The Data & Policy blog: Instructions for authors

The Data & Policy Blog, which is hosted here, is a vehicle for sharing informed opinion and perspectives on ongoing issues in the wider sphere of data science and governance. The blog also publishes summaries of important reports and meetings relevant to our audience.

Topics covered by the blog include but are not limited to:

1. Philosophy, ideation, formulation and implementation of new approaches in Data-driven Transformations in Policy and Governance.
2. Data in its variety of forms and sources, and infrastructure and methods for its utilisation in policy and governance.
3. Governance practices and management issues involved in implementation of data-driven solutions.
4. Issues which must be considered in technology design and assessment, such as ethics, trust, bias, rights, behaviour and more.
5. Algorithmic governance, including automation of government functions, agency of algorithms, understanding the black box and others.
6. Data to tackle global issues and dynamic societal threats, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change or food security.

Note that the Data & Policy Journal is our venue for peer-reviewed contributions to the literature. The Journal has a Commentary category, intended for articles that provide a more formal overview of an issue embedded in the academic and policy literature.

The blog is a more flexible and rapid vehicle. Please pay attention to the following information if you seek to publish a post on our blog.

Author profile

Many of our previous authors are practitioners or researchers sitting at the intersection of data science, statistical science, programming and public, private and non-profit governance. Some are academics embedded in universities and similar institutions, others are professionals engaged with digital transformations in local government, international development policy, data journalism and more. We actively encourage individuals with diverse backgrounds to propose posts.

At the same time, we expect all to follow the guidelines and recommendations below. To submit a blog for our consideration, please contact us at communications@dataforpolicy.org.

Guidelines and recommendations

Format

We seek to publish pieces which are longer than 500 words and shorter than 1500 words. If any are longer, we might consider breaking them up and publishing them in a series format.

Style

Language should be understandable by the general public who might be interested in the interactions between data and policy. This means that technical terms and policy concepts should be defined before being used, or avoided if they do not explicitly contribute to the discussion. The main goal is brevity and focus, so the author should deal directly with the matter at hand, avoiding long introductions. The text should stand in itself and, whilst you can include references, the post should not rely too much on external sources to be understood.

Evidence and referencing

There is no need to use academic citation styles. Links are enough, which should offer access to published works that provide more detail or examples of a particular phenomenon. It is always better to direct the reader to open access sources. The author can provide links in-text to the editorial team, who will add them to the final publication. If the blog post is an adaptation of an academic article, the author should be aware that Medium does not support footnotes, therefore any citation should be an in-text citation with a references list at the end.

Visual resources

Sometimes, visual resources like charts, diagrams and graphs are very useful to introduce and summarise content. They should be labelled appropriately and connected to the original sources of primary or secondary data. Often, the editorial team will add images to published blog posts to facilitate reading, unless the author has proper rights of use and access to specific images and seeks to have them included in the publication.

Editorial input

All posts will be quickly assessed by the Data & Policy editorial team before a decision is made about publication. Our Communications Editor may suggest changes to authors, including language, sources and structure. If the changes needed are major, we may suggest a different deadline or theme for their consideration.

Post-publication

The Data & Policy team will encourage the author to promote the published article across his or her personal social media profiles and any associated institutional accounts, including universities, research groups and others. Sometimes, Data & Policy might write additional materials, create graphics or videos to promote the contribution. The blog post might be used across all Data & Policy communication channels: website, newsletter and social media.

This is the blog for Data & Policy, the partner journal for the Data for Policy conference. You can also find us on Twitter. Here’s instructions for submitting an article to the journal.