Content Submission Guidelines

Introduction

onesixsigma.com maintains a varied and comprehensive knowledge library intended to keep the Business Improvement professional fully informed and up-to-date. As such, we are pleased to accept submissions for publication as white papers, articles or case studies about all aspects of Six Sigma, Lean, and other Business Improvement methodologies, or similarly relevant topics.

The subject areas we cover are expansive, and the level of experience of our readership varied, and as a result if you believe you have something that may be of interest to us, then please don’t hesitate to submit it. If it is relevant, then we are interested. If it isn’t relevant, then we may be able to suggest ways for making it so.

However, there are some guidelines you should follow, and they are fully outlined below, but the main points can be summarised as:

• We will not publish derogatory material of any form.
• Submitted content must be relevant to the target audience of business improvement professionals.
• We will not publish blatant advertisements.
• All content must be your own work, and all included images must be approved by the copyright holder.
• We ask for a period of exclusivity; see below for details.
• We reserve the right to edit your work for grammatical or thematic purposes.
• We will not change technical details and are not responsible for the accuracy therein.

In the first instance, you should contact our Content Editor using the form on this page or the contact us link at the top of the page. He will then advise you on what to do next.

Full guidelines

Before submission:

• Submitted content must be respectful, accurate and non-derogatory. We will not publish content (be it a news item, article, white paper or case study) that in our view relies heavily on conjecture or personal opinion, particularly if it is derogatory towards persons or organisations. onesixsigma.com is a professional website, and as such any opinions expressed within content should be relevant, constructive, business-like and based on professional experience and/or proven fact.
• Content should be relevant and add something to the material already available. onesixsigma.com provides information resources for the business improvement professional and all content should be relevant to this. The nature of the business improvement industry is such that certain topics can be repeatedly visited, as different individual’s experiences of the same subjects can still prove useful and relevant. However, before you submit (or preferably, write) content, you should check to see if a similar piece has been published on the site, and if so, if you believe that you can add to the debate. This is more relevant to content that has been published recently. Also, we often publish special reports on distinct subjects: if your submission covers this area, you should be aware that although there’s every chance we will still publish it, we will probably want to delay publication.
• We will not publish material which we deem to be little more than an advertisement for a company or product. Whilst we are happy to publish press releases on behalf of our partners promoting their services and products, content published as part of the library must contain information that we believe will be of interest to the business improvement professional, particularly with regard to expanding their knowledge. This does not mean that your content is not allowed to mention organisations or their products or services; this information is quite often extremely relevant. If you would like to publish a press release, this is done within the News section of the website and is a service available to our partners. To find out more, follow this link.
• The technical level of content should be carefully thought about before writing. onesixsigma.com caters to professionals of all levels of experience, and therefore content should be written with those of lesser experience in mind, out of courtesy. However, it is also accepted that content of a technical nature should not be bogged down too much in explanation of basic aspects of business improvement, and a certain elementary understanding should be assumed. Deciding the nature of your content, as detailed in the point below, should help:
  • An “article” is defined for our purposes as a general content piece aimed at all levels of competency and of interest to a large proportion of the community.
  • A “White paper” is of a more technical nature, usually containing implicit, detailed statistical and empirical data, aimed at experienced professionals and usually pertaining to a singular topic or tool.
  • A “Case Study” or “Project” is a historical account of an implementation, deployment or tool usage supported by in-depth details of the tools applied and lessons learned that is technical in nature, but usually still largely understandable to a relative novice.
  The length of Articles and White Papers depends entirely on the individual content submitted. Likewise, Case Studies can be as long as they need to be to sufficiently outline the project. However, we may ask for content we deem over-long to be cut. As a guide, we would reasonably expect an Article to be 750-1500 words in length, a White Paper to be around 1000-3000 words in length, and a Case Study around 2000-3000 words. If content is longer than this, we will usually publish it in more than one part over more than one day.
• We positively encourage the use of graphical elements, i.e. Powerpoint slides, photos etc. These not only greatly assist understanding, but break up the flow of text and, particularly in long pieces, are more aesthetically pleasing. However, we do insist that they be either copyright-free, or that permission has been sought from the copyright owners for their use. The burden for seeking this permission is with the author, not onesixsigma.com, and we will immediately remove any content containing copyrighted images if requested to do so by the copyright owner.
• We do not check content for technical accuracy in any way. However, our readership almost certainly will, so we recommend you painstakingly check all technical details for accuracy.
• In summary: keep it professional, keep it accurate, keep it relevant.

Upon submission:

• Content should be submitted as a Word document and accompanied by a profile of the author.
• Unfortunately, we do not pay for the content we publish, but apart from having your words read by your peers in the industry, and giving exposure to the topic/industry/organisation you write about, we also offer the author their own profile upon onesixsigma.com, and include them within the onesixsigma.com contributor’s database. We use this database for planning content, knowledge gathering and networking opportunities. Note that this database is completely private and details are not given to any external person or organisation.
• All content should be sent to our Content Editor, Matthew Moore. using the form on this page, or via the contact us link at the top of this page. We reserve the right to edit your work, but only for grammatical and thematic purposes; that is to say, we will correct any spelling mistakes, check the grammar, and may tweak certain parts so it fits with the tone of the rest of the site. We will not make any changes of a technical nature. Note that after we have made any changes, we will do our best to seek your approval of them before we publish the content. If you do not want a single word of your submission changed or altered in any way, please explicitly tell us.

Upon publication:

• We will inform you when your content is published. We encourage you to check it at your earliest convenience, in case there are any errors that have slipped past yours and our checking procedures.
• We ask for a period of exclusivity on the content. That is to say, we ask that the content is not published anywhere else, in either electronic or print form, for the following period from the first day the content is published on the site:
  • For Europe – 90 days;
  • For the rest of the world - 30 days
• After these periods, onesixsigma.com retains non-exclusive rights to publish the content. By submitting your content for publication to us, you are signaling your agreement to these conditions.
• Further to the above, by submitting your content for publication, you are certifying that you are the author and sole owner of the work, as submitted, and that we may reproduce, distribute, publish, edit, modify, and otherwise use the material as we see fit. You further indemnify onesixsigma.com and its employees against any legal action, damages and ramifications as a result of using the material.
• Unless you tell us otherwise, we will pass on to you any communications sent to us by anyone who expresses an interest in your content. We do this as a networking service, and accept no liability for doing so. We will, of course, respect your wishes for this information to remain private if you so wish.