InfoQ Homepageguidelines

Author Guidelines for InfoQ Articles

Software is changing the world, and InfoQ's mission is to help developers learn and adopt new technologies and practices. We aim to spot emerging trends in software development that we believe have broad applicability and make our community aware of them early. One way we do this is by publishing quality articles.

We think that the story is best told by developer to developer, architect to architect, and team lead to team lead. Therefore, we focus on technical articles written by domain practitioners and experts.

InfoQ readers are senior software engineers, software architects, and team leads typically from Enterprise and mid-sized companies who influence the adoption of innovations and practices. They look to InfoQ for high-quality technical articles that:

• Help them with technical challenges, patterns, and practices
• Understand and validate use cases
• Share valuable learnings and experiences from their peers
• Helps them validate their software roadmap by learning about new trends
• Helps them understand what should be on the radar and what shouldn't
• Identifies clear next steps (actions and signposting)

We carefully curate and peer-review everything we publish, as we strongly believe that the high-quality insights offered by our editors and other contributors have the power to uplift entire communities.

To ensure that your proposal gets the best chance to be accepted for publishing, your article should be:

• Timely - because InfoQ tracks important and significant trends within our respective communities.
• Educational - meaning that they should teach our readers something non-trivial.
• Practical - meaning readers should take away processes and practices that they can apply in their daily work.
• Marketing free - our readers expect InfoQ content to be educational, accurate, technical, and without hidden marketing agendas.

Community and Audience

While software development may constitute a portion of our readers’ overall responsibilities, they often wear multiple hats within their teams. Here are some of their primary day-to-day activities:

• Technical Team Lead
• Overseeing development testing/QA
• Helping dev teams adopt TDD, BDD, and good refactoring practices
• Project management: Ensuring projects are delivered on time and within scope
• Overseeing integration of cross-departmental and B2B systems
• Overseeing operations and ensuring system uptime
• Application design & architecture
• Requirements management: Gathering customer requirements and translating these into technical specifications
• Staying on top of new trends and software technologies so they can provide technical direction internally
• Learning about a range of technologies to guide team development

Personas and Topics

InfoQ focuses on the professional software development market, from top-level architecture and design to development, deployment, and delivery. InfoQ considers each of these in terms of personas. Each persona represents the role the reader serves in their professional work. InfoQ's personas are:

• Development
• Architecture and Design
• AI, ML and Data Engineering
• Culture and Methods
• DevOps

Within these personas are topics of interest. A list of trending topics by persona can be found on the InfoQ home page. Simply hover over a persona to see the correlated topics. So you'll find Java, Kotlin, .NET, C#, Swift, Rust, Go, JavaScript, and other language topics under our development persona. Under AI, ML, and Data Engineering, you'll find articles on artificial intelligence, machine learning, streaming, and so on.

InfoQ's editorial coverage focuses on the technologies within the innovator and early adopter phases of the "Diffusion of Innovations" theory, as well as those in the process of "crossing the chasm". We cover the movement of technologies through these stages in our InfoQ Trends Report (here’s our InfoQ Trends Report dedicated page). We also cover trends in the established major languages and runtimes such as Java and .NET.

Length

Feature-length articles range between 1,500 words and 4,000 words but average between 2,000 and 3,000 words. Below are guidelines for writing InfoQ quality articles, along with the requirements for proposing and submitting articles.

Writing Style

Write your article in a conversational voice, as if you were explaining your concepts to a colleague or peer. Assume your readers have extensive knowledge and they do not need introductory concepts explained. Do not pad your articles with excessive descriptions; please be as concise as possible. Use bullet points to quickly summarize key points. Your readers will appreciate it as it will help them scan articles.

Proposals

All contributed content we publish must be original. We do not publish posts that were already published somewhere else on the Internet for free access.

Send your full article or abstract/outline to editors@infoq.com, and a member of our editorial team will contact you regarding your proposal.

If you have already written your article, simply submit the draft and we will evaluate it.

If you have not already written your first draft, you can send a first outline of the proposed article with a 1-line summary for each section before going forward. The outline and abstract need not be formal, but they should convey enough information for the editorial team to easily evaluate your idea.

Regardless if you submit an actual draft or just the preliminary outline, please include the following additional information along with your submission:

• The proposed title
• Topic focus
• The target reader for the article
• Technologies and tools discussed in the article
• What makes your article different? What is the new approach you are proposing compared to other similar information already published on the web on similar topics?
• Any case studies and use cases covered in the article?
• Are any code examples included?
• The five key takeaways of the article - which should be the most relevant information in the article summarized in five complete, self-standing sentences. They should not be pitches for readers to read the article. Do your best to define specific takeaways from the article. A reader of your article should be able to walk away with a set of actions to perform, a new theory to think about, or a thought-provoking question to answer.
• A brief (one paragraph) biography
• Author contact information - email address. InfoQ would have to be in direct contact with the authors, as we don't publish content on someone’s behalf without their written confirmation first.
• The timeframe in which you plan to submit your completed draft (only add this if you are sending in the preliminary outline and not the actual draft)

Once we receive your proposal, we'll review it and provide feedback on its suitability for InfoQ's audience.

Upon receiving an actual article draft, our review process has 2 stages:

• Initial review – to approve the article in concept. It usually takes within 5 business days for the article to receive a go/no go from our editors.
• Deeper review – if the article gets accepted after the initial review stage. Upon acceptance of your proposal, we will pair you with a technical reviewer. They will perform a deeper review of the article's substance and provide you with iterative feedback. The duration of this process depends on the number of iterations/changes needed between the author and the assigned reviewer to bring the article to the final form. As soon as the article reaches the final form, it is scheduled for publishing.

You will find a list of articles published on our site here: InfoQ articles

Submission and Formatting Guidelines

InfoQ articles are formatted for online reading according to our in-house style. Therefore it is important not to send preformatted documents with complex formatting. Articles can be submitted in plain text, Word, Pages, Markdown, or as a Google Doc. Our editors will remove formatting basic rules (such as font styles) from the text and format it according to our style.

Your document may contain tables, lists, and other elements. Tables will be converted to HTML tables. Numbered or bulleted lists will be converted to HTML-ordered or unordered lists.

Images may be embedded in the document or submitted separately as a JPEG. Images submitted in other formats (such as Tiff) will be converted to JPEG. Diagrams created in a vector graphics program should likewise be output as an image. If you have any questions, please contact the editor working with you.

For educational articles www.infoq.com/articles, we require exclusive publishing rights for a 4-week period from the initial date of publishing.

After this period of time, authors are free to publish the material elsewhere, such as on their personal sites, blogs, or other platforms, provided they include a link back to InfoQ that states, "This article was originally published on InfoQ on [date]"

InfoQ copyright statement

• InfoQ respects the moral rights of any author, therefore, the authors will retain the copyright for any content produced, while InfoQ will retain the distribution rights.
• As the holder of distribution rights, InfoQ is authorized to act on the copyright owner’s behalf to pursue copyright infringements from sites that are copying the content without our permission.
• InfoQ does not agree to any third party reposting in its entirety any work such as but not limited to articles/interviews/news/presentations/mini-books that appear on InfoQ. We permit the posting of a summary and then a link back to the InfoQ landing page.
• InfoQ will remove any article if the author requests that InfoQ do so.