted as separate files, preferably in EPS format. EDUCAUSE can accept documents in most word-processing formats, with the preferred program being Word for Windows. Page layout and presentation software such as PageMaker, QuarkXpress, and PowerPoint are NOT acceptable. If it is not possible to send your manuscript as an e-mail attachment, EDUCAUSE can accept either 3 1/2" DOS or 3 1/2" Macintosh diskettes, CDs, or ZIP disks. Manuscripts should be accompanied by a letter (or e-mail message if being sent by e-mail) stating that the paper is to be considered for publication in EDUCAUSE Quarterly. The message should include name, title, complete address, and phone number, as well as a fax number and e-mail address, for each author. Author name(s) should appear only on the first page of the paper, as the EDUCAUSE Quarterly editorial procedures include blind review for feature articles.

The Editorial Review Process

Articles under consideration for publication as feature articles in EDUCAUSE Quarterly are sent for blind review to six or more members of an editorial review committee (the twelve members of the committee are listed on the inside front cover of each issue of the journal).

Reviewers evaluate the articles in five categories:

• overall quality of the article,
• appropriateness of the topic,
• author's knowledge and coverage of the topic (with special efforts to cover the "people" aspects of the concept or experience),
• coverage of people issues, and
• readability of the article.

They also provide comments concerning how the article could be improved, and often make specific suggestions along those lines. (Even the very well written articles are usually revised before publication.)

Following are some guidelines intended to convey what the editor and reviewers are looking for in articles submitted for publication. Here are a few questions used to help make a judgment as to whether an article should be pursued for publication. Each desirable attribute is followed by a description of things to avoid in writing for EDUCAUSE Quarterly:

• Is the information relevant, i.e., will readers find it practical, applicable, useful? Will it serve the needs of some segment of the readership?
• Avoid relating an experience that is so peculiar and unique to your campus that it wouldn't work anywhere else.
• Is the information readable, i.e., is it easy to understand, clearly and cogently presented?
• Avoid using unnecessary jargon or failing to explain the jargon you must use.
• Avoid mixing chronological and how-to approaches, confusing the reader with inconsistent verb tenses throughout the article.
• Avoid the passive voice and stilted language -- keep it straightforward and simple.
• Avoid text that runs on without subdivisions or headings.
• Is the subject appropriate for EDUCAUSE Quarterly readers (see "Who Reads EDUCAUSE Quarterly?" above), and has the author taken into account the expertise and interests of CAUSE members (e.g., are the complexity, tone, and style appropriate? Has the topic been covered from a management perspective?)
• Avoid writing about a subject that is not within the purview of EDUCAUSE.
• Avoid relating only the technical aspects of the concepts or experience and failing to discuss the "people" and management issues.
• Is the information comprehensive, i.e., does it address the major elements of a situation or idea, or reference the literature where other major elements are addressed?
• Avoid taking such a narrow view that your article doesn't take into account or acknowledge the experiences of others in the same area, or fails to draw on the published body of knowledge.
• Does the information advance the reader's knowledge, i.e., does it convey a new idea or deal with an old one from a fresh or innovative perspective?
• Avoid writing on a subject that has already been covered many times before in the journal, especially if your article adds nothing new from a practical standpoint but simply re-states conventional wisdom.

When a feature-length article is essentially the presentation of a case study, it is important that the article do more than simply tell "what we did on our campus." Case study experiences must be presented in a way that makes them generalizable to others. Thus it is critical to adopt a candid attitude toward revealing not only success factors, but also problems encountered, especially from the point of view of offering lessons learned so that others can learn from your experience. It is also important to place the experience in a conceptual framework, relating it to the literature on the subject.

For any kind of feature article, a list of suggested articles, books, and other publications on the same subject is especially valuable, even if you have not used these references in the article. The EDUCAUSE style guide is online for your referral.

For further information about submitting articles to EDUCAUSE Quarterly journal, contact the editors at the EDUCAUSE office: (303) 939-0321 or eqeditor@educause.edu.

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