Publications For Authors

$\,\,\,\,\,$ (For Authors – For Referees – For Editors)

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This page contains submission instructions and other information for authors who wish to or have submitted work to the nPublications.

Contents

Submission procedure

An author who wishes to submit any material for publication to the Publications of the $n$Lab should go through the following steps:

1. Create the material to be submitted in separate pages on the nLab in the way any $n$Lab pages are created (see nLab HowTo for details).

2. Notify the editorial board of the nPublications about which pages in which precise version (as given in the edit-history of the entry) are to be submitted.

   (The precise version datum is mandatory for a submission to peer-review, as $n$Lab entries are subject to potential perpetual edits.)

It is also possible to submit material for review in the form of a PDF document or arXiv entry, with the understanding that upon acceptance, conversion to nLab page(s) is a precondition for publication.

The submitted material will go through a refereeing process as usual in mathematical journals: specialist referees will be chosen by the editors. If the material is accepted, publication of the material proceeds as follows:

1. The accepted version of the $n$Lab entries is copied over to the write-protected $n$Publications web. (The $n$Lab version of the submitted material remains in place, but is subject to perpetual further edits, as is all material on the $n$Lab.)

2. Hyperlinks are added (ideally by $n$Publications-staff, to the extent that such exists) to the $n$Lab version of the submitted article, pointing to the stable peer-reviewed version published in the $n$Publications. Conversely, the $n$Publications-version is equipped with a link back to the freely editable $n$Lab version.

Formatting for LaTeX submissions

If your submission is in the form of a LaTeX file instead of an $n$Lab page, then, once accepted, this file will be run through an script-software (provided thankfully by Andrew Stacey) which tries to construct an approproiate wiki-page from the source.

Of course this script is not a perfect converter, not yet at least. The output will typically need some further editing by humans (and in the present absence of any actual staff at the $n$Journal, this means in fact that the author himself or herself will mostly have to look after this, with $n$Lab regulars usually offering help).

To smoothen this process, it helps to follow these hints:

• do not use the TeX commands

  \bf \it \rm 

  etc. The script cannot or does not want to handle these. Instead use

  \textbf \textit \textrm

  in text mode and

  \mathbf \mathit \mathrm

  in math mode.

• Beware that the script cannot translate xypic-diagrams. For ways of producing diagrams in the wiki software see at nLab:HowTo – How to draw diagrams and pictures.

(…)

Adding hyperlinks to the published article

A central point of $n$Journal publications is that all the technical keywords of the text are to be hyperlinked to the corresponding entries on the nLab.

There is script, kindly provided by Andrew Stacey, that goes through the page, looks for words that match nlab page titles and tunrs them into hyperlinks.

It’s a perl script, so should run on any modern system (though if you have an old version of perl it might not. My system uses 5.12.3.)

You can download it: script and almost current list of nlab page names (includes redirects).

Call as:

wikilinks.pl -i <input file> -o <output file> [-n <page name file>] [-s <start line>]

The <page name file> defaults to nlab_pagenames in the current directory. Make sure that <output file> does not yet exist as it will be overwritten.

For each word the script finds, you have a choice: (a)ccept, (s)kip, (i)gnore name, (r)edo line, a(l)ways accept, or (q)uit. Hopefully these are all self-explanatory. It will always try to find the longest match, but matches have to be exact so a space in a different place will throw it out. There are some obvious things you should ignore: and, the, and similar. There are also some less obvious ones: section, for example (you’ll see why on the first match). If you quit early, it will have saved everything up to that line so you can resume later at that line by passing a line number to the script to start from (but it will overwrite the output file so you need to save the new bit into a new file and then concatenate them afterwards. Obviously, there are improvements that could be done to this script.)