ESTONIAN ACADEMY
PUBLISHERS
eesti teaduste
akadeemia kirjastus
PUBLISHED
SINCE 1984
 
Oil Shale cover
Oil Shale
ISSN 1736-7492 (Electronic)
ISSN 0208-189X (Print)
Impact Factor (2022): 1.9

Instructions to Authors

General
The Oil Shale is is an open access journal concerned with geology, mining, genesis, composition, methods of processing and combustion, economics, and utilization of oil shale and bituminous sands, as well as problems of environment protection and history of oil shale industry. See also the Editorial Policy of the Oil Shale.

The manuscript submitted should meet the following requirements:
Language
The Oil Shale publishes papers in English.

The title should be concise but informative. The arrangement of words is important for indexing purposes.
The full name(s), affiliation(s), full address(es), and e-mail address(es) of the author(s) should follow the title of the paper.
At the end of the first page of the paper or in the Covering Letter the corresponding author and his/her e-mail address should be indicated.

View Page

The abstract should be a self-contained summary of the paper, presenting concisely the objectives of the work reported, methodology, results, and conclusions (with no mathematical expressions or reference quotations), not exceeding approximately 100 words in length. At the end of the abstract the keywords should be presented.

All manuscripts submitted to Oil Shale are subject to international critical review. The reviewers act only as advisors, and the final decision concerning the manuscript is on the responsibility of the editors. Authors are responsible for the factual accuracy and substance/subject matter  of their papers.

The introduction should be a review of pertinent work, should cite appropriate references, and should also include a clear statement of the object of investigation.
The length of an article should be maximally 15 pages (including figures, tables and references). The volume of one page is considered to be max 3300 characters with spaces. Each page exceeding this volume shall be liable to a fee to the amonut of 40 EUR per page.

It is essential that the paper would be written in clear, proper English. Manuscripts requiring substantial improvement of the English the language may be returned to the author(s) for revision before the reviewing process. If English is not your native language, we recommend you to ask a native English speaker to read over your manuscript before submitting.
Whenever possible, authors should consult a recent issue of the Oil Shale for style and layout. The editors reserve the right to adjust style to certain standards of uniformity.

Additionally to general types of papers there is opened a new column called Oil Shale News to publish short information concerning dissertations (the title, the author, short description and the link to the printed or online paper), information on new books, on new oil shale fields, technologies, chemical factories, mines, conferences, meetings, etc. From 2011 there is also opened a new column called Historical Review to publish brief accounts or articles about investigations made earlier or information on the topic that is not generally accessible (including books), because it had been published prior to electronic capture of articles, and/or published in languages other than English. The requirements for these two types of submissions are the same as for general papers.

Submission
All correspondence concerning editorial matters (manuscript submission, reviews, etc.) should be sent to the Executive Editor by e-mail.

Manuscripts should be prepared in one of the major word processing formats as Word for Windows (other versions of Word are accepted), or Rich Text Format (RTF). For complicated formulas Equation Editor should be used. The authors are asked not to use specially defined macros. If it has been necessary to define the commands they should be added to the text file.
Electronic submission of figures: preferred file formats are TIFF, BMP, XCL, and CDR. The Editorial Office can refuse from figures presented in file formats other than described above or that have unacceptably low quality.
The text should be double-spaced on sheets of uniform size, with a 3-cm margin at the left. It is not necessary to incorporate any special page layout in the manuscript, only insert hard returns at the ends of paragraphs and headings, subheadings, lists etc. Numbering system of headings and subheadings is the following: 1.; 1.1.; 1.1.1.. Location of the tables, figures or/and illustrations should be indicated in the text in case they are provided with separate files only.

Notation and Abbreviations
Notation must be legible, clear, compact, and consistent with standard usage. All notations should be clearly defined in the text.
Avoid abbreviations in the title and abstract. Use standard abbreviations. The full term for which an abbreviation stands should precede its first use in the text unless it is a standard unit of measurement.
Equations should be numbered consecutively with equation numbers enclosed in parentheses at the right margin of the page. In the text, reference to an equation should be in the form of an equation number enclosed in parentheses.

Illustrations
Provide the illustrations by e-mail. Handwritten lettering and low-quality computer graphics are not acceptable. Line drawings for the figures should be of high contrast (600 dpi), suitable for direct reproduction. Avoid using dense shading for background. The lettering (upper- and lowercase letters, italic, bold) should follow the usage in the text. Use commas to separate units of measurement from the text. Different parts of a figure should be marked by lowercase letters. The size of symbols and lettering after reduction should not be smaller than 1.5 mm.
Plan figures to fit the proportion of the printed page (the maximum type area of the journal is 120 × 200 mm).
Figures should be provided in the original application in which they were created. Computer-generated figures should be saved as follows:

•· for Excel, save as an Excel 97 or a later version worksheet (should contain spreadsheet and embedded chart);
•· for CorelDraw, save as version 6 or a later one;
•· for Adobe Illustrator, save as TIFF or BMP files;
•· for Sigmaplot, files should be pasted into a Word document and saved as Word 97 or a later version.

Do not submit artwork/figures in colour if it is to be published in black and white. Scanned photographs and grayscale figures should be saved as TIFF files with a resolution of at least 300 dpi.
Each illustration must be clearly numbered. The appropriate place for each illustration in the text should be indicated in the margin. All illustrations must have self-explanatory legends. Print legends to illustrations on a separate sheet with double spacing and place it at the end of the paper.
The text, tables, and illustrations should not repeat one another.

Colour illustrations should be in RGB and CMYK mode (resolution at least 300 dpi). Authors will be asked to pay the full cost for reproduction of colour artwork at a rate of EUR 35 for one printed page. Colour figures online will be published free of charge. Further information concerning colour illustrations can be obtained from the Executive Editor.

References
References should be as complete and informative as possible. References to the literature cited should be indicated at the appropriate place in the text. Use abbreviated titles of journals in the list of references. Number references to published works consecutively and insert a numeral in the appropriate place in the text on brackets (e.g. [1]). A list of references in numerical order should appear at the end of the paper, and all references in this list should appear in the text and vice versa.

References should be presented as follows:
(a) For a book:

Gregg, S. J., Sing, K. S. W. Adsorption, Surface Area and Porosity. Academic Press, New
York, 1982.

(b) For articles in journals:

Jaber, J. O., Probert, S. D. Non-isothermal thermogravimetry and decomposition kinetics of two Jordanian oil shales under different processing conditions. Fuel Process. Technol., 2000, 63, 57–70.

(c) For articles in collections:

Shafizadeh, F. Pyrolytic reactions and products of biomass. In: Fundamentals of Biomass Thermochemical Conversion (Overend, R. P., Milne, T. A., Mudge, L. K., eds.). Elsevier, London, 1985, 183–217.

Literature published in a language other than English, including those in Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, etc., scripts:  The official title in English should be given if available. It the article has an English-language summary, the title should be given according to the summary’s. If no official English version is available, the titles of books and articles should be translated into English (with good reason the original name can be presented, but it should be transliterated into Roman script and put in brackets); journal names
should be abbreviated and transliterated into Roman script. If the language of a literature source is other than English, the corresponding note should be made at the end of the reference, e.g. (in Chinese), (in German), (in Russian), etc.

The number of references to electronic materials (except electronic journals) should be reduced to a minimum and will be accepted only in exceptional circumstances. The electronic medium should be specified, e.g., CD-ROM, Diskette, etc. If material is available online, the access mode, address, and date should be given.

No reference to manuscripts will be allowed.

Article publication charges
To partly cover publication costs of the papers, the Estonian Academy Publishercharges a publication fee of €250 per publication of papers up to 20 printed pages. The publication fee of articles up to 20 printed pages will be waived by the Estonian Academy of Sciences to the authors whose work was supported by Estonian granting agencies or other Estonian funding bodies and the authors have explicitly stated this information in the Acknowledgement section. For all longer papers than 20 printed pages an additional page charge of €40 will be requested for each extra page. The Editorial Board has right to release authors from paying publication fee by way of exception. Requests for waivers of publication and/or excess page fees should be presented in the Covering Letter. Herewith, information about support received from the Estonian Academy of Sciences should appear in the Acknowledgements of the article.

Authors will be asked to pay the full cost for reproduction of colour artwork at a rate of €35 for one printed page (online-only colour illustrations are free of charge).

When submitting an article to the Oil Shale, the submitting author must agree to pay the publication fee and state this in the Covering Letter. After acceptance of the article the authors will be asked to pay the publication fee and this payment must be received before the article enters the production cycle. Payment should be made in Euro to the bank account indicated by the Estonian Academy Publishers.

Proofs
Proofs of papers will be sent to the authors before publication (by e-mail). They should be corrected and returned as soon as possible. Alterations and additions can normally be considered at this stage.

Offprints
Payable offprints of an article (minimum 10 copies) can be ordered from the Editorial Office at proof stage.