1.0 Overview

If you are new to EANSO Journals or you are having questions that require clarification, we suggest that you first read this section. It contains the most frequent questions that we have been getting from authors. The questions range from submission to the publishing of your manuscripts. The topics on this page are as follows:

1.0 Overview
2.0 Manuscript Submission
3.0 Manuscript tracking
4.0 Publishing
5.0 Peer-review
6.0 Journals indexing
7.0 Fees and payment
8.0 Copyright, archiving and privacy

2.0 Manuscript Submission

2.1 How do I submit the paper?

There are currently only two ways of submitting a manuscript to any of the hosted journals and are both perfectly accepted. These are as follows:

2.1.1 Email Submission

The first is through sending the manuscript to the Editor-in-Chief directly through the email address editor@eanso.org. When using this method, please make sure that you include the subject ‘Manuscript for Publication’ in the email subject. You should also not leave the email body blank and confirm if the manuscript is correctly attached. We usually have a strong anti-spamming system that sometimes marks emails without a subject and/or a body as spam. Make sure that you at least include your academic title, official names, phone number and address within the body of the email for us to correctly address and contact you. If done correctly, you should receive a confirmation that the manuscript was received and be issued with a tracking code for your manuscript.

2.1.2 Submission through the system

If you like the challenge, you can use our online submission system to submit your manuscript. We use an improvement of the Open Journal Systems developed by the Public Knowledge Project that most journals use. This means that the submission process will be familiar to some. The important thing to note is that you must create an account before submitting the manuscript. This means that you must either first login to your account or register a new account if you do not already have one. Please note that you must select all the journals that you will want to interact with during the submission process to avoid being prevented by the system from submitting to those journals.

2.2 Can I submit a manuscript that I had already submitted to another journal?

No, we only publish original work. This thus means that if you have already published the manuscript in a different journal, then it is automatically disqualified from being published by any of our hosted journals. We usually carry out an originality test to ascertain this before publication is done.

An exception is made for manuscripts presented at a conference and appearing only in the conference proceedings. You can also officially withdraw your manuscript from the other journal if you wish to resubmit the same to our hosted journals. This will, however, require you to explicitly present the intention to the Editor in Chief during submission.

2.3 What are the requirements to fulfil before submitting a manuscript?

We only publish scholarly manuscripts. Therefore, anything that is not scholarly is usually returned back to the authors for improvement. We, however, do not place so many requirements on manuscript submission because a lot of transformations are done within the workflow of the publishing process. You should therefore only meet the minimum requirements that are as follows:

1. Not have been previously published or have been presented before any other journal for consideration.
2. Have their files in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format, no PDFs are allowed.
3. Have documents whose text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
4. Have a word count of between 3000 and 7000.

After submission, you will be issued a tracking code that will enable you to track the progress through our submission tracker. The rest of the useful information will be available in the tracking system.

2.4 What is ORCID and why do I need to have it?

2.4.1 What is ORCID?

ORCID is an abbreviation for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. It is most of the time described as a nonproprietary alphanumeric code that is used to uniquely identify academic authors and contributors.

2.4.2 Why it is important?

The idea behind the development of ORCIDs is that human names alone are not unique and it can sometimes be quite difficult to rightfully credit authorship to the right authors. For example, imagine two people with exactly the same name and affiliation. Also, imagine situations after marriages where authors change names. One may easily lose credit for the work published before the change of names. Even the ordering of your names varies from one cultural convention to another and may interfere with how your work is cited.

2.4.3 How can I get it?

Getting it is free and as simple as visiting the ORCID official website and signing up for an account. Once you have registered, you access your account by signing in. The ID is a 16 digits code appended to a URI as follows https://orcid.org/0000-0001-XXXX-XXXX.

2.4.4 Is it a must before submission?

ORCID is not a must. However, it is highly recommended that you get one for yourself and your coauthors for us to accurately credit your work. It is fun to note that these days, some project funders use the information available through your ORCID to determine the extent of merit for each applicant. So please give this the seriousness it deserves.

3.0 Manuscript Tracking

3.1 Where do I go to track my manuscript?

Depending on how you submitted your manuscript, you can have either two or only one way of tracking your submission. For both the submission channels, you can easily visit our Tracker and input the five-character code that you were assigned during the submission process. For submissions made through our online submission procedure, the author who submitted the manuscript can log into the system and check the progress.

3.2 What if I forgot my Manuscript Tracking Code?

No problem, just go back to the email you used to submit the manuscript and search for the responses from the Editor in Chief when you submitted the manuscript. If for one reason or another this is not possible, you can contact us as soon as possible and ask for assistance.

3.3 Why have I not received any notification after submitting the manuscript?

We usually respond to all emails on manuscript submission within 1 hour of submission. The longest it can take without getting a response from us after submitting your manuscript should be 24 Hours.

If it happens that you haven’t gotten any response even after 24 hours, please first check your spam folder. Your email client might be wrongly marking mails from our address as spam. If you get the email in the spam folder, please make sure that you mark it as not spam because there will be more communications to follow that will require your quick address.

If you do not get an email from us in the spam folder, please contact us immediately. That will mean that the error is on our side and we shall promptly assist.

4.0 Publishing

4.1 How long does it take from submission to publishing?

Usually, this takes between 2 weeks and 6 weeks for authors requiring their manuscripts to only be available online. The time taken however depends on a number of factors that include the availability of reviewers, the quality of the submission, the journal submitted to, the time of the year, the efficiency of correspondence from the authors and several other factors. There are times when authors get lucky and have their submissions published within a week or less and there are those who have their work published longer than initially projected.

Authors requiring printed hard copies of their articles together with the online version usually have to wait longer. Hardcopies are printed quarterly with the exact timing being dependent on the journal in question. Feel free to ask the Editor in Chief when the next print issue shall be available during submission.

4.2 How does one correct a paper that is already published?

It’s easy, just make the corrections required and then contact the Editor in Chief about these corrections. For minor corrections, the article is usually corrected at the copyediting stage. Major corrections, on the other hand, are treated as a new submission and the review process is usually repeated where the reviewers once again have the right to either accept or reject the submission. Our journals value quality and accuracy. Therefore, we always welcome corrections from both the readers and the author.

4.3 Is it possible to withdraw a submission?

Yes, it is. You just email the Editor in Chief about it and include the reason for withdrawal in the withdrawal email. Withdrawn manuscripts will have the status ‘CANCELLED’ in the tracker and will disappear from the tracker after a year. Withdrawal makes your manuscript available for resubmission in other journals because the process helps unlink your work from our journals.

4.4 Do you check for plagiarism?

We do. All manuscripts are checked for plagiarism before they are published. The software used for this purpose is the popular TURNITIN. We, however, do not like calling it ‘checking for plagiarism’. Instead, we call it ‘originality check’. The word plagiarism to us usually sounds strong. It is the kind of words that imply one is guilty until proven innocent instead of the intended innocent until proven guilty.

We usually accept a similarity index of not more than 25%. The percentage per source in the primary sources section should also not be more than 3%. If you decide to carry out a similarity check before submitting, make sure that you know how to check without submitting the content of your paper for indexing by the TURNITIN software. If you do not take that extra step, the manuscript will return a similarity index of 100% because you will have plagiarized your own work. Because of this alone, we usually highly recommend that you do not pass your manuscript through TURNITIN before submission.

5.0 Peer-Review

5.1 Are EANSO Journals Peer-Reviewed?

Yes, they are. No single manuscript is published by any of our journals before undergoing a thorough peer-review process. The aim of this review process is to make the manuscripts as academic as possible through improving the quality and querying the accuracy of the provided information.

We use the double-blind peer review type. What this means is that the reviewers have no idea who the authors of the manuscripts are and will thus review submissions neutrally whereas the authors have no idea exactly who reviewed their manuscripts and will thus take corrections positively.

Each submission is reviewed by at least 2 reviewers (and a maximum of 5 reviewers) before the aggregate verdict is given. Papers can then either be accepted without corrections, accepted with minor corrections, accepted with major corrections or rejected.

5.2 Are EANSO journals academic?

Yes. All our journals are academic in nature with ISSNs, DOIs, peer-review, academic indexing, archiving and an Editorial Board derived from different institutions from different countries.

5.3 Do your journals have an Editorial Board?

Yes, we do. Because all our journals are scholarly and peer-reviewed, we have an Editorial and Advisory Board to take care of this. The organization is structured in such a manner that allows for a central board that concurrently oversees the publication processes in all the hosted journals. This board is headed by the Editor-in-Chief.

5.4 How much time to complete a review?

This depends on a number of factors that include the quality of your submission, the availability of reviewers for your genre and the review speed of individual reviewers. On average, however, the time can range from 2 weeks to 6 weeks.

5.5 My work is very urgent, can you help?

Yes, but on very rare occasions. Otherwise, everyone will be submitting their work with the urgency tag. We understand that our authors sometimes face a publish or perish kind of situation and is thus part of our mission to help them out. Be sure to prepare the best quality manuscript in such cases to ensure that it goes through reviews and is accepted with either minor corrections or no corrections at all. To discourage scholars from this, we usually apply a fee of 25 USDs that should be paid together with the publication fee.

6.0 Journals Indexing

6.1 Do you have ISSNs?

Yes, we do. You can find them in the published articles. ISSNs are a must for any serial publications and help during the indexing and the retrieval of published articles.

6.2 Do you assign DOIs to manuscripts?

Yes, we assign DOIs as our primary articles' identifiers. The East African Nature and Science Organization (EANSO) is a member of Crossref. Crossref members have DOI prefixes and can therefore deposit and update metadata for their publications.

6.3 Where are your journals indexed?

Our journals are automatically indexed by more databases than we can keep track of. These include BASE, CrossRef, WorldCat, PlumX, DataCite, Google Scholar, Dissemin, Lens, Scilit, Fatcat, Microsoft Academic and Scinapse. We are working towards adding more databases to the list before the end of the year.

6.4 How do I find my publication after it has been published?

You will be informed about this after the article has been published. You can however easily type the title of the article in search engines and you will get the publication as part of the search results. It, however, takes about 2 weeks after publication for your submission to be adequately indexed and searchable.

6.5 Why can’t find my publication on Google Scholar?

The main reason would be that your manuscript was published recently and is still being indexed by the databases we deposit our metadata to. Recently in this context means less than 2 weeks ago. If you are still not able to search for your paper online and a month has passed, please contact the Editor in Chief about the same. We shall take the necessary action that will ensure the reindexing of your article.

7.0 Fees and Payment

7.1 How much will it cost to publish with EANSO Journals?

It depends on the specific journal that you are interested in and medium of publication that you want. It costs between 55 US Dollars and 190 US Dollars for online publication. Authors interested in getting the printed hardcopy of the issues their papers are published in pay an extra 60 US Dollars. You can read about the applicable fees for more information.

7.2 Are there fee waivers that can be given?

Unfortunately, no. As you can see from the previous section, the publication fee is already quite low. The reason for this is that part of the fee is paid for by the Knowledge is Fun Initiative which seeks to encourage African scholars to publish their work in Africa. There are however very rare occasions where some authors have part or all the fee waivered. This is especially true for authors that make a commitment to share our journals and attract more authors for our hosted journals.

7.3 When should the payment be made?

You should only make payment after you have been notified that the manuscript has been accepted for publication. In the notification letter, there is usually adequate information on how to make the payment. Any payment made prior to the notification is a risk because chances are your submission might be rejected and the payment will then need to be reversed.

7.4 How do I make the payment?

Payment can be made through either Paypal, Mpesa, EazzyPay and direct bank deposit. Detailed information on this is usually available in the Tracker after a submission is made and a tracking code is assigned.

7.5 How do I check if the payment was successful?

You can simply do this by visiting our Manuscripts Tracker and inputting the respective tracking code. If the payment is successful, the visa budge will be green in colour and there will be a green tick and below the budge. If you make payment and this does not happen, please contact the Editor in Chief for clarification.

7.6 What is the payment deadline?

We do not have a payment deadline. Authors can make payment at their earliest convenience after the manuscript has been accepted for publication. You should however notify the Editor in Chief about the day you intend to make the payment because sometimes taking too long to make payment may be seen as a silent withdrawal.

8.0 Copyright, Archiving and Privacy

8.1 What copyrights are assigned to publications?

The peer-reviewed articles published by all of our hosted journals are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and the owner of the rights is the author(s) for the respective articles.

Whereas you are free to adapt and share the individual articles published in this journal, you must always give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

8.2 Are there any archiving arrangements?

Yes, there are two main digital archiving policies currently in use for all of our hosted journals. These are CLOCKSS and LOCKSS. This ensures that the articles published by any of our hosted journals will be available forever.

8.3 Can I share the publication on other platforms?

Yes, you can. However, this should only be after the publication process is over and the publication letter and certificates have been issued. We encourage our authors to share their works widely within their circles and invite friends over to download, read and cite their work. You are also free to submit the publications to institutional repositories and other scholarly profiles.

8.4 What is your privacy statement?

We hate spamming just like you do. Therefore, we only use the information you give us for the sole purpose of creating adequate metadata for your submission. We will only contact you when it is absolutely relevant and necessary.