Submit a paper to ITcon

The paper should be prepared in Microsoft Word according to the formatting instructions below. Only following these simple guidelines can guarantee the authors that their submissions will be processed as quickly as possible.

If you don't have an account yet: please register yourself as author (and/or reviewer) and submit your paper here.

Due to a high volume of incoming papers, submissions are temporarily closed. We will reopen for new submissions in 2025. Thank you for your understanding!

ITcon Peer Review Process

All articles are subject to a single blind review process by at least two reviewers. The review period is usually between 4 and 8 weeks depending on when the article is submitted in the publication process, and when the reviewers are available. Reports from reviewers are anonymised and returned to authors for appropriate action. Articles are also subject to editorial review before the peer review process. It is not uncommon for a member of our editorial team to recommend changes to a submission prior to peer review, especially when submissions do not comply with the Author Guidelines.

ITcon copyright policy

From the beginning of 2009 ITcon has adopted a more explicit copyright policy by using the Creative Commons licence CC-BY for all its full text articles. Creative Commons is a standard license widely used for open content material on the web (music, pictures, films, articles, computer code) which at the same time protects the rights of the author, in particular concerning proper attribution, as it allows free reuse within bounds specified by the particular CC license chosen, thus in our case ensuring the widest possible dissemination of our research results.

We don’t require authors to sign any specific written copyright transfer or licensing agreement with ITcon, but assume that authors submitting manuscripts to ITcon agree to use the Creative Common license.

ITcon formatting guide for authors

This document provides the formatting instructions for documents submitted to ITcon for publication. Authors are entirely responsible for the formatting of the article. The editors will not do any reformatting. The formatting rules apply to:

In addition the following files are, provided:

  • a template for MS Word (Windows or Macintosh platforms).
MS Word template

Authors are instructed to read these directions carefully and follow them explicitly. They are advised to check each box before submitting the final version of the article.

Although these instructions are rather long, the authors will note that the styles required are very common and that little extra work is required.

1. Layout

This section defines the appearance of the article. Articles following this definition will look similar both in electronic HTML format as well as in the print format.

NOTE: All measurements in this document are metric. 1 cm may be approximated as 0.4 inch.

Please use the [_] as chekboxes.

1.1 Principles

Default font.
[_] Times or Times New Roman font of size 10 pt.
Default paragraph style.
[_] Flush left, 12 pt leading, no indents, space between paragraph - on line (set to Auto in Word!).
Fonts.
[_] Bold type is used in all titles. Bold may be used for title words at the beginning of the paragraph but not for emphasized words within the paragraph. Italic must be used for that, to denote variables in formulae or computer listings etc. Underlining is not allowed.
Indents.
[_] Where applicable, are at 1 cm and in 1 cm raster.

1.2 Page layout

Paper.
Articles must be formatted in such a way that they would print on A4 paper. Required margins will allow printing to US Letter paper as well.
Size and margins.
[_] On DIN/ISO A4 paper (29.7 * 21 cm), left, right and top margin are 2.5cm, bottom margin is 4 cm. All pages must have a running footer at one cm below the text (3 cm from page end on A4). Text must be set in a single column. Figures etc. must occupy full width of the column and must not be set floating into the text.
When printed on US Letter paper the right margin will grow to 3.1 cm and bottom margin will shrink to 2.25cm.
Running footer.
[_] Italic, 8 pt, flush left. Consists of text like "ITcon Vol. 1 (1995); authors; pg. N" where "authors" is the reference-like enumeration of the article authors and N is the page number (i.e. Dickens et al; pg. 12 or Jones and Smith, pg. 7). Running footer of articles submitted for review contains only the page number.

1.3 Header elements

A journal article header is built of the following parts, listed in the order as they must appear in the article. There must be a space of 12pt (one line) separating these items.

Article title.
[_] The title must be in uppercase, 14pt bold. It must fit on maximum two lines. Formatted as style H1 or heading 1. Space before 0pt.
Revision dates.
[_] Lines outlining the documents revision history (in 10pt). No spacing between those lines! Example:

SUBMITTED: June 2016 [you press shift-enter here]
REVISED: July 2016
PUBLISHED: September 2016 at http://itcon.org/2016/5/

A list of authors with affiliations.
[_] For each author three lines are suggested, followed by a blank line separator. First line: author's first name, middle name initial and last name followed by title; second line affiliation, last line electronic address. 10 pt bold italic. Style Address. See also address syntax.
Summary.
[_] Following bold and uppercase word "SUMMARY:" on the same line begins the 250-300 word summary of the article in 10pt italic. Style Summary.
Keywords.
[_] List of keywords. Following bold and uppercase word "KEYWORDS:" on the same line are up to 7 keywords describing the article in 10pt italic.

1.4 Body elements

Article body may consist of three levels of sections and subsections. Section titles must decimally numbered i.e. 1. 1.1 1.1.1 ... text. All titles are bold, flush left, with one space between the number and the first word of the title. Paragraphs are separated with 6 pt wide white space. 12 pt separates a fist and second level heading from the previous paragraph and 6 pt separates third level heading from the previous paragraph.

1. FIRST LEVEL HEADINGS.
[_] 12pt bold, upper case only. Style heading 2 or H2 . Note: style heading 1 or H1 is reserved for article title!
1.2 Second level headings.
[_] 12pt bold. Style heading 3or H3.
1.2.3 Third level headings.
[_] 10pt bold. Style heading 4or H4.
Normal text.
[_] Uses the default font, justified, no indent of the first line, space before 6pt.
  • Bullet list.
    • [_] Like normal text but flush left, indent 2cm, bullet indented at 1 cm. Style UL for not-ordered and OL for ordered (decimally numbered) lists. Other types of list numbering are not permitted.
    Computer text.
    [_] Listings, program examples etc. must be in 8pt Courier or Courier New font, left indent 1 cm, line spacing 10pt. Style PRE.
    References.
    [_] Last H2 section must have the title "References". Flush left, publication title in Italic. Style "Reference ". See also: referencing syntax .
    Appendices.
    [_] Appendices are enumerated as APPENDIX A, APPENDIX B ... Appendix titles have the same style as first level (H2) headings.

    1.5 Other elements

    Other elements in the article body are tables, figures and formulae. All include captions or numbering, which is formatted in italic. Distance of those elements to other text is the same as distance between paragraphs. Full width of the column must be reserved for these elements. There should be 12pt spacing between tables or figures and the rest of the text.

    Tables.
    [_] Tables must have a table caption on top of the table (style Caption), followed by table lines and columns. Table must have horizontal lines only. Text in tables must be 8pt, flush left.
    Figures.
    [_] Use of figures and graphics is encouraged. So is the use of color but make sure that they print well on black and white printers. If possible, the figures should be in vector format. Figure captions are placed below the actual graphic. We suggest short captions (one line) and detailed discussion of the figure in the text. Style Caption is italic, flush left, 10pt. See also section on figure syntax .
    Formulae.
    [_] Formulae must be indented 1 cm and must be arabically numbered in brackets at 1cm from the right margin.
    Footnotes and endnotes.
    [_] Footnotes are not allowed. Endnotes are not acceptable.

    2. Syntax

    Since the submitted article will be automatically converted into HTML hypertext for WWW viewing, some of the text elements must adhere to the following syntax rules:

    2.1 Figures

    Text which looks exactly like "Figure n", where n is a number, will be converted into a link to text which looks like "Figure n:". The first is the reference to a figure. The second is the beginning of the figure caption. Note that the FIG in caption is all in block capitals and that the number is followed by a colon. Any other references to figures like, "see left part of figure 1" will not be linked and must be avoided. Text like "see left part of Figure 1 " is correct.

    2.2 Tables

    See the discussions for figures and replace Figure with Table.

    2.3 Sections

    Section references are identified by the word section, followed by a number e.g. section 2, section 4.1, sub-section 1.3. Avoid using terms like next section, section above, section below ...

    2.4 References

    References must be sorted alphabetically in section "References". Modified Harvard style of referencing must be used. For example:

    Jones A.S. (1994a). The future of electronic publishing, Journal of modern communications, Vol. 3, No. 5, 213-232.
    Smith A.S. and Jones A.B. (1994). Publish electronically, Proceedings of 4th international conference of office systems (Jones A.B., editor), University of New Brunswick, 213-232.

    The order of fields in the citation is: author(s), year, [paper title,] publication title, [volume number,][publication editor(s),][publisher, town and country of publisher,][pages]. Fields in angle brackets only apply for some types of publications.

    Authors.
    Authors last name is not followed by a comma. Commas are used to separate authors from each other. Last co-author is separated with an "and" not with a comma. Author's initials, not full names, are given.
    Year.
    Year of publication is in brackets, followed by a full-stop. Year may be followed by a lower case letter if works of identical authors written in the same year are referenced.
    Paper title.
    Except for the first, Words in title of the part of the publication (paper in a journal or proceedings) do not start with a capital.
    Publication title.
    It may include the editors of the publication in brackets.
    Publisher.
    Publisher of the publication must be given for anything but journals. Town, state and country of publisher must be given.

    In order to allow automatic conversion into hypertext, the following rules apply for the citation text:

    • Generally, citations should be in brackets. (Jones, 1994) is prefered to Jones (1994). In simple cases the last form works as well.
    • Up to two names are allowed in the reference, with an "and" in between e.g. (Jones and Smith, 1994) is OK, (Jones, Smith and Jackson, 1994) is not. (Jones et al, 1994) should be used.
    • More than one reference can be in a single bracket e.g. (Jones 1993, Smith 1993).
    • There is a comma between the name and the year. All years must be 4 digit numbers followed by a single lower case letter, if necessary (Smith, 1994, Jones, 1994b, Smith and Jones, 1994, Jones, et al 1995).

    2.4 Pointers to electronic resources

    Use of external links from articles is possible, but the authors are must ensure that the pointed-to material will be on that location for at least 5 years after the paper is published. Links must, however, be useful on printed copy as well. In consequence the URL of the link must appear in the text.

    Any text which looks like an URL will be hypertexified. This is the only way to include a hyperlink to an external document. So if you write: " The program code is at http://www.somewhere.com/program/code.c" the software will translate it to "The program code is at http://www.somewhere.com/program/code.c ". Similarly, a file available by ftp from site cive.uni-foo.edu as /pub/myfile/file.exe must be reference in the text as ftp://cive.uni-foo.edu/pub/myfile/file.exe. More on URL syntax can be found at http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/demoweb/url-primer.html .

    2.5 Electronic address

    Any electronic addresses must be given as URLs as described above. Both email and http addresses are welcome. URLs for email looks like mailto:joe@cive.some-uni.edu. For added convenience any string which will look like email:string@string (no spaces!) will be hypertexified as well.