• "I am among those who think science has great beauty."

    Marie Curie

Guide for Authors

Please read this document carefully before submitting your book proposal. Once you have submitted a book proposal and/or a manuscript, we will review it and reply to you within two weeks.

Book Proposals

Prior to manuscript submission

For an initial check of whether your manuscript is suitable for Aldus Press, please complete our publication proposal document and make sure to clearly outline the following:

  1. The title, subtitle, and list of authors/contributors, including their affiliations
  2. The academic discipline
  3. The intended audience
  4. Your Open Access funding source
  5. The type of book (monograph, edited volume, textbook, reference work, conference proceedings, etc.)
  6. An abstract describing the book (max. 500 words)
  7. The complete table of contents
  8. An estimate of the number of words, images (color and/or black-and-white), and pages

After receiving the outline, we will discuss your proposal/manuscript with our Advisory Board and get back to you as soon as possible. We are usually able to provide initial feedback within two weeks.

Manuscripts

In order to publish your book quickly and without delays, we would kindly ask you to observe a few simple guidelines.

Preparing your manuscript

  1. Please provide your manuscript as a Microsoft Word or Rich Text File, with a basic structure using headings (up to 4 levels).
  2. LaTeX should be converted into a Rich Text File (RTF) format.
  3. Please do not submit a PDF file.
  4. Please ensure that all chapters are clearly labeled and have separate titles, abstracts, and keywords.
  5. Index terms should be given as a list at the end of the manuscript or marked using the feature in Microsoft Word. When no list is provided, we will not prepare an index.
  6. References must be included. Your manuscript may have either footnotes or endnotes, but not both. Please use a common reference style, such as APA or Chicago, and adhere to a single style across all chapters. When an ISBN and/or DOI is available for the sources cited, these should be included.
  7. Please choose one form of spelling for the entire document (either British or American English) and use it consistently.
  8. Please apply one style of metrics (e.g., metric or imperial) consistently throughout the manuscript.

Ethics

Intentionally falsifying information (for example, suggesting reviewers with a false name or email address) will result in rejection of the manuscript and may lead to further investigation.

We expect that all authors follow national and international guidelines on scientific and medical ethics and reporting. Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. For all research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study should have been obtained. An appropriate declaration must appear in your manuscript.

Authorship

Aldus Press endorses the ICMJE guidelines for authorship.

Ghost authors, honorary authorships, and gift authorships are not allowed. Contributions that do not justify authorship may be acknowledged individually or together as a group under a single heading (e.g., ‘Clinical Investigators’ or ‘Participating Investigators’), and their contributions should be specified (e.g., ‘served as scientific advisors’, ‘critically reviewed the study proposal’, ‘participated in writing or technical editing of the manuscript’).

Copyright

Aldus Press will not accept a text that was not written by the authors themselves, with the exception of a clearly labeled quotation of fewer than 100 words. Only after specific written permission from the quoted source, creator, or publisher is obtained are we able to reprint longer texts, poems, news items, etc.

It is possible to reprint longer extracts if these are your own texts previously published elsewhere, but you must obtain written permission from the original publisher. This also applies to translations or modified works. Please include an appropriate reference to your previous publication. All manuscripts are scanned for plagiarism. If you have included reprinted texts, please explain this in your cover letter.

Obtaining any necessary permissions is the responsibility of the author(s).

Tables, figures, and images

Please provide all figures, images, and tables as separate documents, and clearly mark in the text where each figure should be placed, using: < Figure X >. Figure captions should be provided with the figures in the separate documents as well as in the manuscript.

For best results, please provide images and figures as digital image files (black-and-white or colour) with a minimum 300 DPI at 100mm x 100mm minimum size. We can work with lesser quality files, but the result will not be optimal. Avoid 1pt (hair)lines, as these may be too narrow to show up properly.

There are no charges for colour images.

The following file types are suitable: TIF, EPS, JPG, PPTX. Please note that PDF files are not suitable. Tables, line art, and (vector) images made in Microsoft Office software (PowerPoint, Word, Visio, Excel) do not have to be converted and can be submitted as is.

Image rights

Please note that for all images not created by the author(s) themselves, the author(s) must obtain written permission to publish these images. Images downloaded from websites such as Wikipedia and Google, even with the Creative Commons license, should not be included unless the original creator approves publication.

It is possible to reprint your own images published elsewhere after obtaining written permission from the original publisher. This also applies to modified figures. Obtaining any necessary permissions is the responsibility of the author(s).

Peer Review

Upon submission of a proposal, authors are asked to submit the names of potential reviewers. Their names and affiliations (including their ORCID iDs) as well as the reviews will be published in the book itself and included in the metadata. Based on the reputations and endorsements of these reviewers, readers will be able to assess the quality and relevance of the work.

Open Access Process

Aldus Press publishes all of our books as Open Access under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, which means that users are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format.

We encourage authors and readers to share our publications (the final PDF) in their institutional repositories, on their personal websites, and on social platforms such as Mendeley, ResearchGate, or Academia.edu and similar outlets. Please always include the ISBN and DOI (digital object identifier) to help readers cite the work.

Aldus Press also supports Green Open Access (self-archiving) without embargos or restrictions.

When submitting a manuscript, please ensure that when you include text, images, figures, or anything else not directly created by the author(s), you obtain written consent from the copyright holder. Without this permission Aldus Press is unable to consider the manuscript.

Publishing licences

Aldus Press publishes under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license (Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives). Users are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, under the following conditions:

Next steps…

  1. Please complete and submit an Aldus Press Book Proposal form.
  2. We will review your submission and may contact you for more details.
  3. Upon approval, please sign our Open Access publishing agreement.
  4. Secure funding for your Open Access book publication. You can visit our funding page for information or contact us for advice and assistance.

Interested in submitting a proposal for review?

Please review our Guide for Authors before completing a Publication Proposal. A fully completed form helps us to reach a decision quickly, usually in less than two weeks.