Author Guidelines
1. The Scope of the Journal
Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace is an open-access interdisciplinary journal publishing articles with a focus on social science related to cyberspace. We publish original work by scientists emphasizing psychology, media studies, communication science, sociology, political science, nursing, ICT security, organizational psychology, and also other disciplines with relevance to psychosocial aspects of cyberspace. We accept submissions of all original research articles as well as theoretical studies and research meta-analyses. We do not accept submissions of essays or non-systematic literature reviews.
2. Review Process
Submitted articles are first reviewed internally by editors to assure their baseline quality and relevance for the journal. In the next step, submissions are subjected to a double-blind peer review by at least two external reviewers (authors and reviewers are anonymous to each other). Reviews are forwarded to authors along with the editor's decision. Invited revisions are sent to the original reviewers for their re-evaluation.
The typical review process takes from 3 to 6 months (average 4 months), but can be longer under special circumstances. See this News post for further information about decisions (e.g., desk reject rates, initial decision length). To avoid editorial rejections, please read editorials How to increase probability of manuscript acceptance and How to get your manuscript accepted where we described typical reasons for editorial rejects and the best practices to get your manuscript accepted.
3. Publication of Accepted Manuscripts
All accepted manuscripts are published as open access articles. Publishing in Cyberpsychology is free of charge (no article processing charge or submission fee).
The papers are typically published within 1 to 3 months since acceptance of the paper.
4. Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement
Cyberpsychology follows the standard for Ethics and Publication Malpractice set by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Authors, reviewers, editors, and publisher are expected to conform to these standards.
To detect possible plagiarism in submitted articles, Cyberpsychology uses the Similarity check by iThenticate.
5. Submissions and Manuscript Preparation
This section summarizes the journal’s requirements regarding the format, structure, and other aspects of the submission. Please go through these instructions carefully. Not adhering to these requirements can lead to a desk rejection of the article without assessing its quality.
5.1. Length
To facilitate the review process and publication clarity, manuscripts should be no longer than necessary. The submissions should be up to 11,000 words, including abstract, references, tables, figures, and footnotes or endnotes (the length does not include appendices).
The length of articles can be exceeded when justified by the authors (e.g., in case of multiple studies, mixed methods, or in a deep qualitative investigation). Journal’s editors will critically review articles exceeding the recommended length. Authors may be asked to shorten the submission before sending it to external reviewers.
5.2. Manuscript structure and citations format
The American Psychological Association (APA) standards is used for publications, both in terms of publication structure (i.e., IMRaD) and citation style. Please follow the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7ed.). Manuscripts that do not follow the required APA style will be rejected directly by editors.
5.3. Reporting statistics
Follow the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7ed.) standards for reporting statistics, such as reporting exact p-values to three decimals, or not using a zero before a decimal when the statistic cannot be greater than 1.
5.4. Submission files
The required format for articles is MS Word. Do not submit your article, or its revision, as a pdf file.
Authors should prepare the following documents. All documents must be in English:
5.4.1. Title page(s) with full author information. This document will not be presented to the reviewers, and should include:
- Manuscript’s title
- All authors’ full names, their affiliations and email addresses, identification of the corresponding author and their full address
- Authors’ contributor roles – please use the relevant roles from the CRediT taxonomy (https://credit.niso.org/)
- The disclosure of interests’ statements
- Short biographical note for each author
- Acknowledgments
5.4.2. Anonymized main text. See the section “Anonymization of the manuscript” below for information on what to anonymize. The document should include:
- Title page(s). The title page should include the title of the article, the abstract, five to eight keywords, and the (anonymized) disclosure of interests. The title should be concise and accurately depict the manuscript’s content. The abstract should be unstructured (i.e., without subtitles), self-explanatory and reflect the study well. It should not exceed 250 words. The abstract should briefly introduce the study’s focus, design, sample, main findings, and its importance. The disclosure of interest should include any conflicts of interest that the authors might have. Please state these in an anonymized fashion in line with the double-blind review process. If the authors do not have any conflicts of interest, please state so (suggested formulation: “The authors do not have any conflicts of interest to report.”).
- The main text. Use Times New Roman font, size 12, with double spacing. The structure of the manuscript should correspond to the APA citation style. The main sections, with Level 1 Heading (bold, centered, title case), are: Introduction, Method, Results, Discussion, and References. Level 2 Heading should be bold, left-aligned, and in title case; Level 3 Headings should be bold italic, left-aligned, and in title case; Level 4 headings should be indented, bold, in title case, ending with a period; and Level 5 Headings should be indented, bold italic, in title case, ending with a period. See https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/paper-format/headings for more details.
- Tables, figures, and other visual materials. All tables and images should be named and numbered in Arabic numerals. Place all tables and pictures in the text at the position where they should be placed. All common formats of tables, images, sound, and videos are accepted. Permissions for all formerly published figures such as tables and pictures are required. An author of an article should obtain written copyright permissions from their original holders.
- References list. All sources that are cited in the text must be included in the Reference list. The journal uses the APA citation style. See https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/references/examples for guidelines and references examples.
- Endnotes. Endnotes are preferred over footnotes. However, please limit the number of endnotes to a minimum.
- Appendices. Appendices are included at the end of the document. They are optional and do not count to the recommended manuscripts’ length. Unless it violates third-party rights, share the full list of items in the Appendix.
5.4.3. Supplementary materials. These materials are optional and can be included either via URL to an anonymized version of the documents on Open Science Framework (https://osf.io) or other platforms or as a separate supplementary document(s) in our system. We strongly encourage authors to share dataset(s), analyses scripts, supplementary tables / figures / audio files / video files, detailed methodology descriptions (e.g., experimental protocol), and other supplementary material that help transparency and replicability of their research. When sharing data and analysis scripts, we recommend using relative paths and TIER Protocol 4.0 (https://www.projecttier.org/tier-protocol/protocol-4-0).
5.5. Preregistered Studies
Make sure that the manuscript containing the preregistered study includes:
- URL to the anonymized version of the preregistration (this could be in the Introduction, Methods, or Results)
- A clear indication of which parts of the study were preregistered (e.g., data collection procedure, hypotheses, measures, tested model)
- A clear indication of which tested hypotheses were preregistered and which (if any) were not
- A clear (but concise) description of the differences between the preregistration and the manuscript (e.g., differences in conceptualization/measurement of a tested construct, in conducted analysis, in data collection), or an explicit statement that preregistered procedures were all followed (please note that detailed description of the changes should be included in 'transparent changes' document as part of OSF documents)
5.6. Anonymization of the Manuscript
5.6.1. Replacing identifying self-citations. “Identifying self-citations” are references from which a reviewer can recognize the authors of the submitted manuscript based on the context in which they are used. For instance, a sentence “In a previous study, we suggested that…. (Smith & Clark, 2010)“ contains an identifying self-citation. On the other hand, a sentence “In a study by Smith and Clark (2010), the authors suggest that…” contains a non-identifying citation, because the reviewer is unable to tell that Smith and Clark are the authors of the submitted manuscript. To ensure the double-blind review, identifying self-citations must be replaced. In-text citations of such identifying self-citations should be replaced by “AUTHOR, 2010” (e.g., “In a previous study, we suggested… (AUTHOR, 2010)”) and the source in the Reference list should be replaced by “AUTHOR (2010). Blinded for review purposes,” and placed at the beginning of the Reference list. Non-identifying self-citations, on the other hand, are not replaced and remain un-anonymized.
We recommend using non-identifying self-citations where possible because the referred-to work may contain crucial information (e.g., for justification of the conducted study) for the reviewer to properly evaluate the submitted manuscript.
5.6.2. Replacing other identifying information. Other information that might lead reviewers to recognize the authors might include, for instance, the name of the institute or university where the study was conducted/approved, or the project name. Please, replace all such information (e.g., “the project (blinded for the review).”).
5.6.3. Removing author information from the document metadata. The document may keep the information about authorship in its metadata. See the guidelines for the removal in MS Word here.
6. Language Requirements
It is the authors' responsibility to have their manuscripts proofread before submission. Submissions can be rejected due to language insufficiencies.
7. Manuscript Submission
Log in the journal's system, click on New submission and follow provided instructions.
If you already have a reviewer account, log in, go to „User“ tab, select „Edit profile“, scroll down, and tick the option „Roles: Author".
8. Publisher
The Journal is published by the Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Joštova 10
602 00, Brno, Czech Republic, fax: +420 5 4949 1920, e-mail: info@cyberpsychology.eu
Copyright Notice
By submitting a work (hereinafter referred to as the “Work”) into the Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace (https://cyberpsychology.eu/) (hereinafter referred to as the “Journal”) for the consideration for publication, the author grants the Masaryk University (hereinafter referred to as “MUNI”) a license to the Work, under the following conditions:
1. Author’s Statements
1.1 The author declares that the Work is free of copyright or other legal defects, it was neither published anywhere else, nor simultaneously offered for publication, except the platforms of standard scientific pre-submission communications (e.g. SSRN, ResearchGate, Academia).
1.2 The author declares that he/she is the real author or the joint author of the Work and his/her freedom to grant the license is not limited or excluded, and the author is entitled to dispose of the Work, because especially, but not limited to:
- the Work is not an Employee work where the employee would not be entitled to exercise the rights to the Work,
- using of the Work within the scope of the granted license is not limited by the conditions of provided grant or other financial support
- using of the Work within the scope of the granted license is not limited by the third parties’ rights (e.g. copyright, the right to the protection of personal data),
- the Work is not the work of joint authors, where the other joint authors would not agree to grant the license.
1.3 In the case that the Work is the work of joint authors, the author declares that all the joint authors have been informed of these License Terms and that he/she is authorized to grant MUNI the license under these License Terms on behalf of the joint authors.
1.4 The author agrees that if the Work is accepted for publication, the proposal to conclude a license agreement for the Work will be on his/her behalf aimed at an indefinite number of persons, while the content of the agreement will be determined by reference to the publicly available licence conditions Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 International (available from: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/); such proposal will not be done for the works or the elements (e.g. image or photographic documentation) used by the author in the Work under a contractual license with a third party.
1.5 If any of the author’s statements prove to be untrue, the author is aware that he/she is liable for the resulting damage, including the costs associated with any litigation and damage caused by a violation of the Journal’s and/or MUNI’s reputation.
2. License Grant
2.1 The author grants MUNI gratuitous non-exclusive license to use the Work in all the known manners of use (especially, but not limited to, reproduction, distribution and communication to public), individually, in the collection or together with any other works or elements unlimited as regards to amount and form and media of expression (including electronic).
2.2 The license is granted as territorially and quantitatively unlimited.
2.3 The license is granted royalty-free.
2.4 The license is granted for the duration of economic rights to the Work.
2.5 MUNI shall be entitled to grant an authorisation forming part of the licence to the third party or parties, in whole or in part under a sublicense agreement, with or without remuneration.
2.6 By granting the license, the author agrees with including the Work into the scientific and bibliographical databases (eg. EBSCO, CEEOL) as well as information systems for providing the informational services, where the Journal is currently indexed as well as those, where it will be indexed pro futuro.
2.7 MUNI shall be not obliged to make use of the license.
3. Further Use of Work
3.1 Given granted the non-exclusive license to the Work, the author shall be entitled to further use the Work. For the purpose of such further use of the Work, the author shall be obliged to state the Journal as the source of publication of the Work.
3.2 In the case of disclosure of the Work on the platforms of standard scientific pre-submission communications within the meaning of Art. 1.1, the author shall be obliged to additionally state the Journal as the source of publication of the Work, without undue delay.
3.3 The reputation of MUNI and/or Journal shall not be negatively affected by the further use of the Work.
4. Varia
4.1 Legal relations based on the license shall be governed by the laws of the Czech Republic; any disputes arising out of the license shall be settled by the courts of the Czech Republic.
4.2 If the Work is rejected for publication in the Journal, the license shall be, at the moment of the decision of rejection, restricted in such a way that it shall cover use of Work only in the necessary extent within related editorial activities (e.g. review and archiving).
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