The Code4Lib Journal (C4LJ) exists to foster community and share information among those interested in the intersection of libraries, technology, and the future.
Share your ideas and experiences with your colleagues. Please submit article proposals via our online submission form. If you have completed a draft of the article, you may indicate this in the “abstract” field of the submission. The Coordinating Editor of the current issue may then contact you for the full draft for consideration along with your proposal. If you have questions regarding the deadlines for article submission and the timing for publication, you can consult the Code4Lib Journal Deadlines page. Please note that submissions are subject to rejection or postponement at any point in the publication process as determined by the Code4Lib Journal’s editorial committee.
C4LJ encourages creativity and flexibility, and the editors welcome submissions across a broad variety of topics that support the mission of the journal. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
* Practical applications of library technology (both actual and hypothetical)
* Technology projects (failed, successful, or proposed), including how they were done and challenges faced
* Case studies
* Best practices
* Reviews
* Comparisons of third party software or libraries
* Analyses of library metadata for use with technology
* Project management and communication within the library environment
* Assessment and user studies
C4LJ strives to promote professional communication by minimizing the barriers to publication. While articles should be of a high quality, they need not follow any formal structure. Writers should aim for the middle ground between blog posts and articles in traditional refereed journals. Where appropriate, we encourage authors to submit code samples, algorithms, and pseudo-code. For more information, visit C4LJ’s Article Guidelines or browse articles from the earlier issues published on our website: http://journal.code4lib.org.
Send in a submission. Your peers would like to hear what you are doing.
Submission of Articles
When a proposal has been accepted, authors will submit drafts to the assigned editor in a format likely to be widely readable (with a strong preference for Google Docs). The article should be accompanied by brief “about the author(s)” metadata. We may request the submission in a different format if we have trouble with yours.
Please note that articles published in C4LJ must be licensed by their authors under a US CC-BY license. We recommend but do not require that any included code also be given an open source license suitable for code. Authors are free to publish articles anywhere else in addition to C4LJ.
By submitting the proposal you accept that the email and full name of authors will appear with your submission, and that all named authors are consenting to this. If your article involves the utilization of individuals’ personal data (such as but not limited to email addresses, unique identifiers, borrowing history – a potentially useful definition is available from the US Department of Labor) it is not currently eligible for inclusion in Code4Lib. The editorial committee is undertaking an audit of internal editorial practices in order to prevent accidental exposure of personally identifiable information.
Note: We cannot accept files with the anticipation we host them as attachments to the article, and encourage use of open formats in linked files.
For more information, see our Article Guidelines and the Journal’s Process and Structure.
