ISA Interchange

ISA Interchange Blog Submission Guidelines

At the International Society of Automation (ISA), we are committed to helping automation professionals automate a better world. We're grateful that you're interested in sharing what you know with our members and the broader automation community. To ensure that all content associated with ISA remain easy to read, unbiased, and useful, we ask that you review the following guidelines thoroughly before submitting your article for consideration.

Your Submission: What Works

1. Everything you submit must be original content. You must write it yourself or have express permission to publish it under your name. If you have written an article that is published elsewhere (such as a company blog) before the ISA blog, you must have express permission to republish it with us.
• We do not permit plagiarized content. We will automatically reject articles if they are found to be plagiarized. Furthermore:
• Any published articles found to be plagiarized will be immediately deleted
• Any contributor found to be plagiarizing risks having their submissions automatically rejected without further review
2. Content submitted to the ISA blog must be relevant to our members, interesting, informative, and broadly related to industrial automation. The related topics we cover can be found in the "Categories" dropdown menu on this blog.
3. Articles should be at least 300 words long. Shorter content may be accepted on a case-by-case basis on other ISA channels, such as social media. However, we cannot make exceptions on the blog.
4. Articles must be written in English and have legible grammar and spelling. Because English is the de facto language for writing about automation across much of the world, English will reach the largest number of readers. Unfortunately, we do not have the bandwidth at this time to review and publish articles in other languages. Our editors are happy to clean up grammatical and spelling errors, but excessive mistakes may result in your article being rejected.

Your Submission: What Doesn't Work

The following topics, on the other hand, are not well-suited to the ISA blog:

• SEO techniques that are not considered best practices, such as keyword stuffing, are not acceptable on the ISA blog
• Product reviews
• Press releases/product announcements
• Ads for products and professional services. If you are interested in partnering with ISA to promote your product or service, we would be happy to introduce you to one of our account executives.
• Advertorial content. Advertorial content may be selectively deleted by our editorial team at their discretion and includes:
• Overtly marketing-oriented links to products and/or professional services
• Non-technical content that only applies to paid/closed source/proprietary software or systems
• Opinion-based/editorial articles solely describing benefits of a product, service, etc., without touching on the drawbacks
• Lists or summaries of product features
• Lists or summaries of problems that a product solves
• Any content irrelevant to the professional lives of our members
• Blurbs or incomplete articles

Additionally, please note that all articles submitted to the ISA blog are subject to editing by our team of editors and peer reviewers. We will do our best to notify you in a timely manner when your article is accepted for publication, typically within 10 business days of receipt.

With that, thank you for your interest in contributing to the ISA blog! If you have any questions about articles, content, or submission guidelines, please email kphelps@isa.org.

These guidelines were adapted, with generous permission, from DZone.com's technical article submission guidelines.

Please feel free to submit your article for consideration below, or use ISA's Volunteer Content Contribution Form to indicate your interest.