Instructions to BBS Commentators

Articles that have been accepted for publication in BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (BBS) have been judged by 5-8 referees to be appropriate for Open Peer Commentary, the special service provided by BBS to investigators in psychology, neuroscience, behavioral biology and cognitive sciences who wish to solicit multiple responses from an international group of fellow specialists within and across the BBS disciplines to a particularly significant and controversial piece of work.

If you have just been formally invited to submit a commentary we would greatly appreciate your replying by email to bbs@soton.ac.uk WITHIN 3 DAYS to let us know whether or not you will be able to contribute a commentary. If there are additional commentators you wish to recommend for this article, please note them in your email, together with their email address.

1. Please email us within 3 days, indicating whether you wish to submit a commentary.
   
   
2. Before preparing your commentary, please read carefully the full Instructions for Authors and Commentators as well. You may also find it helpful to examine a recent issue of BBS.
   
   
3. Email is now the medium by which BBS transfers and processes all of its material, from the first draft of the target article, through open peer commentary, to the author's response and final publication. We now no longer process hard copies (with their associated snail-mail delays), so these no longer need to be sent. Instead, and in order to facilitate the time-consuming and complex process of Open Peer Commentary (with up to 150 active commentaries at any one time), we now archive online drafts of the submitted commentaries on a hidden BBS website, accessible only to the target article authors.

   Consequently, commentaries can only be accepted in the following format:
   

   DOUBLE-SPACED text-only with line-breaks (.txt).
   FIGURES should be separate (.gif or .jpg) and equations
   should be in text or TeX. Send to: bbs@soton.ac.uk
   

   In addition, please make sure your commentary has ALL of the following (in this order, please):
   

   1. THE NAME OF THE AUTHOR(S) OF THE TARGET ARTICLE
   2. AN INDEXABLE AND INFORMATIVE COMMENTARY TITLE
   

   FOR ALL AUTHORS OF THE COMMENTARY:
   

   3. FULL NAME(S)
   4. INSTITUTIONAL ADDRESS(S),
   5. EMAIL ADDRESS(ES)
   6. HOME PAGE URL(S) where available
   

   7. 60 word ABSTRACT
   8. MAIN TEXT (~1000 words)
   9. ALPHABETICAL REFERENCE LIST (APA STANDARD)
   

4. BBS's rigorous timetable constraints (requiring the coordination of target articles, commentaries, and authors' responses within the publishing queue) make it impossible for us to process follow-up drafts of commentaries. Please make sure what what you submit is the carefully checked final draft to which you wish the author to respond; second thoughts will require removing your commentary from the queue and holding it over for a later issue. (Small nonsubstantive corrections, not affecting the author's response, may be possible at a later stage, when you are sent the edited copy to review, but not before.)
   

5. Commentaries should be limited to ONE THOUSAND WORDS (references included). Please do not devote the limited space in your commentary to recounting the contents of the target article. Portions of commentaries redundant with the target article or with other accepted commentaries may have to be deleted by the editor. (When commentaries duplicate one another, priority will be assigned in terms of order of receipt.) BBS also reserves the right to edit commentaries for relevance and style. In the interest of speed, commentators will only be sent the edited copy for review when there have been major editorial changes. If necessary, commentaries will be formally refereed.
   
   
6. Please provide an INFORMATIVE, INDEXABLE TITLE for your commentary. As many commentators will address the same general topic, your title should be a distinctive one that reflects the gist of your specific contribution and that is suitable for the kind of keyword indexing used in modern bibliographic retrieval systems. With around 150 active commentaries at any one time, it is also extremely helpful to us if you indicate at the very top of your commentary the name of the target-article authors on whom your are commenting. (There is no need to cite the entire target article, just the name of the authors will do.)
   

7. Your commentary must include an ABSTRACT (of ABOUT 60 WORDS), summarising as specifically as possible the content of your contribution.
   

8. Please provide your (i) FULL INSTITUTIONAL ADDRESS, your (ii) EMAIL ADDRESS and your (iii) WORLD WIDE WEB HOME-PAGE URLs, as well as those of your commentary co-authors.
   

9. Commentaries must be submitted by EMAIL as DOUBLE-SPACED text-only with line-breaks (.txt). Figures should be accompanying .gif or .jpg files; equations should be in text of TeX.
   

   Please email this to bbs@soton.ac.uk
   

With many thanks for cooperation in this project.

Stevan Harnad,
Editor Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton
Highfield, Southampton
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

bbs@cogsci.soton.ac.uk
phone: +44 703 594-583
fax: +44 703 593-281

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs
ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/
gopher://gopher.princeton.edu/11/.libraries/.pujournals