NOTE:
We no longer publish technical and scientific papers in ISB. These guidelines for authors have been left on the site because they are deemed to be of general value for potential authors.

Preparing Copy For Publication In ISB

What we publish in ISB

• Technical and scientific papers - the journal is fully refereed and a highly respected reference publication
  
• Short articles relaying experiences from the field and useful to other information security professionals (these are easy to write and always in demand)
  
• Debate - short letters and articles
  
• News - about companies, products, events, services, etc (very limited space - strictly information security subjects)
  
• Security alerts - news about things that need reacting to by security staff and sysadmins
  
• Reviews - books and other literature

Who can publish in ISB?

The publication is open to all scientists, technicians and other professionals who are active in the field of information security, e.g. CSOs, CISSPs, SysAdmins with information security as their speciality - or e.g. jurists specialising in information security issues. As the leading professional journal in the field, the purpose of ISB is to dissimate information of use and relevance to information security/information assurance practitioners and to further development of the subjects associated with, as well as the progress of, the field.

How to go about it...

If you wish to publish a paper or article in ISB please start by contacting the editor-in-chief by email, , briefly outlining your idea. That will lead to an initial discussion, by email or telephone, in which the best way to proceed is identified. Please do not use a proxy - we do not deal with PR agencies and the like.

We recognise that brilliant technicians are not necessarily born writers, and that not all technicians have English as their native language - but if you are willing to invest time into writing a paper our editors are willing to invest time into getting it right! As an author you will find the editorial process very friendly and supportive - ISB has one and only one purpose: to serve its readers - and the best way to do this includes making sure that the quality of the information presented in the journal is as high as possible, in other words, providing the maximum assistance to authors.

As part of the editorial production and review process you as an author will receive feedback from the highest level of world class expertise available anywhere, an important part of the experience for many authors. A paper typically goes through two or three editorial iterations.

Some practical issues

It makes production easier and less error prone if authors stick to a few practical points (but if they don't we will do what needs to be done).

Firstly, office applications are not made to produce high-quality output to be printed on a press, nor are they geared towards controlling the kind of machines used to produce professional printed output. An important consequence of this is that illustrations should never be mixed with text. Text should contain place-holders for illustrations together with captions but the illustrations should be kept separate.

With regard to text this means that text formatting cannot normally be carried over directly onto production machinery. Thus, the best way to supply text is in a simple ASCII-file with no markup language embedded. If formatting instructions need to be given, this is best done in Rich Text Format. Other text file formats should be avoided (.doc files, for example).

With regard to illustrations popular office applications (e.g. Powerpoint) should be avoided if possible - we normally need to recreate such illustrations from scratch and that is very expensive. Line drawings and similar illustrations should if possible be created in a professional vector-graphics illustration package, e.g. Corel DRAW or Adobe Illustrator. Photos and other bitmaps should be supplied as e.g. TIFF-files, 32-bit CMYK, 300 dpi in the intended reproduction size - the editorial office can furnish more information as required. Graphs from spreadsheets should simply be supplied as spreadsheet files - we can often extract the illustrations in a format which can be printed, directly from spreadsheet applications.

Please note that this advise should be followed insofar as this is convenient for the author because doing so saves production costs and reduces the potential for errors. If it is not convenient then the necessary production steps will be taken here. Inconvenient production considerations is not something we wish allow to interfere with the creative process.

Copyright and all that...

We very rarely publish something which has already been published elsewhere, e.g. on the Internet, unless in a very limited circle, e.g. as a conference presentation, in other words, we require first publication rights.

With regard to copyright we require full and unlimited copyright in all media. To protect our subscribers we require this on an exclusive basis for a period of six months after the publication date. After this period of time authors are free to re-publish in printed media, on their web site, etc. In other words, as an author you regain full (non-exclusive) copyright after a period of six months. In many cases we will even let you use our professionally produced illustrations and lay-out. In special cases we will occasionally allow limited re-publication (e.g. on an intranet) before the six months have expired.

Thank you...

We regard regular publishing as a natural and necessary career activity, and we want to keep our subscription prices as low as possible. For these reasons we do not pay fees for papers - we do however say 'thank you' with a free one-year subscription allowing access to the closed areas of ISB-online, to all authors whose papers are published. So, publishing one paper in ISB every year makes sense both economically and as a career move :-).