Editorial Guidelines for Uploading Notes

[Mao]

Hi AN'ers,

ATARNotes.com has been hosting the user-submitted repository of notes for some time now. Previously, the submission/approval process has been handled by the admins. Recently, this has been expanded to include national moderators to accomodate the increased number of submissions, and we have therefore drawn up the following set of quality-control guidelines for approving/rejecting new submissions.

Note that these guidelines are not rules, they are not enforced with an iron fist. Almost all of the uploaded notes are of excellent quality and are valued resources to the community. These guidelines are given here simply for the sake of transparency.

We thank you for your continued contributions. Keep uploading!

Cheers,
M.


Editorial Guidelines

• Quality
• Must be legible (preferably typed, though neat handwriting is acceptable).
• Must use good English (occasional spelling/grammatical errors can be overlooked, but poorly written notes will not be accepted).
• Factual accuracy: where possible, editors will review notes relevant to areas of the individual editor's expertise to examine the accuracy of the notes.
• Must be 'standalone'. The reader should be able to read notes without referring to or being redirected to another source of information.
• Comprehensiveness: a reasonable attempt should be made to cover all major aspects of the topic of the work. This does not mean the work must contain absolutely everything that is related, but insufficiency of key areas may lead to rejection.
   
• Quantity
• Length: the work must have a sufficiently significant volume. For certain topics, this may be a few paragraphs or a diagram that fits on one page (e.g. notes on a very specific topic); for other topics, this may require several pages (e.g. summary of an area of study).
• Concision: conversely, the work must not be so verbose as to render it useless. For example, the summary of a chapter in a textbook should be concise and much shorter than the actual chapter. Overly detailed notes, whilst representing significant amounts of work, are often not useful to other readers due to the sheer volume of information.
   
• Attribution
• Work derived from other work (such as textbook, website, etc) must properly acknowledge sources. Use of proper referencing styles, e.g. the Harvard referencing style, is not required, but adequate attribution to sources must be given to work that is not original.
• Work by other people (i.e. the uploader is not the author) must clearly state the original author and provide written consent from the original author.
• Submitted work must not be illegal copyright material.

Submission Process

• Ownership
• Notes submitted to and published by ATARNotes are placed in public domain. The author holds copyright and may request the removal of uploaded materials at any point (by sending a PM to a national moderator or administrator), but ATARNotes takes no responsibility for any cached copies hosted by other content providers such as Google.
• ATARNotes takes no responsibility for the distribution of uploaded notes via other channels (e.g. distribution by another user to another distribution channel without explicit consent of original author).
   
• Correspondence
• Reviewing contents takes time! Please be patient with us.
• If you haven't seen a response in a few weeks, feel free to send us a PM and give us a nudge, though this won't guarantee immediate processing.
• We generally will send a brief response if your submission has been rejected but we feel you have put in a reasonable effort. Feel free to discuss it with us.
• We won't respond to silly submissions or PMs.
   
• Duplication of submissions
• We know that sometimes computer glitches happen, and sometimes you may submit something multiple times. We can deal with that.
• Please do not deliberately submit the same document multiple times. That is spamming. Deliberate spamming could mean a lot of bad things, worst case scenario being the disabling of your account.

Editorial Decisions

• Discretion
• Editorial decisions are at the discretion of the editors. Multiple editorial decisions may be made (possibly in conflict), and these are resolved at the discretion of the editors.
   
• Revocation
• Published notes may be removed from public viewing at the discretion of the editors. Of course, we will send out courtesy notices detailing the reason (e.g. contents are no longer relevant to study design).
   
• Grievance
• Users may lodge feedback and complaints via the public feedback function, or privately to the editors.
• Authors may appeal to the editors against an editorial decision, or ask for another editor to review an existing decision. We will handle things fairly, we promise!

Feedback

• Please do not post unnecessarily negative feedback. At the discretion of the moderators, this could result in consequences ranging from limiting your access to the notes to completely banning your account.
• Constructive criticism is always welcome.
• We encourage users to report on the factual accuracy of approved notes in case the editors have missed something

Who are the editors?
Admins and national moderators.