Compositionality

The open-access journal for the mathematics of composition

Information for Authors

The acceptance criteria for manuscripts—correctness, significance, and clarity—are detailed in the Editorial Policies.

Manuscripts must include a short abstract, and bibliographic references should be listed alphabetically at the end of the paper. It is recommended that authors have their manuscripts proof-read by colleagues before submission, to weed out typos, incomplete sentences, inconsistent notation, and so on. Manuscripts displaying carelessness may be returned without review.

As Compositionality is a member of Crossref, all references to works that have a DOI must be hyperlinked. Crossref DOIs should always be displayed as a full URL link in the form “https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxx and should not be preceded by “doi:” or “DOI:”. Direct links to the publisher’s website are not sufficient. See https://doi.org/10.13003/5jchdy for further information.

Once accepted, copy-edited manuscripts are required to be typesetted in LaTeX, using the Compositionality LaTeX class, which you can find here. An overleaf template for this LaTeX class may be found here.

Compositionality is an arXiv-overlay journal. This means the published version of each paper must be uploaded to the arXiv. We also host a local copy of the published version on this website, and links are provided in both directions to ensure it is easy to verify editorial approval. Subsequent updates to arXiv are permitted (and strongly encouraged in case of errata) but do not automatically obtain editorial approval. If the latest arXiv version and the local Compositionality-hosted version of the paper diverge, the local version will be considered the official published version.

We ask authors to sign our consent to publish agreement. In particular, this agreement licenses each manuscript under the Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 license (CC-BY 4.0).

Submission procedure

Authors submit manuscripts to Compositionality through Scholastica, a website which manages our peer review process. They will need to create a Scholastica user account.

We recommend that our authors first upload their manuscripts to the arXiv. To submit an arXiv paper, all that is required is:

  • an arXiv ID number, and
  • a contact email for the corresponding author.

Note that, even if updated on arXiv, the manuscript will be evaluated only on the arXiv version at the time of submission. 

Submissions may also include supporting files (such as code, data sets, computation outputs, or software tutorials), and suggestions for choice of handling editor and reviewers. Please use the reviewer suggestion box in the Scholastica submission form for all peer review preferences, including editor preferences.

Manuscripts may be also submitted directly to Compositionality through Scholastica without prior arXiv upload. Manuscripts submitted in this way may be anonymised, and the authors of such manuscripts will not be made known to any reviewers.

Authors are required to have the permission of all co-authors and other right holders to pursue publication of the work in Compositionality, and manuscripts may not be published or submitted for publication at any other venue.

Submit a paper

Typesetting guidelines

Accepted papers must be typeset using the Compositionality article template and follow the guidelines below.

Metadata.

  • Add the correct acceptance date.
  • Add ORCIDs to author names.
  • Format the bibliography consistently. For instance, venues and author names should be always written in the same way.
  • Provide the full address of your affiliation, including your department, whenever possible.

Format

  • Use the latest versions of the Compositionality template and the logo.
  • Remove unnecessary LaTeX packages or packages that may cause compatibility issues. Do not change the default font.
  • Check that there are no overfull hbox warnings (i.e., content overflowing in the right margin) and no bad line or page breaks.
  • Use correct spacing. For instance, use "i.e.\ " instead of simply "i.e. ".
  • Reference sections, theorems, definitions, etc with a hyperlink. When they are used as proper names, i.e. followed by a cross-reference, they should appear with a capital letter, a non breaking space before the cross-reference, and no abbreviations.
  • Check that all your internal cross-references are working properly.
  • Any proof that ends with an equation should avoid placing the QED symbol on a newline. Place the QED symbol at the end of the equation using \qedhere.
  • Avoid leftover comments: remember that all the paper sources will be made publicly available on arXiv.
  • Acknowledgements should appear at the end of the introduction.
  • Appendices should appear before the references.
  • Avoid typos and spelling inconsistencies. You may use a spell checker.
  • Use consistent punctuation at the end of formulas.

LaTeX and ArXiv

  • You may need to add \pdfoutput=1 to the first five lines of your source code to get ArXiv to format it correctly.
  • The template file logo-converted-to.pdf is not automatically generated by ArXiv, and you must provide it.

References.

  • Use BibTeX to manage references and make sure to provide your .bib file on arXiv. The Compositionality LaTeX template may require the use of natbib to format DOIs correctly.
  • Include the DOI of all of the cited papers. Papers that do not have an assigned DOI are the only exception to this rule. DOIs should appear in the form https://doi.org/10.xxxx/xxxxx. Artifacts should be also cited with a DOI when possible.
  • Avoid links to webpages that may go offline. Archive your references using the Internet Archive.

These typesetting guidelines are partially based on those of Logical Methods in Computer Science (LMCS) and the work of our volunteering typesetters. We want to thank them for this effort.