Curating a Special Issue

Once approved and finalized, the Special Issue will be open for submissions and the Call for Papers will be posted on the journal’s Open Special Issues page. A promotional PDF version of the Call for Papers can be found on the Special Issue’s website page. Editors can distribute this PDF to their contacts using email, social media, and other channels.

Our marketing team will send the Call for Papers via email to researchers working in the field. We will also promote your Call for Papers to readers on our website. In some cases, we may also share it using our social media channels, ensuring the widest possible visibility.

Hindawi’s marketing team will conduct initial outreach on your behalf by sending the Call for Papers to researchers working in relevant fields.

As the publisher, Hindawi undertakes significant promotional activities to increase visibility and reach, but the most successful Special Issues are those that are supported and promoted by their Guest Editors.

Any of the following techniques will increase the likelihood of your Special Issue receiving high quality submissions:

• Share your Call for Papers with researchers directly. It is more meaningful to receive an invitation from a friend or a colleague than from a publisher. Hindawi provides a PDF version of your Call for Papers that you can send as an email attachment. Consider making personalized requests to contacts that you know are working in relevant fields.
• Add a short description of the Call for Papers and a link to the online version to your email signature.
• Include a one page slide at the end of conference presentations, alerting colleagues to your Call for Papers and inviting them to participate.
• Use social media to promote the link to your Call for Papers. Tag Hindawi - for example, using @Hindawi on Twitter - and we will amplify your promotion.
• Maintain contact with authors who have expressed an interest in participating in your Special Issue. Provide them with any support they require or send them to Hindawi for assistance. However, be wary of developing potential conflicts of interest.

Special Issue articles follow the same peer review process as other articles in Hindawi's journals. Guest Editors serve the same function as Academic Editors for submissions to the Special Issue.

Guest Editors are responsible for the tasks that require their subject-specific expertise, such as selecting appropriate reviewers for submitted papers and making the final decision of accepting or rejecting a paper based on the reviewer reports.

Our editorial staff provide Guest Editors with any administrative assistance they may need. Members of Hindawi’s staff are responsible for contacting late reviewers, sending reminder emails to authors and reviewers, notifying authors of a Guest Editor’s decision, and tracking down missing material, among various other administrative tasks.

The entire editorial process is handled on Hindawi’s peer review system.

Key points from our editorial policy

Submitting to your own Special Issue

The Guest Editorial team may publish 3 articles in their own Special Issue, in addition to an Editorial article should the Issue be successful. To avoid any potential conflicts of interest, we do not allow for papers authored by Guest Editors to be handled by any members of the Guest Editorial team. As such, these manuscripts are handled by members of the journal’s Editorial Board, and hence will not be visible to the Lead Guest Editor. To ensure this functions correctly, we ask that you submit manuscripts to your own Special Issue using the email address associated with your Editorial role. If you notice that you are assigned to a manuscript authored by yourself or a member of your Guest Editorial team, please contact the Editorial Assistant immediately.

Being aware of conflicts of interest

When handling manuscripts submitted to your Special Issue, it is important to consider the risk of any potential conflicts of interest. If you have recently co-authored with the author(s) of the manuscript, you could be perceived to be influenced by your relationship. Similarly, if you have recently shared an affiliation or employment history with the author(s), it could also be seen to be inappropriate for you to handle their work. Hindawi aims to avoid assigning papers to Editors who might have conflicts, but we also expect our Editors to declare any conflicts. If you believe a conflict exists when you are notified about a paper, you should refuse to handle the manuscript and notify the Editorial Assistant so the manuscript can be assigned to an alternative editor. If everyone in the Guest Editor team has a potential conflict of interest, or the conflict of interest belongs to the Lead Guest Editor, the manuscript will need to be handled by a member of the journal’s permanent Editorial Board. This is to ensure the impartiality of the peer review process.

In addition, it is important that the reviewers you invite do not present any potential conflicts of interest. The above considerations should also be made when selecting reviewers to assess a manuscript.

Avoiding citation manipulation

As Editor, you must not ask authors to include references merely to increase citations to your own or an associate’s work, to the journal, or to another journal you are associated with. In addition, manuscripts should not be submitted with the primary purpose of increasing the number of citations to a given author’s work, or to articles published in a particular journal, and such articles may incur sanctions.

For more information on our editorial policies, please see our guide to handling a manuscript.

Manuscripts may be submitted as soon as the Special Issue opens. Accepted articles are immediately published in the Special Issue.

We allow four months from the initial Call for Papers to the final submission deadline. After the deadline, the Special Issue will no longer accept new submissions, but new articles will continue to appear in the Special Issue as manuscripts make their way through the review process.

Once all manuscripts have passed peer review, we ask the Guest Editor team to write an Editorial that introduces the Special Issue.

Typically, Article Processing Charges (APCs) are paid by the authors of each published paper. The APC is the same amount as a regular submission to the journal the Special Issue is in.

If Guest Editors wish to provide financial support for contributing authors to cover the APCs, either themselves or via a third party, this must be raised with Hindawi’s staff at the point of proposing the Special Issue, or as soon as the Call for Papers has been issued. If approved, this may necessitate mention in the articles’ Conflicts of Interest statements and must be declared in the editorial that accompanies the Special Issue.