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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.

Proposal Submission Policy

At InfoQ, our mission is to provide a platform for a wide range of expert voices and ensure our readers always receive fresh, practitioner-driven perspectives.

We manage hundreds of article submissions per month, and currently, only about 10% of the articles submitted make it to publishing. To ensure our team can give each proposal a thorough and fair evaluation and give every author a fair chance to be heard, we have established the following submission guidelines.

Submission Frequency & Eligibility

To maintain a diverse contributor base rather than focusing on repeated contributions from the same authors, the following limits apply:

• One Proposal at a Time: We accept one article proposal per author at a time, regardless of the topic. This includes proposals for articles co-authored with others.
• Quarterly Limit: We accept a maximum of one article proposal per quarter from the same author.
• Consecutive Declines: We allow a maximum of three total proposal reviews per author. If a third consecutive proposal is declined, we will not review further proposals from that author for the remainder of the calendar year.

Maximizing Your Chance of Acceptance

Meeting the eligibility criteria above is the first step, but acceptance is based on the quality and relevance of your ideas, as well as the article's content, argumentation, and overall execution. To ensure the best chance of having your article accepted:

• Align with our core mission: We look for timely, educational, and marketing-free content from current domain practitioners and based on real-world experience.
• Provide complete information: Ensure your proposal contains all the details required in the Submitting Proposals section below.

Submitting Proposals

All contributed content we publish must be original. We do not publish posts that have already been 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. Or, you can use our form for article submissions.

• If you have already written your article:

  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 proceeding. The outline and abstract need not be formal, but they should convey enough information for the editorial team to easily evaluate your idea.

Regardless of whether you submit an actual draft or just the preliminary outline, make sure to include the following additional information along with your submission:

• Is this article new and original and not published elsewhere on the web?
• The proposed article title
• What is the topic focus?
• Who is the target reader for the article?
• Technologies and tools discussed in the article — please include a list.
• 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?
• Is this article based on real-world project experience?
• Any case studies and use cases covered in the article? Please provide a list.
• Are any code examples included? Please mention what they are about.
• The five key takeaways of the article — these 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; a reader 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 confirmation that you have read our AI usage policy.
• A confirmation that you have read our Image & Legal Responsibility policies
• Full names of all authors/ co-authors of the article.
• A brief (one paragraph) biography showcasing your professional experience and expertise in the topic. Include a link to your LinkedIn or other professional profile. Please make sure to include all co-author names and bios.
• Author contact information: email address. InfoQ must be in direct contact with the authors, as we don't publish content on someone’s behalf without their written confirmation first. Please be sure to include all author names and contact information.
• 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).

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]"

Our approach to generative AI in articles: A guide for InfoQ Contributors

At InfoQ, we are committed to publishing deep technical content from real-world practitioners. We recognise that generative AI is a powerful new tool, and we want to be clear about how it can be used when creating content for our audience.

Our core principle is simple: AI is a support tool, but human expertise must drive the content. Your unique insights, experience, and critical judgment are what our readers value most.

If you are considering submitting an article to InfoQ, here’s what you need to know about using generative AI.

You are fully responsible for your content

As the author, you are accountable for the accuracy, originality, and quality of everything you submit. Any output from an AI tool (text, code, facts) must be considered untrustworthy until you have personally and rigorously verified it.

How you can use AI (acceptable uses)

You are welcome to use generative AI as a creative partner or productivity tool for tasks such as:

• Brainstorming & ideation: Generating initial ideas, exploring different angles, or creating outlines.
• Feedback: Using AI as a persona (e.g., "Act as a junior developer reading this, what questions would you have?") to identify gaps.
• Drafting assistance: Improving the clarity, flow, and grammar of your human-written drafts. Basic tools like Grammarly are perfectly acceptable.
• Title & subheading suggestions: Generating ideas for you to choose from and refine.

What isn't allowed

• Full AI generation: Submitting articles or substantial sections that are written entirely by AI is strictly prohibited. The core of the work must be yours.
• Replacing your expertise: Relying on AI for core technical explanations or complex code where your deep human understanding is required.

Transparency is key: disclose your AI use to InfoQ

This is our most important rule. You must inform InfoQ about any generative AI tools you used and how you used them during the creation process. For example, "I used ChatGPT for my initial outline and Grammarly for grammar checks." This transparency is crucial for our editorial review process.

Our editorial review and reader disclosure

Our editors will critically review all AI-assisted content to ensure it meets InfoQ's high standards for technical validity and originality. If AI has provided substantial assistance in drafting the article, we will add a standardized disclosure notice to the published piece to maintain transparency with our readers.

This balanced approach enables our contributors to utilize innovative tools responsibly, ensuring that InfoQ remains a trusted source of expert-driven content for the global software development community.

Images included in your work: Copyright, Usage Rights, and Author Liability

Please read this section carefully. By submitting an article, you are attesting that all included content complies with this policy.

DO NOT include any imagery (images, diagrams, screenshots, etc.) in your submission unless you can confirm you possess the necessary legal rights:

• Original Creator: You personally created the image/diagram.
• Permissive License/Public Domain: The image has verifiable, free-to-use rights (license and source must be cited).
• Written Permission: You have explicit, written consent from the copyright holder (documentation must be provided with your submission).

Legal Responsibility and Indemnification

By submitting visual content, you, the author, assume full and exclusive legal responsibility for ensuring all necessary permissions and usage rights are secured.

• Financial and Legal Liability: In the event of any claim, suit, demand, or damages arising from copyright infringement related to unauthorized imagery you submit, you will be held solely legally and financially responsible.
• Indemnity Obligation: You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless C4Media Inc. (including its employees, affiliates, and agents) against all losses, liabilities, costs, damages, and reasonable attorneys' fees and expenses associated with any such claim.
• Consequence: Any imagery violating this policy will be immediately removed, and the author will be notified that future submissions may be subject to additional scrutiny.

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.