Collective Intelligence is an open access, peer-reviewed journal. All accepted articles are made freely available online immediately upon publication, are published under a Creative Commons license, and hosted online in perpetuity.

The Article Processing Charge (APC) is $1800. For members of Association of Computing Machinery, the APC is $1300.

If, after peer review, your manuscript is accepted for publication, a one-time article processing charge (APC) is payable to cover the cost of publishing, paid by the funder, institution, or author. There is no charge for submitting a manuscript.

For general information on open access at Sage please visit the Open Access page.

Your article must be within the scope of the journal and be of sufficient quality. If not, it will not be reviewed. Please read the journal’s Aims and Scope to see if your article is appropriate.

The manuscript must be your original work, you must have the rights to the work, and you must have obtained and be able to supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you, including figures, illustrations, tables, lengthy quotations, or other material previously published elsewhere.

Article types

Sage Publishing and ACM are committed to diversity and inclusion in publishing. We encourage submissions from a range of authors from across all countries, genders, and backgrounds.
We want to avoid overloading reviewers with peer review requests. Therefore, we send for review only manuscripts of sufficient quality that meet the aims and scope of Collective Intelligence.
There is no charge for submitting a paper to the journal
As part of the submission process, you will be required to: submit your original work, have the rights in the submitted work, have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyrighted works, submit the work for first publication in Collective Intelligence,
warrant that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere and has not already been published elsewhere. Please see our guidelines on prior publication and note that Collective Intelligence will consider submissions of papers that have been posted on preprint servers or in computer science conference proceedings. Please alert the Editorial Office when submitting and include the DOI for the preprint in the designated field in the manuscript submission system. Authors should not post an updated version of their paper on the preprint server while it is being peer reviewed for possible publication in Collective Intelligence. If the article is accepted for publication, the author may re-use their work according to Collective Intelligence’s author archiving policy. If your paper is accepted, you must include a link on your preprint to the final version of your paper.

Research Articles(no word count but < 6000 words recommended)

Research Articles include conventional theory, computational, and empirical/experimental reports on novel research not published elsewhere. Criteria for evaluation include impact, novelty, creativity, technical soundness, and applicability to collective intelligence.

In addition to the standard abstract (250 words), introduction, methods, results, discussion, and appendix sections (as appropriate by paper), authors should include a 250-word significance statement that puts the conclusion of the paper in broad, accessible terms and states the relevance to basic science and/or applied settings.

Theory and modeling papers should include a table in which constraints (e.g., exponents in scaling models derived from first principles) and parameters fit to data or tuned, are defined, and an accessible interpretation and justification given. For example, Einstein's field equations to make accurate predictions in our universe need to fix things like light speed and the gravitational constant.

For replications of previously published work in CI or elsewhere, whether theory papers or experiments, authors should include a table listing all important similarities and differences in design or model and results between the current replication and the previous work.

Appendices will be reviewed and published as part of the main paper and should include details critical to replicating an experiment or model but which otherwise distract from the main text. Appendices can include a section at the end for supplementary information that is not critical to the paper but might be useful for future work.

If you wish to apply for Open Data/Open Materials OSF badges, please ensure you mention this in your cover letter, complete the disclosure form and include it with your submission. Any required data/materials should be hosted on a publically-accessible website in a format that is time-stamped, immutable, and permanent. For more information about the badges and how to earn them, please see the OSF Wiki.

Note that for regular articles, Collective Intelligence only offers Open Data and Open Materials badges. Preregistration badges are currently for Registered Reports only. Please refer to the more detailed Registered Report guidelines below.

Pre-registration studies: Collective Intelligence encourages pre-registration of analyses for studies that build closely on an existing body of work, and for fields with a respective tradition, as is often the case in the biomedical and cognitive sciences. Pre-registration will not be required for empirical/experimental papers that test novel ideas or introduce fundamentally new methods.

These submissions are reviewed in two stages. In Stage 1, a study proposal is considered for publication prior to data collection. Stage 1 submissions should include the complete Introduction, Method, and Proposed Analyses. High-quality proposals will be accepted in principle before data collection commences. Once the study is completed, the author will finish the article including Results and Discussion sections (Stage 2). Publication of Stage 2 submissions is guaranteed as long as the approved Stage 1 protocol is followed and conclusions are appropriate. Full details can be found here.  

Reviews, Synthesis, Perspectives, and Comments

A Review is a comprehensive, ideally "objective" (as opposed to advancing one's own view) evidence-based summary of the literature on a given topic. It should conclude with the consensus view and suggest directions for future research. No word count, but < 8,000 words is recommended.

Syntheses concretely formulate new hypotheses and frameworks by bringing together approaches and results from different sub-disciplines within the broadly conceived collective intelligence community. No word count, but < 4000 words is recommended.

Perspectives build a case for promising but speculative directions within basic science for future work or introduce out of the box ideas. Ideally, a Perspective is pithy and short. No word count but < 2000 words is recommended.

Comments are constructive remarks on previously published papers. A comment might suggest a new direction, improve a method, propose an alternative interpretation of the data or results, or put another author's results in a larger context. No word count but < 2000 is words recommended.

Case Studies

Case Studies report implementations of collective intelligence in practice. Case studies should identify the principles, questions, or problems the authors are studying in practice and describe the context in which the study occurred (e.g., crowdsourced project, portfolio management team, etc.). Case studies should also use language accessible to a general audience, explain how and why the case addresses issues relevant to applied and/or basic scientists, and offer clear takeaways for the reader. For example: Did the case study illustrate how to improve team performance, increase robustness, or produce more accurate information? What were the important design decisions and tradeoffs? What was learned after the project implementation that was not anticipated beforehand? What are the implications of those insights for basic science? The discussion should have sufficient depth to allow replication of the challenges and allow other researchers to build on top of these observations.

Given the differences in form and audience, our criteria for evaluating case studies differ from those for research articles, reviews, and syntheses. Reviewers and editors will evaluate case studies based on potential impact to science and society, general interest, the novelty of application, and whether the domain and application are compelling. Results need not be positive. We will treat failures to achieve collective intelligence with the same openness and rigor that we consider successes. We will impose no word count but recommend articles with fewer than 3000. We encourage the inclusion of appendices that describe process and methods in more detail, including findings of scientific interest that might not fit within the general thread of the case. Case studies will have three reviewers—when possible, two from the applied side and one who sits between practice and basic science.

Challenges

Challenges are speculative essays that identify either ideas from basic science that would benefit from being tested in practice, identify ideas implemented in practice that need a firmer scientific foundation, or identify points of conflict between the science and applied communities. No word count, but < 1000 words is recommended.

Book Reviews & Conference Reports (typically solicited by the editors).

Debates

Debates aim to find common ground and identify new directions and profitable intersections by bringing together two to three researchers or teams with different perspectives, who work on similar problems but at different scales (e.g. neural vs human social systems), or who have drawn different conclusions. The format of a collective debate is a series of 1000 to 2000 word "letters" with two to three iterations by each debate contributor.

A Debate is published in its entirety. Upon publication, the debate is opened to the community, and individuals or teams can submit one-page responses to be considered for publication as part of the debate. The tone of the debate contributions should be constructive.

Essays and Creative Writing Contributions

Essays and Creative Writing Contributions can be nonfiction, fiction, poetry, or other kinds of creative writing. With this, the journal aims to provide a place for social commentary and creative work, the latter constrained only by the imagination of the author and the subject of the journal. To that end, fiction essays should creatively explore the notion as well as implications and effects of collective intelligence. Nonfiction essays explore the implications of collective intelligence historically or in contemporary society. These essays should be between 3000 and 7000 words. They will be handled by CI’s creative writing editor.

Reporting guidelines

Your manuscript must follow the relevant EQUATOR Network reporting guidelines, depending on the type of study. The EQUATOR wizard can help identify the appropriate guideline. You will need to upload the appropriate checklist with your submission.

Other resources can be found at NLM’s Research Reporting Guidelines and Initiatives.

If your research involves animals, you will be asked to confirm that you have carefully read and adhered to the ARRIVE guidelines.

As part of the submission process you will need to confirm that this is your original work, that you have the rights in the work, that this is for first publication in this Journal, that it is not being considered for/has not already been published elsewhere, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you.

Please see our guidelines on prior publication and note that the journal may accept submissions of manuscripts that have been posted on preprint servers.

Submission site

Submit your manuscript online via Sage Track.

IMPORTANT: Please check whether you already have an account in Sage Track before trying to create a new one. If you have reviewed or authored for the journal in the past year it is likely that you will have had an account created. For further guidance on submitting your manuscript online please visit ScholarOne Online Help.

Manuscripts should only be submitted with the consent of all contributing authors. The individual responsible for submitting the manuscript should carefully check that all those whose work contributed to the manuscript are listed as authors.

Ensure you upload all relevant manuscript files, including any additional supplemental files (including reporting guidelines where relevant).

Authorship

Please view our authorship policies, which includes information on criteria for authorship, who should be the corresponding author and more.

Please note that AI chatbots, for example ChatGPT, should not be listed as authors. For more information see the policy on Use of ChatGPT and generative AI tools.

Files

• Cover letter. To help the Editor in their preliminary evaluation, please indicate why you think the manuscript suitable for publication.
• Your manuscript, properly formatted according to all stipulations above, and within the scope of the journal.
• Figures and images.
• All figures must be numbered consecutively in the order in which they appear in the text – they will appear in the published article in the order they are numbered.
• Figure resolution is 300dpi. More information on figure/image preparation can be found here.
• Supplemental material. This journal can host additional materials online (e.g. datasets, podcasts, videos, images, etc) alongside the full-text of the article. Your supplemental material must be one of our accepted file types. For that list and more information please refer to our guidelines on submitting supplemental files.

• Complete list of authors, with their institutional affiliations.
• The author information you enter at submission must exactly match what is included on your manuscript and/or title page, including full names, academic affiliations, and corresponding author contact details.
• The listed affiliation should be the institution where the research was conducted. If an author has moved to a new institution since completing the research, the new affiliation can be included in a note at the end of the manuscript.
• All listed authors must meet the criteria for authorship (above).
• All persons eligible for authorship must be included at the time of submission.
• All authors must have given consent for the manuscript to be submitted in its current form.
• Keywords: During submission, you may be asked to select or enter keywords for your manuscript. These keywords are used to match appropriate reviewers to your manuscript.
• The number of figures, tables, and words in your manuscript.
• Funder information: Name, grant/award number.
• You may be required to enter your declaration of conflicting interest as part of the submission process, in addition to listing it on your manuscript and/or title page. Please have it on hand.

• If you have posted your manuscript to a preprint server, you will be asked to supply the DOI (this does not prohibit submission, but no changes should be made to the preprint version while your manuscript is under evaluation in this journal). Please see our guidelines on prior publication. If the article is accepted for publication, the author may re-use their work according to the journal's author archiving policy. If your manuscript is accepted, you must include a link in your preprint to the final version of your published article.

The following summary describes the peer review process for this journal:
Identity transparency:Single-anonymized

Collective Intelligence is a transdisciplinary journal that publishes research articles, reviews, syntheses, comments, case studies, debates, and long form fiction and nonfiction essays. This statement concerns all of these paper types except long form essays and debates, which are invited and reviewed respectively by the Journal’s long form essay editor and chief editors. Due to both the transdisciplinary nature of the Journal as well as the Journal’s goal of facilitating discovery of collective intelligence principles that apply across scales, careful attention needs to be given to the Journal’s reviewing philosophy. Collective Intelligence consequently seeks broad-minded reviewers who are able to review outside their apparent domain of expertise as well as technically proficient reviewers. Please keep this in mind when considering this invitation and reviewing the work. Specific evaluation criteria for each paper type can be found via the link in point 5. In brief, the chief editors ask that reviewers follow these guidelines:
CI encourages reviewers to suggest literatures to authors in which related points to the authors’ have been made. Reviewers are also encouraged to suggest related terminology
CI encourages reviewers to suggest literatures to authors in which related points to the authors’ have been made.
Reviewers are also encouraged to suggest related terminology CI encourages reviewers to make suggestions to the authors to improve the generality of the paper to increase readership and impact.
For theory and modelling papers, CI requires authors to include a table identifying and defining constraints and/or parameters in models. This table should be carefully reviewed for rigor and clarity.
For information about code deposition and what material should be included in the main paper verses an appendix, Sage and ACM are committed to facilitating openness, transparency, and reproducibility of research. Where relevant, Collective Intelligence encourages authors to share their research data and code in a suitable public repository subject to ethical considerations and where data is included to add a data accessibility statement in their manuscript file. The authors should also follow data citation principles. Finally, reviews should always be constructive!

Appealing the publication decision: Editors have very broad discretion in determining whether an article is an appropriate fit for their journal. Many manuscripts are declined with a very general statement of the rejection decision. These decisions are not eligible for formal appeal unless the author believes the decision to reject the manuscript was based on an error in the review of the article, in which case the author may appeal the decision by providing the Editor with a detailed written description of the error they believe occurred.
If an author believes the decision regarding their manuscript was affected by a publication ethics breach, the author may contact the publisher with a detailed written description of their concern, and information supporting the concern, at, [email protected]

Prior publication: Collective Intelligence, Sage and ACM take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. We seek to protect the rights of our authors and we always investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of published articles. Equally, we seek to protect the reputation of Collective Intelligence against malpractice. Submitted articles might be checked with duplication-checking software. When an article, for example, is found to have plagiarized other work or included third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgement, or when the authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article; taking up the matter with the head of department or dean of the author's institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; or taking appropriate legal action.
If material has been previously published it is not generally acceptable for publication in Collective Intelligence. However, there are certain circumstances where previously published material can be considered for publication. Manuscripts based on papers that have been presented at conferences or published in conference proceedings may be considered for publication provided that that the following conditions are met: 1) previous work: you must still retain the rights to the manuscript, 2) the new work is substantially developed and contains at least 25% new material (in general terms), and 3) you must incorporate a citation to the previous work. Please see our guidelines on prior publication and note that Collective Intelligence will consider submissions of papers that have been posted on preprint servers or in computer science conference proceedings. Please alert the Editorial Office when submitting and include the DOI for the preprint in the designated field in the manuscript submission system. Authors should not post an updated version of their paper on the preprint server while it is being peer reviewed for possible publication in Collective Intelligence. If the article is accepted for publication, the author may re-use their work according to Collective Intelligence’s author archiving policy. Please contact the Editor at the address given above if you have questions about prior publication.

Your manuscript will undergo an initial evaluation. If it does not conform to the requirements laid out in these guidelines, it will be returned to you for amendments prior to peer review. Manuscripts may be desk rejected without peer review at this point if they are out of scope for the journal or otherwise unsuitable.

After passing the initial evaluation, your manuscript will then be peer reviewed. You can log in at any time to check the status of your manuscript. We will notify you when a decision has been reached.

Collective Intelligence adheres to a rigorous single-anonymize reviewing policy in which the identity of the reviewer is anonymous. Three reviews will be obtained for each manuscript sent for review.

To ensure the integrity of the peer review process we assign reviewers and cannot accept author recommendations.

All manuscripts are reviewed as rapidly as possible, while maintaining rigor. Reviewers make comments to the author and recommendations to the Editor who then makes the final decision on all manuscripts, including those appearing in a special issue or special collection. The Editor or members of the Editorial Board may occasionally submit their own manuscripts for possible publication in the Journal. In these cases, the peer review process will be managed by alternative members of the Board and the submitting Editor/Board member will have no involvement in the decision-making process.

Read Sage's complete peer review policy.

Plagiarism

The journal and Sage take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. Please read Sage's complete policy on plagiarism and the actions we may take.

After acceptance you will receive instructions via email inviting you to complete the Open Access process. This will include signing the appropriate Creative Commons license and, where applicable, paying the Article Processing Charge (APC) or assigning a bill payer. Once the APC has been processed, your article will be prepared for publication and can appear online within an average of 30 days. Please note that, where an APC is applicable, production work cannot be completed on your manuscript until payment has been received.

Contributor’s Publishing Agreement

Before publication we require the author as the rights holder to sign a Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement. The journal publishes manuscripts under Creative Commons licenses. The standard license for the journal is Creative Commons by Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC), which allows others to re-use the work without permission as long as the work is properly referenced and the use is non-commercial. For more information, you are advised to visit Sage's OA licenses page. Alternative license arrangements are available at the author’s request (e.g. to meet particular funder mandates).

Preprints

If your manuscript was posted on a preprint server prior to acceptance, you must include a link in your preprint to the final published version of your published article.

Production

Your Sage Production Editor will keep you informed as to your article’s progress throughout the production process. Proofs will be made available to the corresponding author via our editing portal, Sage Edit, or by email, and should be returned promptly to avoid delaying publication. Authors are reminded to check their proofs carefully to confirm that all author information, including names, affiliations, sequence, and contact details are correct, and that Funding and Conflict of Interest statements, if any, are accurate. This is the final opportunity to make changes to your manuscript. Further corrections will not be possible after publication. Changes to the author list are not permitted at this stage.

Publication

One of the many benefits of publishing your research in an open access journal is the speed to publication. With no page count constraints, your article will be published online in a fully citable form with a DOI number as soon as it has completed the production process. At this time it will be completely free to view and download for all.

OnlineFirst publication: This enables us to publish final articles online immediately, without waiting for assignment to a future issue of the Journal. This usually significantly reduces publication lead time. Visit the Sage Journals help page for more details, including how to cite OnlineFirst articles.

Promoting your article

Publication is not the end of the process. Between us, we can ensure that your article is found, read, downloaded and cited as widely as possible. Many of the most effective tactics are those you can do quickly and easily to your network of contacts and peers. Visit the Promote Your Article page on the Sage Journal Author Gateway for numerous resources to help you promote your work.

The Sage Journal Author Gateway has some general advice on how to get published, plus links to further resources. Sage Author Services also offers authors a variety of ways to improve and enhance your article including English language editing, plagiarism detection, and video abstract and infographic preparation.

If you have any questions about publishing with Sage, please visit the Sage Journals Solutions Portal.

You can view our complaints and appeals procedure.

Contact us

You can direct any questions to the journal’s editorial office:
Allison Templet
collectiveintelligence@acm.org