Policies for BMessays 2022

Who Can Submit

BMessays 2022 is only accepting submissions from undergraduate science students currently enrolled at Western University.

Rules

Number of entries

One entry per author. Subsequent entries by the same entrant will be disqualified.

Length

The word count will be adhered to rigorously.

Format

Print entries must be typed in English and double-spaced.

The title of the submission must appear on the first page of each entry but, to ensure that judging of the entries is blind, the author’s name must not appear anywhere on the text.

Judging

All entries will initially be judged by a panel of student judges, who will select the semi-finalists. The winning entries will be chosen by our expert judges, who are professors, university faculty members, or librarians.

Find out more about our judges (stay tuned - information will be out soon).

All decisions made by judges are final.

Removal

A paper may be updated or removed from public view by sending a request to the system administrator at squres55@uwo.ca. However, a citation to the original version of the paper will always remain on the site.

Author Review

OPTION 1 (author review):

Authors are asked to review PDFs created from their papers within 5 days of being sent the PDF. At this stage, we're unable to make any changes beyond the rare error that occurs in PDF conversion.

OPTION 2 (no author review):

Authors do not have an opportunity to approve papers they have submitted prior to them becoming publicly available on the site; therefore, please be sure that the paper is ready for public distribution.

Rights and Permissions

Before submitting a paper to the repository, please be sure that all necessary permissions have been cleared. You retain the copyright to your paper and grant us the nonexclusive right to publish this material, meaning that you may also publish it elsewhere.

In this open access repository, authors retain copyright. To easily show readers what can be done with these essays, we recommend using a Creative Commons license.

We recommend adding the most permissive license CC BY 4.0 which means that you must be attributed and receive credit for your writing.

However, there are other licenses which are less permissive and my also be applied

For more on selecting a Creative Commons license please refer to the license chooser and if you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to contact a librarian.

It is necessary that you agree to the terms of publishing in the repository listed in the author agreement.

Express Agreement

Entry is taken to be express agreement to all competition rules by participants.

For more information, contact the organizers Saniyah Qureshi or Ronnie Du via email at squres55@uwo.ca or gdu6@uwo.ca.