Logging On
Cheryl Ball, Co-Editor
Making Our Guidelines More Explicit
Kairos is working to make permanent space on our journal's site for materials that make the publishing process more transparent. We have, for instance, spent the last two months rewriting our author guidelines to make them more accessible and turning them into a Submission Form and Acceptance Form for authors, so they know exactly what content is needed, with links for more information, where relevant.
The basic requirements for submission include the following questions, which synthesizes our lengthy Submissions page and Style Guide information into the most critical, baseline Must Dos for authors before they submit:
- Your webtext has considered and attended to the peer-review criteria outlined on our website.
- Your webtext uses an HTML-based home page that is not part of a proprietary web-authoring system such as Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, etc.
- You have provided editable transcripts for or closed captioning in all embedded media (e.g., videos, audio).
- You have included rhetorically useful alt text for all static images so that users with screen readers will be able to parse the navigation and design of your webtext.
- You have a References list (in modified APA style) that cites all sources including non-original media (images, video, etc.) unless the rhetoric or design of your text requires using a non-standard citational practice.
- If your webtext includes student work or likenesses, you have acquired written permission from them.
Eventually, the Submission form and Kairos website will link to videos we are making that better explain, at a micro-level, different parts of the webtext authoring and publishing process. It's a tall task that we are excited to take on, and which is long overdue.
In addition to posting on our website this new peer-review heuristic that we have begun giving our revamped and expanded editorial board, we also plan on making several policies and procedures more explicit by posting them in locations on our website that will be easily findable, readable, citable, and usable. This will require a website redesign, so we may post them in temporary places until the redesign is completed. In the meantime, some of these policies and procedures that we need to post include the following:
- Open Access statement (indicating what kind of OA journal we are and why)
- Inclusive Editing statement (on how our anti-racist editorial values are implemented in our peer-review and copyediting practices)
- Article Processing Charge statement (that we are an OA journal that does not charge APCs and don't believe that APCs are part of an ethical OA business model)
- More specific/findable copyright statement encouraging CC licensing of webtexts
- Impact factor statement (and why Kairos doesn't have one)
- Plagiarism policy (to be in accord with DOAJ guidelines)
If there are other guidelines, policies, and procedures you would like us to make more clear or findable, please let us know by emailing the editors at kairosrtp@gmail.com. Our goal is to have these policies, etc., posted to our website by Summer 2021 and having the site redesigned for better findability of these top-level issues by January 2022.
