Tufte Working Papers

Publication criteria

This series accepts unpublished papers and revised versions of previously published research in the areas of political science and public policy. Papers that use innovative research techniques, especially quantitative ones, or offer new data or novel empirical information are encouraged. Articles can be submitted in English or Spanish.

Ethics and Open Access Policy

This series is edited in Tufte-LaTeX, a LaTeX template inspired by Edward R. Tufte. LaTeX is free software that allows the composition of texts with high typographic quality. On the other hand, this series has ethical policy and style standards based on the Singapore Statement on Research Integrity and the COPE guidelines. It also has an open access policy based on the Budapest Open Access Initiative and the Bethesda and Berlín declarations on open access and San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. Accordingly, the works are licensed under Creative Commons and LPPL v1.3c.

Finally, the series uses the CRediT taxonomy to identify the exact contributions of each researcher in the case of co-authorship or research assistantships.

Editorial Management

This series has only the editorial team as its executive body. The editorial team is comprised of the editor, Bastián González-Bustamante, who manages the series in its broadest sense, Jaquelin Morillo, associate editor, and Antonia Rebolledo, editorial assistant.

Editorial Process

All manuscripts received are subjected to a preliminary desk review. The outcome of this desk review may be rejection, approval with minor changes or, exceptionally, sending the manuscript for peer-review.

Double-blind peer-review with external referees is not considered mandatory in this series. When the editorial decision of the preliminary review is to submit the manuscript for peer-review, an open review with one or two experts is used in which the identities of the authors and referees are disclosed.

In this sense, the traditional peer-review model, which is currently widely criticised for its delays in editorial management, bias in evaluations despite anonymous refereeing, and other shortcomings such as the production of superfluous opinions, is discarded. The outcome of open peer-review can be a rejection of the manuscript or approval with minor changes.

Both desktop and peer-review are based on open review reports. These reports are published attached to the article with the signature and biographical details of the reviewers. This creates an incentive to participate in the process and increases the quality of the refereeing.

Accepted manuscripts must be adjusted by the authors based on the comments of the review process and are then reviewed by the editorial team, who may request further minor adjustments. This cycle is repeated until a satisfactory version that can be typeset is obtained. Manuscripts are then typeset in Tufte-LaTeX and reviewed by the editorial team and the authors. This whole process is done openly and with constant monitoring in our GitHub repository.

Finally, the version of record is stored on GitHub, optionally SocArXiv in OSF, and Zenodo.

Style guide for authors

While these working papers use the American Psychological Association (APA) standards, we favour the “your paper, your way” method. Accordingly, authors may choose to submit their manuscript in the format that suits them best for the review process: Word, OpenOffice, PDF or LaTeX. When the manuscript is accepted, the format will be standardised.

As this series favours empirical studies, it is strongly recommended to follow the format introduction-method-results-discussion and keep the document’s length between 4,000 and 10,000 words (including references).

Submissions can be made to working-papers@training-datalab.com.