Submission Preparation Checklist
As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.- The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
- You acknowledge that if the research qualifies for ethics review by an institutional ethics review body (e.g. IRB), each author’s institution has formally approved or exempted your study.
- The manuscript is anonymized for blind peer review. (Commentary submissions do not need to be anonymized.)
- You acknowledge that if you are invited to revise and resubmit your manuscript, you will be asked to resubmit the manuscript using a template that the journal will provide.
- If this manuscript includes a pre-analysis plan, you have included an anonymized version of the pre-analysis plan linked either in the manuscript or included in an appendix.
- You acknowledge the journal's policy on artificial intelligence. The policy is that the journal generally prohibits the use of AI-generated text and citations in articles, and the use of AI-generated code for analysis. We can make exceptions when the article is about generative AI. In these cases, the use of AI must be disclosed. When in doubt, authors should disclose the use of AI.
Peer-reviewed Articles
The next deadline for peer-reviewed submissions is April 30, 2026. Papers submitted by this deadline will be considered for Trust and Safety Research Conference Proceedings Issue. Click here to start a peer-reviewed article submission.
Authors may also submit letters of inquiry to assess whether the manuscript is a good fit for the journal by following the instructions on the submissions page.
Data Availability Policy
In general, authors should make anonymized data and replication code public in a data repository at the time of publication. We recognize, however, that this may not always be possible, especially with the kinds of sensitive data common in online trust and safety research. In these circumstances, to increase transparency and trust in research findings, we encourage authors to offer managed access to replication materials to qualified researchers. There are many ways this could be done. For example, the author can provide an email address where researchers can request an in-person meeting to reproduce findings on the author’s device where the data reside.
Submission Statistics: Conference Proceedings 2025
- We received 11 letters of inquiry or submissions for peer-reviewed articles. We accepted 2 articles.
- Authors waited 3 days on average between sending us a letter of inquiry and receiving an initial response.
- For authors who submitted articles directly but we declined the submission, we declined the submission in on average 11 days.
- We responded positively to 3 of the 11 letters of inquiry or submissions. We received full article submissions from 4 of the 11, and sent 2 out for review. We accepted all submissions we sent out for review.
- For articles sent to review, authors received reviewer feedback and the Journal’s first decision after on average 36 days.
- The average time between submission and acceptance for all accepted research articles was 75 days.
Commentary
We invite letters, editorials, or other research outputs that are not a good fit for the peer-review section of the journal to be submitted as commentaries. There is no word count minimum nor maximum.
The next deadline to submit a commentary is June 1, 2026. Commentaries submitted by this deadline will be considered for the Trust and Safety Research Conference Conference Proceedings Issue of the Journal of Online Trust and Safety.
To be considered for Trust and Safety Research Conference Proceedings Issue, please click the "Conference Proceedings" box in Catergory Section.
