Scope

Enterprise Development and Microfinance (EDM)is a journal aimed at practitioners and policymakers in the field of microfinance and enterprise development. Themes include microfinance institutions and their sustainability, poverty impact on clients and producers, business development services, value chain development, and the business environment. Readers of your article will want to learn about developments that are new and helpful for their work.

Themes include:

• Articles should provide insights into how programmes might be run better, or what changes in policy are needed.
• Articles concentrating on analysis of how poor people manage their finances or their businesses should also include recommendations for how interventions might be improved.
• 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.
• Readers are also interested in sustainability i.e. how much programmes cost to run, or financial products cost to offer on the market, and how far they are able to cover their costs with customer charges.
• Articles should be well structured to support the arguments they present. They should include enough relevant data, and this information should be adequately analysed to support their arguments.
• Authors should be aware of current thinking, and should cite other relevant work, They should adequately cite their own assumptions and findings.
• Authors should consider whether cross cutting issues such as gender, environment, poverty outreach or other are relevant to their article, and if so provide some discussion.

Format

Articles should be up to 6000 words in length (total to include everything: title, abstract, text, references, tables): articles covering specific projects and their experiences may be shorter, whereas more analytical overviews are often longer.

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

All articles should be submitted via EDM online submissions site

References and footnotes

EDM does not have footnotes. Material of this type should either be incorporated into the text (possibly in brackets) or omitted.

References should be given in the Harvard style e.g. (Smith, 2001) in the text, together with, in a list at the end:
Smith, John (2001) ‘Water coverage indicators’, DFID report.
Please include the DOI number at the end of the reference if available; also,for any websites, check the url is still live and give the [accessed date].

Tables and illustrations

• Tables should be set up in Word, referred to as ‘Table’ and numbered consecutively.
• Graphs or diagrams should be submitted as a separate files. Adobe Illustrator files are preferred; otherwise pdfs, or Excel files are accepted. 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 as separate files (preferably Adobe Illustrator, otherwise pdfs or Word diagrams) 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, not three-dimensional.
• Photographs and illustrations. If you are sending photographs, please save them in colour, preferably in jpeg format (at least 300 dpi for size 12 cm wide). Please always send them as separate files, not embedded in the Word document. Indicate in the text where the figure/photo filename should appear, and the figure title and credit where relevant.

Submission and editorial procedures

All articles should be submitted via EDM online submissions site, Editorial Manager

Please submit your article as a Word document containing the text, including title (up to 16 words), abstract (100–250 words), references, tables, boxes and figure captions. Please omit author details and affiliations from this ‘Anonymized manuscript’.Acknowledgments are not encouraged but if it is important to include them, please keep them to one sentence.

Please register on the site as an author then follow the instructions to give details of authors and co-authors, information about the submission, and upload the article itself.  Once  you have submitted the article, viewed the pdf generated and approved the submission, we will acknowledge receipt, and check that the article is within the scope of the journal. We will send your article to at least two other reviewers. When the reviewers’ comments have been received, usually within 2–3 months, we will send you the decision (Accept; Accept with minor revisions; Revise and resubmit; Decline to publish), together with the reviewers’ comments.

If you have been invited to make revisions or resubmit, you should resubmit your revised paper online, together with a copyright assignment form (see below). Your article will be checked and either accepted for publication or sent back for further revisions or declined.

Once your article has been accepted for publication it will be copy edited, at which point you may receive editorial queries from the copy editor. Once the article is typeset you will receive a pdf proof which we ask you to read and correct promptly.

Articles that have been accepted for publication but are not yet assigned to an edition of EDM are published on the journal website under ‘online preview’. When they have been assigned to a particular edition of EDM we will let you know. Once your article is published we will send each author a single copy of the issue.

Copyright Assignment

The journal’s policy is to acquire copyright for all contributions. We do this to ensure the widest dissemination and protection against copyright infringement of your article.

Your research, in its written article form, has been subject to rigorous peer review, and authorial revision. Your article in its accepted form will now be published in its final, definitive, and citable form, for the first time, as the Version of Scholarly Record by Practical Action Publishing. In addition to facilitating peer review, we add value to your accepted manuscript and create the Version of Scholarly Record by editing the manuscript to a style consistent with community and journal conventions, converting it to a suitable digital form, incorporating digital reference links and metadata tags for feeds to abstracting and indexing services, registering the digital object identifier (DOI), and monitoring electronic usage and citation. We work to assure the integrity of the scholarly record and to protect copyright and associated author rights.

All named authors should therefore download, sign, and scan the copyright assignment form and once the article has been reviewed and revised, the form(s) must be uploaded to the Editorial Managersite along with the revised article. The original copy should be posted to Journals, Practical Action Publishing, The Schumacher Centre, Bourton-on-Dunsmore, Rugby, Warwickshire, CV23 9QZ, United Kingdom or faxed to +44(0)1926 634401. Co-authors can sign a single form, or may each sign separate forms, whichever is more convenient.

Open Access

Practical Action Publishing provides authors or their research sponsors and funders with the option of paying a publishing fee and thereby making an article permanently available for free online access – open access – immediately on publication to anyone, anywhere, at any time. This option is made available once an article has been accepted in peer review.

Please visit here for further information.

The purpose of these guidelines is to simplify the process of submitting your article for publication in EDM. 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.