Blog Submission Guidelines for Authors

Submission and Publication

• By making a submission here, you agree to BSSw.io content licensing terms.
• Blog articles appear here: https://bssw.io/blog_posts and are also announced in the monthly BSSw email digest (https://bssw.io/pages/receive-our-email-digest). You are certainly welcome to draw attention to your article through social media and other opportunities.
• The BSSw site is backended by a GitHub repository, and articles are produced in Markdown. If you’re comfortable with git and GitHub, feel free to give us a pull request with the draft of your article.
  • A skeleton blog article that you can copy and customize is: https://github.com/betterscientificsoftware/betterscientificsoftware.github.io/blob/main/Articles/Blog/BlogArticleSkeletonA.md
  • You PR should add your article as a new file in the blog directory: https://github.com/betterscientificsoftware/betterscientificsoftware.github.io/tree/main/Articles/Blog
  • Please use a filename of the form YYYY-MM-keywords.md where YYYY and MM are the expected year and month of publication (we’ll update that if needed) and keywords are a few keywords indicating the topic or title of your article (to distinguish it from others published the same month).
• Or of you prefer, you could instead provide text in some convenient format (e.g., MSWord) via email. Some authors prefer that approach.
• We can work with you on the timeline. We sometimes schedule articles to come out in conjunction with some event – in advance, or as follow-up. But in the absence of a specific target, we’ll work it into our pipeline. Publication dates sometimes need to be revised, since we have multiple blog articles in flight.
• We like to allow a minimum of three weeks from draft to publication, so that we have time for our review and technical editing process and also work together with our designers to develop an accompanying image (optional).

Content

• Length is flexible. We generally want to keep these as a light read. We suggest length of 500-1,500 words, though both shorter and longer may be perfectly reasonable for some topics. You can peruse past blog postings to get a feel for what we’ve published in the past.
• In the spirit of a “light read”, we ask you to limit your use of figures, tables, and links.
• We request a brief bio for each of the authors
  • 50-100 words, in paragraph form, can include hyperlinks
  • Mention your current position, employer, a bit about your background
  • Include info about your interests related to software productivity and sustainability
  • Anything else you want to mention
• We use GitHub profile information (particularly photo and affiliations) to construct our Site Contributors page: https://bssw.io/items/authors/. Please let us know your GitHub username. We encourage you to include a photo and up-to-date institutional affiliation in your GitHub profile.
• At the top of your article, we can include a hero image, which is also used as a background to highlight it as the newest article in the list of blog postings. This image is optional, but if you have ideas for an appropriate image please let us know. Many blog articles are published without hero images. Guidelines for the hero image:
  • wide rectangular shape; we can crop an image to the required size (1125 x 432 pixels)
  • the design brief for our site focuses on three types of imagery for hero:
    • stock images (we have access to a number of stock photo libraries),
    • data visualizations, or
    • people in trainings, workshops, conferences, or other settings
  • “hero” images should contain no bold text; incidental text (in diagrams, for instance) is OK.

Contacts

The primary Editorial Board contacts for blog articles are currently:

• David Bernholdt bernholdtde@ornl.gov
• Lois Curfman McInnes curfman@anl.gov

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us if you have questions.