Information for Authors

In an ordinary journal, there are two points where you deal with your manuscript: before submitting it, and after it has been accepted and you revise it using the responses from the reviewers. In the ETAI system, by contrast, there are three such points:

Before submitting it
At the end of the Review Discussion period, where you have a chance to revise the manuscript before it is sent to the referees
After the article has been accepted by the referees.

Changes to the contents of the article are normally done at the second point. In principle, the referees should only return a "yes" or "no" decision, and then no changes of contents are needed at point three. However, it is also possible that referees make additional requests or suggestions for modifications at point three.

Changes of layout and formatting may be needed in order for the accepted article to go into its ETAI journal issue. In order to assure the uniform appearance of those issues, there is a standardized Latex style file that we recommend to use. Articles prepared using e.g. Word or Framemaker can of course also be submitted for reviewing, but then one has to take special care when the article has been accepted in order to obtain the right graphical appearance.

Putting the article on-line before submission

ETAI's public reviewing scheme requires that every submitted article must be available over the Internet in a secure fashion, so that it remains on-line in a tamper-free way. There are three ways of arranging this:

First Publication Archives: The article is published (without review) by an organization that commits to keeping it on-line for a long period (at least 20 years) and in a secure way.
First Publication Servers: The article is posted as a departmental technical report that has a special backup agreement with a First Publication Archive.
Posted Copy of Printed Article: The article has already been published in a conference proceedings; the author puts a copy of it on-line on his or her home page on the web, and some safety measures are taken to verify that the on-line version is identical to the one in the conference proceedings.

Here's what you have to do as an author in each of these cases:

First Publication Archives: Get in touch with one of the ETAI approved FPA's, and arrange to have your article published there. If your own university or institute has its own FPA, then talk to them, otherwise contact the ETAI secretariat for assistance.
The FPA method is easy to use if your article has been prepared using Latex, since then it is only a question of reformatting it with the ETAI style file (plus making those corrections that may be necessary because of the change of linewidth etc). If you have prepared your manuscript using Word or Framemaker, or if you have it in HTML form, then the matter is slightly more complicated but it can still be done.
First Publication Servers: This method can be used if your department or institute has an organized system for posting technical reports on-line on the Internet. It is required that those responsible for the on-line report library have made a simple agreement with the ETAI, or that they make one when your article is submitted, but this is an easy matter. See the "Rules for FPS" below.
In this case, you can choose the format required or recommended for the tech-report series, as long as it uses a reasonable size (A4 or American letter size paper). You are also welcome to use the ETAI style file if you wish; this has the advantage that the article is then ready for ETAI journal publication after acceptance.
Posted Copy of Printed Article: This method can be used if you are submitting an article that has already been published in a widely available conference proceedings, and you can also put it on-line (e.g. on your web page), and if it is consistent with your agreement with the publisher of the conference proceedings that you do so. In this case, you have to sign a simple statement confirming that these conditions apply, and that you will keep the article on-line at least for the duration of the reviewing period.

You are welcome to use whichever method is the most convenient for you, as long as the preconditions for that method are valid. However, when choosing how to publish the article (in the sense of putting it on line, "making it public"), you may also take into account what will happen down the line.

Revising the article before refereeing

Hopefully, the review discussion has given you valuable feedback that you would like to take into account for improving the article before it is sent to the referees. Do as follows with the revised article, depending on how it was first published:

First Publication Archives: The FPA will publish the revised article, and both the original and the revised version will be retained on-line. See an FPA cover such as http://www.ep.liu.se/ea/cis/1997/006/ for an example of how this gets to look.
First Publication Servers: Check with your departmental tech report service whether they have a mechanism for posting revised version of previously posted articles, similar to the FPA way of doing it. If so, use it, otherwise use the PCPA mechanism (next item).
Posted Copy of Printed Article: Post the revised article on your web page, using an appearance that is reminiscent of how the FPA does this.

Operations on the article after refereeing

If the article is not accepted, then the story ends here. If it is accepted (congratulations!) then first of all, if the referees have suggested additional changes to the article, you must of course deal with that.

Then, the article has to be turned into the form required for inclusion in the ETAI journal. This requires that there exists an FPA published version of the article which conforms 100 percent to the ETAI journal appearance. Technically speaking, the ETAI journal contents are obtained from the FPA published version by removing the first few pages, and inserting the remaining pages into the ETAI volume. This operation is done on the postscript level.

To see how this works, please compare the postscript version of Liberatore's article as published by the FPA (click link above) with the same article on pages 16-38 of ETAI volume 1. You will notice that from the FPA published article (revised version) the first pages have been removed and the remaining pages have been renumbered in order to arrive at the journal version.

If you have used the FPA method for the article all along, and if you used the standard ETAI style file, then this editing operation is trivial: the ETAI secretariat picks up the article's file and uses it. In all other cases, the article has to be republished by an FPA and using correct style.

If the article exists in a Latex version but under another style file (for example, becaused you used your local tech report repository and they require another style) then it's a question of reformatting using the ETAI style file. If it exists only in Word or Framemaker versions, then there are two possibilities:

Find a Word or Framemaker style file that gives exactly the Latex-like appearance. We have not been able to accomplish this yet, but it may still be possible.
Convert the article to Latex. Probably the easiest way to do that is to obtain an HTML version of the article from the formatter, and to use an HTML-to-Latex translator combined with manual correction. The ETAI secretariat has some software of this kind, and will be able to help (for the foreseeable future).

Even though the ETAI secretariat can help, your participation will of course also be needed in order to make sure that no mistakes are introduced within this reformatting process.

Formal rules for FPA's, FPS's, and PCPA arrangements

The ETAI is organized in such a way that publication (in the sense of "making public", "putting online") is a separate layer of activity. The reviewing and refereeing activities will not deal with articles submitted on paper, only with articles that already exist at URL's in a steady manner. It has therefore been necessary for the ETAI to define some groundrules for each of those alternatives, in order to guarantee that the process functions correctly. The following are those sets of rules. Please consult your area editor or the ETAI secretariat if you should need additional information.

	Rules for First Publication Archives (FPA:s)
	Rules for First Publication Servers (FPS:s)
	Rules for Posted Copies of Printed Articles (PCPA:s)

Copyright conditions

First Publication Archives let the author retain the copyright for his or her article, but require the author(s) to sign a publication agreement that regulates the FPA's right to keep the article on line. For accepted articles, the ETAI needs a similar release from the authors in order to keep the published variant (subset of pages) online. In all cases, the author must be careful not to later transfer copyright to a third party in a way that violates the agreement with the FPA or with ETAI.

Last revision: February 24, 1998.