Waterlines: guidelines for contributors

Scope

Waterlines aims to look to a sustainable future through exploring all aspects of the water supply, sanitation, hygiene and waste sectors from the practical to the political at every level across a broad geographical base.

Themes include: 

• Practical solutions are essential if the many of the difficulties experienced are to be addressed. However, the impact of government organizations, policy formation and institutional influence is also key to addressing all water, waste and sanitation issues.
• Articles reporting on experimental results should include the implications of these results for practical situations.
• Water and sanitation issues impact at every level of society from the village to the national level. How change at one level requires support from, or influences, another must not therefore be overlooked.
• Waterlines tries to cover as wide a range of geographical areas as possible. Articles describing particular projects in a given country should also include international comparisons, or at least some discussion of how local practice relates to what is done in other parts of the world.
• Sustainability is key to future solutions for the water and sanitation sector. This can mean how much programmes cost to run, and how far customer charges cover costs; it can also mean whether systems can be maintained into the future, and whether hygiene behaviours have been remembered. 

Format

Articles should be between 2000 and 6000 words in length: articles covering specific projects and field-based experience may be shorter (2–3000 words), whereas more analytical, research-based papers, or overviews are often longer (5–6000 words). 

The editor welcomes authors sending in 100–150 word outlines of their proposed article for discussion and guidance prior to writing the full article.

Please submit your article as a Word document containing the text, including title (up to 12 words), abstract (100–150 words), references (no more than 15), tables, boxes and figure captions.

Please also include one sentence on the author’s occupation. Acknowledgments are not encouraged but if it is important to include them, please keep them to one sentence. 

References and footnotes 

Tables and illustrations

• Tables should be set up in Word, referred to as ‘Table’ and numbered consecutively.
• Graphs or diagrams that were originally composed in Excel, should be linked as an object in the Word file, and furnished as a separate file. Data should be displayed in greyscale or with patterns rather than colours; they should be in 2-D rather than 3-D. Graphs and line images should be referred to as ‘Figure’ and numbered consecutively.
• Line images should be submitted in black and white, with no areas of solid grey, and at a resolution of 600 dots per inch at the size you would like it published or larger. They should be two-dimensional and not three-dimensional.
• Photographs and illustrations. If you are sending photographs, please save them in greyscale, preferably in TIFF or PostScript format (at least 300 dpi for size 12 cm wide). Please always send them as separate files, not embedded in the Word document.

Submission, editorial selection procedures and copyright assignment

Articles should be submitted as email attachments. Once received, they will be acknowledged by the Managing Editor, who will check that the article is within the scope of the journal. They will then be read by at least two other reviewers. When the reviewers’ comments have been received, usually within 6 weeks, the Managing Editor will convey the decision of the reviewers to the author. Unless the decision is not to publish, the reviewers usually ask for some revisions or they have a few queries.
If it is agreed that the article is suitable for publishing, the final decision on which issue the article is most suitable for is made at the editorial committee meeting, approximately three months before the issue will be published. The Managing Editor then edits the article and prepares it for publication. She will send each author a single copy of the issue when it is published: please send her the postal address to which copies should be sent.

Articles should be submitted to the Managing Editor, Clare Tawney, via email at publishinginfo@practicalaction.org.uk

The journal's policy is to acquire copyright for all contributions. Once articles have been selected for publication authors will be sent a copyright assignment form which they should sign and return to the Practical Action Publishing office.

The purpose of these guidelines is to simplify the process of submitting your article for publication in Waterlines. These steps will make it easier for the article to be reviewed, and make the production process run more smoothly once an article has been accepted for publication.