code4lib journal - mission, format, guidelines

Purpose

Library technologists (developers, programmers, sysadmins, and systems librarians) need better ways to share information both among themselves and with the library community as a whole, including public and technical services staff, library management, and other non-IT specialists. The code4lib journal facilitates technical communication by publishing articles on tools, specs, and challenges in the world of library technology. The journal focuses on showcasing practical hacks, working code, best practices, and implementation issues, and also includes higher-level discussions of large projects or challenges pertaining to information technology in libraries. It is what Roy Tennant calls a "truly technical rag" for libraries.

Format

Articles

The code4lib journal publishes two types of articles:

1. Longer, more formal articles on topics such as large projects, trends, or theoretical issues.
2. Shorter articles on successful or failed projects, calls to action, common mistakes, useful techniques, and actual code.

Issues are formally released every two months, but individual articles may be available prior to the official publication date.

Other Stuff

[What do we want to try to do besides regular articles?]

Editorial Policies

Submission 

Anyone may submit material to be considered for publication in the code4lib journal. The editorial board also reserves the right to solicit submissions from conference presenters, bloggers, and anyone else who has something interesting and useful to say.

Editorial Review 

All articles considered for publication are subject to a two-tiered editorial process:

1. The editorial board receives submissions, solicited and otherwise, and conducts a preliminary review based on the following criteria:
   • usefulness;
   • newness;
   • relevance.
2. Articles that pass the preliminary review are posted to a public wiki for review and comment by the broader community.
3. Authors revise their material as needed based on the input from steps 1 and 2 above.
4. Revised articles are published in a subsequent issue of the journal.

Publication 

New issues are released every two months. 

Articles which have been finalized for publication may be made available as "pre-release" articles prior to their official publication date.

Rights 

[This section needs to be revised and vetted by someone knowledgeable about copyright.]

Authors hold the copyright in their works. Articles are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs2.5 License, which permits reproduction of unaltered copies of articles for non-commercial purposes. Since the author retains copyright, parties interested in other arrangements (such as commercial republication or publication of derivative works) should contact the author to make arrangements.