2  Style Guide

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  1. Prepare the text in English. The Chicago Manual of Style 18th Edition (CMOS) is being used as the overall publication style. We will stay close to (CMOS) but not 100% compliant as we have many non/English native writers and styles vary. Points to note will be:

    1. We will use International English as the primary audience is English as a second language in Europe and therefore the expectation of the reader leans towards UK English. For example the ending of words is “ise” and not “ize”, but use US “License” as Creative Commons use the US form of license. This also applies to en (–) and em (—) dashes, use spaces unlike the US with no space. Refer to The Economist style guide as that caters to a US English audience.

    2. Use the Oxford Comma. Which means the presence of a comma before “and” or “or” in a list of three or more items.

    3. It is important to use the correct hyphen or dash as they have different meanings and there are rules for their use. There are three lengths of what are all commonly called dashes: hyphen (-), en dash (–), and em dash (—). Finding en and em dashes on your keyboard can be difficult, see this article in Proofed for tips or look for ‘insert character’ in your word processor. NB: Use find and replace in your work processor to check for usage.

      In this style guide they will be used as follows:

      1. hyphen (-): The hyphen is used to join words together as with hyphenated compound nouns, e.g., dry-cleaning, jack-of-all-trades, or ninety-nine and other compound words.

      2. en dash (–): This is used to show ranges, for page numbers, connect places, join compound adjectives, and show relationships. (Merriam Webster)

      3. em dash (—): The em dash has several uses. It allows, in a manner similar to parentheses, an additional thought to be added within a sentence by sort of breaking away from that sentence — as done here. (Merriam Webster)

  2. Typesetting punctuation:

    1. Use non‑breaking hyphens in phrases like Co‑creation – Word instructions (word.tips.net) – HTML (toptal.com). A non-breaking hyphen is used to keep the words together when automatic hyphenation wraps characters at the end of a line.

  3. Capitalisation:

    1. Titles

      1. Article titles capitalised as ‘title capitalisation’ which generally means, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are capitalised, see Grammarly.

      2. Running headers, which means sub-headers in an article: Header 2, 3, 4, etc., these only have the first word and then after a colon (:)

    2. Capitalisting terms

      1. Generally we will aim for lowercase words to keep the reading flow easy, follow this rule for movements, schools, etc., (7sage.com). Capitalize the names of movements and schools derived from proper nouns; lowercase those that are not. Unfortunately, there are some exceptions: “Cynic,” “Scholasticism” and “New Criticism,” for example, are capitalized when used as movements. Look a term up in Merriam-Webster if you’re not sure. romanticism; Keynesian economics; cubism; Cynicism. The rule of thumb can also be applied that capitalisation is to get rid of ambiguity. So in our example

      2. For terms like open science, open access, open data, or FAIR data, etc.

        1. FAIR data would have acronym capitalised

        2. Open science, open data, and open access – would all be lowercase

        3. Open source software – here we run into the ‘rival camps’ problem. There is the Free Software Foundation (Richard Stallman) and the Open Source (Eric Raymond) movement who disagree on ideologies. Properly the full term should be use Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) but it’s a mouthful. And there is more to the story. Our ‘get-out’ is to use the pre-compound adjective open-source.

  4. Author biographies: Job or role title to be removed. Biographies for authors are like so: INSERT