Working with our Editors

First draft

If your outline has been greenlit, congratulations! Please share your first draft through Google Doc when you are ready. Routine copyediting involves a round of fact checking and a basic grammar review. We will also ask you to clarify specific sentences if we feel that doing so will help the reader’s understanding.

Depending on your writing experience and your topic’s complexity, you might decide to request additional help from us. We are happy to help you delete redundant phrases, make suggestions on how to address a query, or support you in any other way you like. Let us know If there is a section that requires our attention.

Generally speaking, these are the annotations you can expect from us:

1. Please reconcile – a particular detail

2. Please fix – a factual error

3. Please clarify – a concept

We respect your content and voice. Unless we see an obvious grammatical error such as subject-verb agreement, we will not edit the original writing. You have full autonomy over how the query is addressed.

Cross-disciplinary review panel

The research will then go through a cross-disciplinary review panel, where experts from different fields will be asked to provide feedback so we can acquire a more holistic understanding of the validity and impact of your work. The first round of reviews will always happen internally by at least two of our researchers to speed up the review process. The question our reviewers ask is: has the author made a compelling argument beyond a reasonable doubt? This is in contrast to more conservative standards which requires authors to prove beyond a shadow of doubt. To be more specific, we are expecting to see research of the highest academic rigor within real world constraints on topics where preventive action is critical, and the need for quality insights justifies some speculative or forward-looking components. We will then consult external experts if there are parts we are unsure about. As per our editorial policies, this process is anonymized and the external reviewer will not know the names of the authors. We decided on this process after carefully considering the balance between the speed and accuracy of insights needed to take action. Please talk to your editor if you have any questions or concerns.

Second or third draft

You then have the opportunity to respond to the feedback. Hopefully, all of the earlier queries will be resolved. If some concerns persist, we will suggest ways to address it and to help move the conversation forward. We will then confirm a final draft for publication when the draft is satisfactory. We try our very best to make this experience a positive one. However, we also understand that some times things just do not work out whether it is because of time constraints or other real world constraints. We may decline to publish the article if we believe there are irreconcilable differences though this is rare.

We hope you have a wonderful publication experience with us - thank you for considering Unbuilt Labs.