Moving through Production
Congratulations, your article has been accepted!
When you are notified, your editor sends you permission forms and information about your article's first publication steps—posting on the Leonardo Just Accepted (JA) page of The MIT Press website and making arrangements for it to be an Open Access (OA) article. You must return the signed permission forms (Publication Agreement, Image Release Form; see Forms) before your material can be posted to JA. For more information about JA and OA, see Publish.
The next step requires some patience, as your article is put in the queue for print publication with other accepted articles. Please note that it may take two to three years from your article's acceptance date to publish it in print. We are working on ways to improve the time between acceptance and final publication and hope that the JA early publication step satisfies publishing requirements for most authors.
You are notified by your editor when your article is assigned to an issue approximately six months before the final publication date, but one month before your involvement is required. The following sections explain what to expect during the editorial and production stages.
Edit and Review
The editor sends your manuscript to a copyeditor who performs the following tasks:
- Edit the language for clarity and adherence to Leonardo's editorial house style, referencing the Chicago Manual of Style, in general, and checking spelling, punctuation and grammar.
- Look deeply and globally at the manuscript to find inconsistencies and identify problem areas.
- Ensure that the manuscript is at the length specified by the article type (including number of figures).
- Ensure that references and notes conform to formats outlined in the Manuscript Guidelines.
- Ensure that figures are referenced in the manuscript properly and that captions include complete attributions as outlined in the Manuscript Guidelines and specified on signed Image Release Forms from copyright holders.
- Embed queries directly in the manuscript for you when an edit may require your special attention or when passages are unclear and need your clarification.
Examples: [QA: Have we interpreted your meaning correctly in this paragraph?], [QA: Please clarify your meaning here.]
After the edited manuscript is reviewed by Leonardo editors who may resolve queries from the copyeditor or add more, you receive it for review and are requested to return it to your editor within 1–2 weeks. All corrections or changes to your manuscript must be made at this time because you will not have the opportunity to review your manuscript again before publication. For this reason, we strongly encourage you to do the following:
- Read the entire manuscript—including references, notes and captions—carefully for typographical errors as well as for errors in meaning and syntax.
- Answer all queries from the editors. If queries are left unresolved, your editor will return the manuscript to you for clarification.
- Mark all of your changes to the manuscript with brackets directly in the document OR use MS Word's tracked changes feature. Do not submit a clean version that incorporates your changes without indication of where changes were made or use MS Word's commenting feature. The editor must be able to see easily where you have made changes to the manuscript.
Once you review the manuscript and resolve all queries, return the reviewed materials, including any requested revised art files, to your editor via email.
Design and Layout
Leonardo editors review your returned manuscript and prepare the final manuscript and art files for submission to MIT Press for design and layout. This preparation stage takes approximately 2–3 weeks for an entire issue. After an issue's manuscript and art are submitted, the production coordinator at MIT Press and a Leonardo editor coordinate the work of compositors and proofreaders to finalize pages and submit them to the printer. The design and layout stage takes approximately 3 months before files are sent to the printer.
Manufacturing and Web Preparation
MIT Press coordinates the printing, binding and delivery of journals as well as the posting of PDFs to its website and to other online databases.
Supplemental Materials and Follow-up
Though you do not participate during the design, layout and manufacturing stages, your involvement in other matters is requested.
Leonardo's editorial assistant contacts you to confirm your intention of submitting supplemental materials to your article (audio, video, additional images, appendixes, etc.) to be published on the MIT Press website. If you have not yet submitted supplemental materials or the materials you have submitted are not complete, you are asked to complete the process (see Supplemental Materials) now. We work with you to arrange the posting of supplemental files on the MIT Press website.
Our editorial assistant also contacts you to request confirmation of your physical address to forward to MIT Press. If you are the lead author, MIT Press will send a print copy of the journal directly to you once it is available. Lead and coauthors receive PDFs of the final article. Additional copies of the issue may be purchased from the MIT Press (journals-cs@mit.edu) at 40% off the regular price.