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All commentaries on your article will be posted as they are received to a hidden URL only accessible to the Authors and Editors. Authors are notified of this hidden URL once the commentary invitations have been sent. Please note that even though all commentaries are posted, no commentary is officially accepted until the Editor in charge has formally reviewed it and notified both you and the Editorial Coordinator that it has been accepted. This will be done after the grace period for late commentaries has expired. We invite you to use the interval until the final commentary acceptance to begin to compose your response, with the caution that some commentaries may be rejected, some may undergo substantial editing, and some may be added right up until the final date. In addition, you may feel that some of the commentaries should not be accepted for some reason (e.g., quality, relevance) or should perhaps have particular sections scrutinized by the editor. You are encouraged to communicate any such concerns to the Editor, but with the understanding that the final decision must rest with BBS.
Clearly, the authors must be allowed the liberty to express and
defend themselves as they see fit, but out of consideration for the reader
(who must assimilate all this material), and in order to derive benefit
from BBS experience so far, we make the following suggestions:
(a) The multiple commentaries, appearing alphabetically rather than in terms of subject matter, present the reader with the problem of integration. Optimally, this should be provided by the author's formal response. Many authors have found it useful to organize their responses around specific topics that have suggested themselves in the commentary. A table classifying the commentaries according to these topics as well as informative section headings has often been found to be most useful. In addition, any general and integrative observations that suggest themselves are very helpful to the reader and help to place the author back in the central locus that he is meant to occupy in an Open Peer Commentary. A serene tone is best; do not trade barbs. Rather than matching the tone of a response you find intemperate, personal or offensive, notify the Editor of your concerns as described above.
(b) The commentaries tend to place the reader in a position of waiting for the other shoe (or, more properly, shoes) to drop. It is highly advisable therefore not to leave any specific nontrivial queries or criticisms unanswered. We would ask that you cite every commentary at least once, for example, to rebut some specific claim, to answer with an extended argument, or simply to classify it into a set of responses raising similar points.
(c) The response should provide an integration and an overview. It should avoid becoming a haphazard pastiche of replies to random points, but it is nevertheless important that specific replies should be addressed to specific commentators. To aid the reader in cross-referring, you should put the first instance of any commentator's name in each paragraph of the response in boldface. This way the reader impatient to hear a particularly profound shoe drop can cross-refer directly from the commentary he is reading to a quick scan of the response to determine whether the author has replied to his satisfaction.
In summary, the optimally organized response will represent an appropriate balance, integrating the general themes in the commentaries and providing specific, thorough replies to the substantive points made, each point prominently identified by indicating the names of the commentators who made them.
The preferred length of a BBS Response is about 8-12,000 words; it should not exceed half the length of the target article. Please supply a distinctive and representative (keyword-indexable) title and an abstract of approximately 60 words, summarizing as specifically as possible the content of your contribution.
We prefer that your Response be submitted in MSWord format placed as an email attachment to bbs@bbsonline.org. (BBS may also accept RTF, HTML or text files.)
Figures may be in JPEG, GIF, TIFF or EPS format. Depending on the quality of the images, TIFF or EPS format may be required.
All figures, tables and equations must be placed where you would like them to appear in print, at the proper location in the document with the corresponding figure captions below (or above the tables).