Submission rules
All contributions must be submitted in English. For authors whose native language is not English, it is highly recommended to check the article for linguistic correctness with the help of a professional copy-editor.
Any manuscript submitted to ASK must be an original work that has not been published before. ASK considers unethical the practice of simultaneous submission of the manuscript to another publication, either in English or in another language. All major findings of the manuscript that have been made by the authors themselves, or by their collaborators, and that has been or will be published elsewhere must be clearly identified and specified in a letter announcing manuscript submission to ASK.
Both ghostwriting and guest authorship[1] are regarded by ASK as unethical and the publisher is obliged by Polish law to prevent such manuscripts from appearing in their journal. In this regard, we require two statements in the letter announcing manuscript submission. First, that all parties — institutions or individuals — other than the authors of the manuscript who had significant contribution to this manuscript must be mentioned in an acknowledgement footnote or elsewhere in the manuscript. Second, that all authors had substantial contribution to this article, and no author acts as a guest.
We have a zero tolerance policy for unethical scientific behavior related to publications in Ask: Research and Methods. In any documented case of plagiarism, knowingly unethical data practices, and ghost authorship, the editors of ASK will retract the article and ban the offending authors from publishing in ASK for a minimum of five years.
ASK adheres to a rigorous double-blind reviewing policy and uses anonymous peer reviewers for manuscript evaluation. Remove or rewrite any text that identifies you as the author; when citing your own work, write “Kolczynska (2007) argued that…,” but do not write “I argued that (Kolczynska 2007)….”. Remove any identification of you and your affiliation from the computer file (in the file name, the file’s and document’s properties, history of usage etc.). All contributions are initially reviewed by the Editor and only those that meet editorial and scientific standards, and follow ASK’s scope and aims, will be processed for external review.
The author must prepare a manuscript for blinded review, which consists of two documents. The first document is the text of the article. This document for blinded review must not include the title page, authors’ names or affiliations, or any other identifying information. This document for reviewing must start with a title, an abstract with minimum 150 to maximum 250 words, followed by 3 to 6 key words. The body of this document should consist of the following parts, each starting from the title page: the text of the manuscript, footnotes, references, appendices, tables, charts and graphs. The latter three are optional.
The second document is the manuscript’s cover page containing the title, author’s name and institution and must be enclosed as a separate file. A footnote to the title page containing the acknowledgments, the names and numbers of research grants and any other data that could be used to identify the author must also be placed only in this file. A brief, one-paragraph biographical note must be enclosed for each author describing their current institutional affiliation, research interests, and last publications. Biographical notes must be part of the file containing cover page information.
The authors are responsible for copyright permission when reproducing materials published elsewhere.
Authors retain all rights to work published in ASK. Authors are free to reuse their work and to enter into other agreements as long as they credit the journal as the site of first publication and provide a link to the journal website.
ASK is an Open Access journal co-published by The Ohio State University Libraries and the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences under a Creative Commons
Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0), to allow for certain types of reuse without permission. Authors submitting their work to this journal must agree to apply a CC BY license upon publication.
After publication, the authors receive one copy of the journal.
Manuscript format
All electronic files should be composed in a word processing format. Manuscripts received by ASK that do not adhere to these guidelines may be, at the discretion of the Editor, rejected without further review.
Text must be double spaced with normal margins of 2,5 cm (1 inch), and page size A4. Manuscripts in ‘Letter’ size (8.5 by 11 inch) should not be used. Use a proportional typeface font, like ‘Times New Roman’, 12-point size. The length of the manuscript should not exceed 9,000 words.
Tables must be consecutively numbered: 1, 2, 3, … The title of each table should briefly and accurately identify its content and must be unique for each table. Column headings should be as short as possible. All relevant and important information (e.g. sample size) should be submitted in a note below the table or noted clearly in the text under an easily identifiable heading. Footnotes to table cells should be marked with lower case letters: a, b, c, … Footnotes indicating the significance level should use asterisks (not letters). Each table should start from a new page.
Charts and graphics may be developed under any software and then embedded as picture objects into the manuscript. All charts must be titled and numbered as Figure 1, Figure 2, etc. Place all tables and charts at the end of document and provide clear references to them in the text.
Except in tables, charts and graphs, ASK prefers endnotes to footnotes. Endnotes should be collected after the end of the text, before the references. We remind you to limit the number of footnotes and endnotes.
The references format should follow the APA style (https://apastyle.apa.org). Please attach the DOI numbers, if available.
ASK is funded by the Polish Academy of Sciences, which is a Polish government funded institution, as well as The Ohio State University Libraries. All submissions are absolutely free of charge; authors will never be asked to pay a fee for submission or at any point in the review and publication process. With this policy we maintain the professionalism and integrity of our journal.
Manuscript submission
All articles should be submitted using the editorial system available via the Open Journal Systems platform.
[1] A ‘guest author’ is a person whose name is listed among the authors but who had no significant contribution to the article.