Editorial Procedures and Notes for Authors

Editorial policy

The mission of LRRD is to:

• Provide a forum for exchange of information pertaining to sustainable use of natural renewable resources in integrated farming systems in the tropics and sub-tropics.
• Assist scientists in developing countries to prepare their research findings  for publication.
• Disseminate relevant research results rapidly, and in easily assimilable format, by making maximum use of electronic communication media

To this end the journal publishes both full-length papers and short communications (posters) describing the results of research that relate to the theme of sustainable rural development. Guidelines  for the preparation of  papers and posters are given in the section on Notes for Authors.

Submitting papers and posters to LRRD

Papers and posters should be sent by E-mail or on diskette to the Senior Editor (trpreston@email.com). If acknowledgement is not received within one week (in the case of E-mail) then authors should send a reminder to the Senior Editor with details of the file names and dates sent. The papers can be written with the aid of any of the principal word processing software programs and if sent as e-mail should be as attachments or "compressed and UUENCODED" files.   Further details are given in "notes for authors".

Editing papers for LRRD

Rene Sansoucy is now assistant editor with specific responsibilities to share with the Senior Editor (T R Preston) in:

• The initial screening, pre-editing and formatting of papers prior to their restricted distribution to the members of the editorial committee who will comment on the suitability of the paper for publication in LRRD
• Communication with authors regarding proposed changes to papers in the light of editors' comments
• The final editing of papers when each issue of the journal is closed and the definitive version in "html" format is prepared

A editorial committee is formed whose responsibility is:

• To receive (restricted circulation during one week to members of editorial committee) and assess all submitted papers to LRRD and to report within one week if they consider a paper to be unsuitable. The decision will be communicated immediately to the authors and editors.
  
• To review papers for technical content and to send their comments and suggestions to the other members of the editorial committee (a list-server for the editors has been established to facilitate this task) regarding technical content of papers and ways in which the interpretation and presentation of the data might be improved.

• The members of this committee are:

• T R Preston (Senior Editor: tpreston@hcm.fpt.vn)
• Rene Sansoucy, France (Assistant Editor: rene_sansoucy@csi.com)
• Mauricio Rosales, Colombia (mauro@cipav.org.co)
• Andrew Speedy, UK (andrew.speedy@fao.org)
• Hanne Hansen, Denmark (hanne.hansen@ihh.kvl.dk
• Jorge Combellas, Venezuela (jcombell@telcel.net.ve)
• Frands Dolberg, Denmark (frands@mail1.stofanet.dk)
• Christophe Dalibard, France (cdalibard@hotmail.com)
• Steven Lukefahr, USA (s-lukefahr@tamuk.edu)

Editorial Procedure

The editing procedure consists of three stages:

Stage 1: Receipt of paper by Senior and Assistant Editors who do initial editing and format the paper in HTML

Stage 2: The papers are posted on the WWW but access is restricted to members of the editorial committee. The editorial committee have one week during which they give their opinion on acceptance (or otherwise) of the paper for publication in LRRD.

Stage 3: Papers approved by the editorial committee are made available for widespread access (linkages are made from the LRRD Home Page). Within 2 weeks, editors and readers send comments which the Senior Editor (or Assistant Editor) convey to authors according to relevance.

Stage 4: When 10 papers have been received and posted on the Internet, and a reasonable time has elapsed for comments to be received (2-3 weeks), the definitive version of each issue is finalized and published on the LRRD Home Page in  HTML format.

In this way the basic information in the articles is immediately available to interested readers who can enter into an interactive dialogue with authors, for exchange of information, and to the editors for any proposed amendments to the paper. It is believed that this "transparency" is an improvement on the traditional system of using "anonymous" referees who are not always completely objective and impartial, especially when the research emanates from developing countries.

Responsibility for posting the pre-publication papers on the Internet Home Page of LRRD and later the edited final HTML version, is with CIPAV (Nick Waltham and Hector Osorio)

Notes for Authors

The principle tools for publishing the journal are now: Corel Office (Word Perfect 7 or 8), Lotus 123 and Microsoft Office (MS Word and Excel). These are the preferred formats for receiving papers and posters..

Authors should examine carefully recent papers and posters in the journal and follow the style currently in use. Where possible, please always supply the original spreadsheets and data which were used to produce graphics in the papers, since this allows us to produce a uniform look and maintain the quality of the finished journal. Likewise, if you have tabulated data in your paper, please format it using a table, and not tabs and spaces since tables are very well supported in HTML format. References should be set up with minimum punctuation but maximum detail of the actual citation. Abbreviations of journal titles should not be used.

PLEASE use the Spell-Check and ensure that references in the text are in the reference list and vice versa. An easy way to check this latter point is to print the reference list and then from the beginning of the text to use the "FIND" command and type "19". This will locate all the references assuming you have cited correctly the source including the date.

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