Authors Guidelines

Read these instructions carefully before submitting your manuscript. 

The Journal on Interactive Systems (JIS) is published and maintained by the Brazilian Computing Society (SBC). JIS is inherently interdisciplinary, and its main goals include:

• To disseminate original scientific works on (and across) the areas related to the design, evaluation, and study of interactive computing systems in different domains.
• To introduce scientific projects under development by research groups focused on contributing to the state-of-the-art of related themes.
• To openly disseminate high-quality research results to a broad audience, favoring open science and knowledge sharing.

Contributions

JIS publishes research papers that present contributions in several manners:

• Concluded scientific works presenting algorithms, concepts, new devices, models, techniques, etc.
• On-going research presenting new ideas with preliminary results and critical discussions, addressing important problems, describing systems' implementations, etc.
• Surveys with a critical vision of a specific area, including a complete state-of-the-art revision and presenting a rigorous methodology (e.g., systematic reviews).
• Essays, Position articles, or tutorials deeply covering a specific topic from a theoretical or practical point of view.

Please use the "Comments for the Editor" field during submission to provide any extra information.

See the Ethical and Post-Publication Issues and the Communications pages for submissions regarding already published papers.

Cover Letter

Authors must present a cover letter containing the items below:

1. The research problem the paper is approaching and the main contribution it is offering to advance our capacity to understand, solve, or deal with the problem;
2. Research highlights: Up to five original contributions the paper offers to the scientific community;
3. A short explanation about why the manuscript is suitable for publication in the journal; 
4. A short explanation about how the manuscript relates to the journal's previous work on the topic, highlighting its originality when no related work is found;
5. An explanation of any issues relating to the journal's policies;
6. The name of the special issue you are submitting for (if this is the case);
7. The title and venue of the previously published paper the article extends (if this is the case);
8. The names of three possible reviewers, with no conflicts of interest with the authors, who are specialists in the paper's subject;
9. A declaration of any potential competing interests.

Authors are encouraged to outline, both in the cover letter and at the end of the manuscript, their contributions to the paper, following the CRediT taxonomy. 

If you are submitting an extended version of a previously published conference paper, ensure that the paper is a non-trivial extension of the version that has appeared at the conference. We strongly recommend that authors highlight areas where new text or results have been included, how the text has been re-written, and where extra depth is provided. Pay attention to the five following requirements:

1. Authors must ensure that the extended paper, in English, contains at least 35% new material (more is expected) compared to the previously published work; 
2. The new version must explicitly cite the original work, indicating it is an extended and revised version; 
3. No large blocks of text (i.e., entire sections or paragraphs) are to be copied verbatim from the conference paper: the extended version must be a rewritten paper;
4. The paper must highlight its original contribution, explaining how it extends the original work;
5. The .pdf file of the original published work must be provided (use the Article Component "Other") when submitting the extended paper. 

Authors are required to inform their ORCID numbers. Institutions' names must be informed as registered in ROR, preferably in English. 

Review Process

JIS operates under a single-anonymous peer-review system, where reviewers are aware of authors' names and affiliations, but review reports provided to authors are anonymous. 

Publication of research articles by JIS depends primarily on their scientific quality and contribution as judged by our external expert editors and peer reviewers. The review process will also assess whether the writing is comprehensible and whether the work represents a valuable contribution to the field.

Submitted manuscripts are generally reviewed by three independent experts. Reviewers evaluate whether the manuscript helps the scientific community advance its capacity to deal with a clear and relevant research problem, whether the manuscript is scientifically sound and coherent, duplicates already published work, and sufficiently clear for publication. Reviewers will also be asked to indicate how interesting and significant the research is. Editors will reach a decision based on these reports, and, where necessary, they will consult with members of the Editorial Board.

For more information, consult the Editorial Workflow.

The 3 Rs

JIS values Rigor, Responsibility, and Reproducibility (or rationale). Articles must be transparent regarding how rigor was applied to research design, development, and analysis; the reported work must be seen through the lens of social responsibility; and the article must present authors' critical thinking and discussions, communicated in a good style and improving reproducibility (offering everything readers need to reproduce or replicate the work, or to understand the research rationale and the researcher reasoning line).

Ethical Issues

Manuscripts must explicitly indicate how the ethical issues of the research were addressed and managed, including the research approval by an ethics committee when applicable. Authors are invited to critically examine their references, background, and methods, striving to avoid and fight different biases in science (e.g., gender bias, race, ethnicity, social class, disability, etc.).

JIS subscribes to the Brazilian Computer Society's Code of Conduct and follows COPE's (Committee on Publication Ethics) core practices in its editorial process and published materials. See the Ethical and Post-Publication Issues page for more details and instructions.

Open and Fair Science

Manuscripts must offer the conditions to replicate, reproduce, or understand the research design and results. The use of AI-generated content must be appropriately acknowledged.

JIS strongly encourages the authors to make their datasets, methods, software, transcripts, and other additional materials available for the readers. All the supplementary material the authors provided will appear on the paper's publication page.  

JIS encourages its authors to ensure that their research recognizes contributions from underrepresented groups in science, not only in their related work section but also in theories and applied methods.

As SOL is an open and free database that indexes JIS and other journals maintained by the Brazilian Computer Society, manuscripts submitted to JIS must ensure that SOL has been adequately consulted (i.e., included among the scientific databases considered when searching for relevant related works) and that the submission is appropriately situated in the existing literature: https://sol.sbc.org.br/busca/

Open and free of charge

JIS has no Article Processing Charges (APC) or charges for authors and readers.

The journal is maintained by the Brazilian Computer Society through three special interest groups: Human-Computer Interaction, Games, and Virtual Reality. JIS is funded by these communities, which, in turn, obtain their resources primarily from membership fees and conference registrations for students and teachers. That is why JIS has a non-negotiable commitment to open, rigorous, and quality science and the struggle for democratic and inclusive science for all people.

All papers published by JIS follow the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, and authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions.

Language

JIS publishes original research in English. Translations to other languages (e.g., Portuguese) can be included as supplementary materials. The document must begin with the following statement: "This document is a free translation made by the authors. Original article in English:  <complete reference with doi number>.

Institutions' names must be informed as registered in ROR, preferably in English. 

Templates

Submissions must be in pdf format following the JIS LaTex template. Although we strongly recommend using the template for the first submission, adherence to the template will be enforced only upon acceptance.

Please pay attention to the error messages when compiling the main.tex file on Overleaf, which may require changing the default compiler. Change the compiler to XeLaTex in the Menu\Compiler option.