Content Submission Guidelines

Author Submission Guidelines 

Vision Systems Design is a global media source serving engineers and engineering managers at OEMs, system integrators, and end-user organizations who design, develop, manufacture, and integrate components and subsystems for machine vision and image processing.

VSD has served the machine vision and imaging community as the foremost resource for high-quality technical information aimed at the engineering audience for more than 25 years.

 

Subject Matter

Vision Systems Design provides in-depth technical and integration insights focused exclusively on the information needs of machine vision and imaging professionals.

We accept content from outside contributors that is technically oriented and of interest to our audience of engineers and design professionals. Our audience is looking for articles that educate them and help them perform their jobs. Contributed content should be about what, how and why—not a product pitch. We don’t accept contributed content that is commercial or written in a promotional tone.

Q&As, interviews and pieces that "quote" interviewed sources are generally not accepted as contributed pieces. Rather, "Top 10 Tips for Selecting X," "How to Specify an X," "What's the Difference Between X and Y," are good starting points for contributed articles.  

All contributed content must be first-run by Vision Systems Design with 90 days of exclusivity beginning on the date of publication. This means that articles or columns should not have already appeared elsewhere, even on the author’s own website.

Note: You can send a well-crafted pitch in lieu of the full article, if you'd like feedback before putting the time into writing the full piece. However, we only make final decisions about acceptance upon seeing the completed article.

You are not required to be a professional writer. The editorial staff is happy to work with anyone who would like to contribute their expertise.

Length

800-2,000 words

Attribution

Please note where you got outside facts, which should be from the original source.

Text

Articles should be submitted as text files, such as MS Word, and should have no embedded formatting—including embedded footnotes, headlines, or subheads.

Art

Articles should contain two or three pieces of art, such as photos, charts, drawings, graphs, or infographics.

  • Art should be sent as individual files (.jpg, .tif, and native .psd). We can also accept file formats that are compatible with Adobe Photoshop (.bmp, .gif, .pict). 
  • Photos should be at least 1,200 pixels in size (height or width), or a minimum of 3x5 inches @ 300 dpi resolution.
  • Please do not embed art in Word documents, PDFs, or PowerPoint files.

Submissions should include the following:

  • Full text
  • Suggested headline and subheads
  • Art and suggested captions in full sentences
  • A photo of the author
  • A brief bio of the author

We require all authors to sign an electronic contributor’s agreement. Our editors will provide authors with an electronic link to this document.

 

Can I use AI to help write my article?

We seek original expertise in our contributed articles. No more than 20% of your piece may be created by or directly derived from verbiage produced by a generative AI tool. More than 20%, don't bother to submit the article.

Contributors must disclose their use of Generative AI tools to write or otherwise generate content that is intended for publication. Again, no more than 20% of published content should be created by or directly derived from verbiage produced by a Generative AI tool.

If less than 20% of a piece of content is created by or directly derived from verbiage produced by a Generative AI tool, the AI must be cited as a source. This should be accomplished by adding the following note to the end of the piece, in italics: This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence.

For the avoidance of doubt, contributors should not use Generative AI to write or generate content submitted to VSD for publication in its entirety without substantial human validation, editing, or ideas.

VSD may use generative AI-detection tools to evaluate any content submitted for publication. Please note that using tools such as Grammarly to significantly rewrite your text may cause your article to be indentified as AI-written.

 

Other Content Types

VSD also accepts new product announcements, business news and/or story pitches. Our editors use this type of information to create staff-written articles.

For more information or to submit a pitch or article for consideration, reach out to Sharon Spielman, head of content, Vision Systems Design.