Submissions

This page is designed to help you ensure your submission is ready for and fits the scope of the journal.

Before submitting you should read over Zygon's 'Author Guidelines' and the information on this page, then register an account (or login if you have an existing account).

Before making a submission to Zygon, please ensure that the below checklist has been followed:

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.
3. All authors qualify as authors, as per the publisher's authorship guidelines, and have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper.
4. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines. Every effort has been made to ensure that author names are removed from the manuscript (following the instructions to ensure anonymous peer review).
5. Ensure that any competing interests have been declared at the point of submission. Please see the publisher's guidelines for declaring a competing interest.
6. Tables are all cited in the main text and are included within the text document.
7. Figures are all cited in the main text and are uploaded as supplementary files. Figures/images have a resolution of at least 150dpi (300dpi or above preferred). The files are in one of the following formats: JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS (to maximise quality, the original source file is preferred).

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

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. If you would prefer to publish your work under an alternative Creative Commons License, please indicate this in the Comments for the Editor box below, providing reasons for your request.

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. 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).

In cases where on December 31, 2023, the copyright was held by the Joint Publication Board of Zygon (which includes the first 13 volumes, published by The University of Chicago Press, whose copyright was assigned to the Joint Publication Board of Zygon in 1978), the copyright has now been assigned to the author(s) under the CC BY 4.0 attribution license. For content published before December 31, 2023, a note has been added by the publisher under 'Rights' on each article webpage stating that copyright rests with the author(s). However, historic article files (before December 31, 2023) will not reflect this change in copyright.

This journal operates a double-anonymous peer review policy for research articles. For more information, please see Zygon's 'Peer Review Process' under 'Journal Policies'. The average time it takes for reviews to be completed for articles submitted to the journal is 3 weeks.

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 articles from January 1, 2024, are available under the open access license CC BY 4.0. Articles published before December 31, 2023, have now had their copyright assigned to the authors where it once was assigned to the Joint Publication Board of Zygon under the CC BY 4.0 attribution license. However, the licenses displayed on historic article files (before December 31, 2023) will not reflect this change.

This journal is published by the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). Unlike many open-access publishers, the OLH 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 ask your librarian to sign up. 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.

The journal is published online, with articles being collated (and repaginated) into four issues per volume (year). Articles are made available as soon as they are ready to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in getting content publicly available.

Thematic Sections of articles are welcomed and will be published as part of a normal issue, but also within a separate section page. Please see the Journal Policies page for further information on Thematic Sections.