Submissions

This page is designed to help you ensure that your manuscript is ready for submission to the journal.

Before submitting, please make sure that your research fits the 'Focus and Scope' of the journal, that it adheres to the 'Author Guidelines', and that the below 'Submission Checklist' has been followed.

Before submitting you should register an account (or login if you have an existing account) to begin the process.

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

1. The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
2. Any third-party-owned materials used have been identified with appropriate credit lines, and permission obtained from the copyright holder for all formats of the journal. The journal requires authors to secure any permissions for the reproduction of images as figures within articles that are currently licensed to be reproduced under restrictive terms (e.g., an artist's estate, archive or gallery). Evidence of any granted permissions will need to be shown to the Editorial Team prior to an article's publication in the journal. Permission to reproduce images must be obtained from the copyright holder prior to submission, and details of the permissions obtained, including a copy of any agreed licensing terms, should be included with your submission. Image permissions should permit open access publication with no restrictions on duration of use or recurring renewal costs.
3. All authors have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper and satisfy the Author Guidelines.
4. The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
5. All DOIs for the references have been provided, when available.
6. Tables and figures are all cited in the text. Tables are included within the text document, whilst figures are uploaded as supplementary files.
7. Figures/images have a resolution of at least 150dpi (300dpi or above preferred). Each is no more than 20MB per file. The files are in one of the following formats: JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS (to maximise quality, the original source file is preferred).
8. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found under the Submissions tab. Any competing interests have been acknowledged in accordance with our Competing Interests policy. Every effort has been made to ensure that author names are removed from the manuscript (following the instructions to ensure an anonymous review).

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

This journal recommends that authors retain their copyright via a CC BY 4.0 attribution license. This means that users accessing the work must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. They may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses them or their use of the work. No additional restrictions, however the user may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

All submissions are initially assessed by an Editor, who decides whether or not the article fits the scope of the journal and is suitable for peer review. Submissions considered suitable are assigned to one or more independent experts, who assess the article for clarity, validity, and sound methodology.

The journal operates a double-anonymous peer review process, meaning that authors and reviewers remain anonymous for the review process. The review period is expected to take around six weeks. Reviewers are asked to provide formative feedback, even if an article is not deemed suitable for publication in the journal.

Based on the reviewer reports the editor will make a recommendation for rejection, minor or major revisions, or acceptance. Overall editorial responsibility rests with the journal’s Editor-in-Chief, who is supported by an expert, international Editorial Board.

Further information on the peer review process for Marvell Studies can be found on the 'Journal Policies' page.

This journal is published by the Open Library of Humanities. Unlike many open-access publishers, the Open Library of Humanities does not charge any author fees. This does not mean that we do not have costs. Instead, our costs are paid by an international library consortium.

If your institution is not currently supporting the platform, we request that you use our 'Recommend Us' tool. The OLH is extremely cost effective and is a not-for-profit charity. However, while we cannot function without financial support and we encourage universities to sign up, institutional commitment is not required to publish with us.

Authors who have access to institutional funds or grant funding earmarked for Open Access publication (via a research grant or through their institution's department or library) are kindly asked to use those funds to cover the £450 Voluntary Author Contribution (VAC) of their publication in Marvell Studies. If you do not know about your institution’s policy on open access funding, please contact your departmental/faculty administrators, grant officer, and institution library, as publication funds may be available to you.

We intentionally use the term Voluntary Author Contribution (VAC) to sharply distinguish this from an Article Processing Charge (APC), a fee that is required for publication at most Gold Open Access journals. Marvell Studies is emphatically a Diamond Open Access journal: it does not charge obligatory fees to either readers or authors, in the interest of scholarly equity. The VAC, if the author is able to make one, would cover publication costs (editorial processes; web hosting; indexing; marketing; archiving; DOI registration etc.) which in turn helps the OLH's model to fund even more articles for publication. This approach maximises the potential readership of publications and helps the journal to be run in a sustainable way.

The VAC is genuinely voluntary. Whether or not the author is able to contribute makes absolutely no difference to editorial decision-making on the submission. For further information on VACs, please see the publisher's VAC policy.

The journal is published online as a continuous volume and issue throughout the year. Articles are made available as soon as they are ready to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in getting content publically available.

Special collections of articles are welcomed and will be published as part of the normal issue, but also within a separate collection page.