Electronic Journal of Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Rules)

Commission

The journal is dedicated to the cognitive and brain sciences including epistemology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, anthropology, biophysics, neurobiology, neuroanatomy, electrophysiology, neurochemistry, evolution, ethology, biomathematics, informatics, neural networks, artificial-intelligence, theory of automatons, complexity theory, nonlinear dynamics . The style can be (1) paper or (2) commentary. Paper submissions include essays, a research reports, Ph.D. thesises or review articles, however, these must include a hypothesis, empirical data and conclusions. Commentary articles do not have to present any empirical data or hypothesis. The access is FREE! No printed version of the journal is distributed.

The two phases of paper acceptance:

Each document may have two status: (1) "Submitted" and (2) "Accepted" status. From the moment of submission the document will be public and open for "commentaries" for a mount. Then the status of the paper is finalized based on the evaluations submitted by the readers. The final status can be an "accepted" or a "rejected" status. At the second phase the accepted document will automatically be transferred to the "Archive of Accepted Papers" (Table of Content [accepted]). Rejected papers will be deleted from the "Temporary Archive" (Table of Content [Submitted]). Commentaries will be accepted or rejected together with the target paper.

Submission

Self-editing: We are calling for papers which have not been published in any other journal. However, the later versions of the paper can be submitted to other journals. Thus, we not only accept but encourage the submission of first drafts, which will undergo the critique of reviewers. This is useful for authors intending to submit articles to high level paper journals. To submit a paper, send your preformatted document to our dedicated public FTP site by using the interactive Submission form. The document will automatically be converted to a web page and become public from that moment. No rejection, editing or censorship is applied at the first phase unless (i) the topic is outside the circle of above listed sciences, (ii) the content or the presented experiment is unethical, (iii) it contains personal notes or (iv) it is obviously inconsistent with the scientific norms.

Acceptance

Reader-rating: Submission of your paper makes the document public and open for review immediately. However, this is only a temporary status of the paper. By submission, an evaluation form is automatically appended to the document, which makes other readers able to evaluate the article. After a month the individual evaluations will be averaged and a numerical grade will be calculated. Based on the numerical grade, your document will be automatically submitted to the final archive of the papers and commentaries or will be rejected and deleted from the system. The same rule is applied for commentary articles and critics. To be accepted, your document must be graded more than 80%. The percentage is calculated as an average of the five evaluation criterias. If there is no evaluation has been submitted the document will be rejected. Rejected papers will be deleted from the temporary directory.

Feed-back

Open for review: Everybody is welcomed to write commentary on papers once it has been "Submitted" and available in the "Table of Content (submitted)". The submission of a commentary is the same preocedure as for papers. Commentary papers are also subjects of the reader's evaluations and can be accepted or rejected based on the readers ranking. The opinion of the author of a commentary paper will be taken more seriously and weighted 10 times more than the scores from other readers. The percentage threshold for the acceptance as well as the weight of the commentator's evaluation may change over a time.

Referencing

The journal has been registered by the Congress Library (ISSN: 1096-4924). You can refer to a paper as Electronic Journal of Cognitive and Brain Sciences (or EJCBS), Vol. "Month", No."day", where the Month and day is the date of submission as it is indicated in the Table of Contents.

"Archive of Links" and submission of a link:

There is an option to submit a direct link as a URL (uniform resource locator) either to a document or information resource located in a remote server. The information resource can be a knowledge base, database or lab introduction. The URL must be a "HTTP" or an "FTP" site. The document can be an "html" (hypertext markup language) as well as a postscript file. The name and the address of the link will be stored as a pointer in a dedicated archive called "Submitted Links". The submission of a URL link is similar to the submission of a paper or commentary. The difference is that URL links will be listed separately from papers and there is no criteria of acceptance applied besides the ethical standards described at the "Submission paragraph". Every submitted links became public and accessible at the moment of submission.

Disclaimer:

We do not take any responsibility on documents and links submitted our journal. No censorship and/or post-hoc editing may be applied unless by personal contact with the system operator. To keep the standard high is everybody's job. Since the system is open for public access the security of documents and the security of authorization is limited. All submitted documents are subjects of copyright, even if they have never been "accepted". However, they are all allowed to print and distribute. Using submitted figures or texts in any (printed or electronic) publication requires the permission of the authors. Publication without proper citation and permission of the original authors is illegal.

by Zoltan Nadasdy

zoltan@vis.caltech.edu