Author Guidelines

Submissions should be made electronically through this website.

Please ensure that you consider the following guidelines when preparing your manuscript. Failure to do so may delay the processing of your submission. Please note that there are no set article lengths, though authors are encouraged to be as concise as their subject matter and approach allows.

Article types

  • Research articles must present previously unpublished arguments or the outcomes and application of unpublished original research in the application of digital technology to humanities subjects. These should make a substantial contribution to knowledge and understanding in the subject matter. Research articles are refereed.
  • Method articles should outline, test, and discuss the application and significance of new techniques or critique or propose modifications to existing techniques within the digital humanities. In contrast to research articles, method and review articles may discuss techniques that have not yet been applied within the digital humanities, provided their (potential) relevance to the field is (made) clear. Method articles are refereed.
  • Commentary articles should reflect upon or critique current events or methods and approaches related to the intersection of computation and the humanities. Authors interested in submitting a commentary piece should discuss the content with the editor before submitting a manuscript. Commentary articles may be refereed.
  • Review articles can cover topics such as current controversies in or the historical development of the intersection of computation and the humanities. Articles should critically engage with the relevant body of extant literature. Review articles may be refereed.

Peer review

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.

In recognition of the fact that many digital projects are immediately identifiable to experts in the field, the journal operates a modified single-anon peer review process. This means that authors may or may not be identifiable to referees (we encourage but do not require anonymization), but referees remain anonymous unless they voluntarily identify themselves.

We encourage referees to review the article as soon as possible, preferably within four weeks. Reviewing is, however, an inherently slow process as referees can be difficult to find.

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 international team of expert editors.

Copyright notice

All articles published in this journal are published using a CC-BY 4.0 licence. By submitting your article to this journal, you are giving us a right of first publication. Others may reuse this material in accordance with the CC-BY licence. Digital Studies/Le champ numérique is commonly contacted for reprint permission. In keeping with the CC-BY licence, we always give this permission.

In keeping with this licence, 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.

Publication fees

Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 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 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.

Sometimes editors of special issues have access to subvention funds from grants and similar sources of support. While such funds are not required and have no impact on editorial decision-making, the journal welcomes voluntary support and can work with fund-holders to ensure support is compliant with the rules governing their funding.

Publication cycle

Digital Studies/Le champ numérique 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 publicly available.

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

Structure of submissions

Submissions normally should be structured as follows (items in bold are required):

  • Title (entered into submission form)
  • Authors (entered into submission form)
  • Abstract (entered into submission form)
  • Keywords (entered into submission form)
  • Competing interests (entered into submission form)
  • Article (uploaded in Word format only)
    • Title
    • Abstract
    • Keywords
    • Main text
    • Appendices (optional)
    • Acknowledgements (optional)
    • Ethics and consent (if applicable)
    • Competing interests
    • Author contributions (required for multiple-author papers)
    • References

Title

Ensure that your submission has a title that adequately describes its content.

Authors

For each author, provide a name, affiliation, and contact email address.

Provide author names in the same form and order that you wish them to appear in the publication.

Include an affiliation for each author. For authors associated with an organization (e.g., university, research institute, corporation), the affiliation is the name of the organization, plus an optional geographic identifier (i.e., city, region, or country). For authors without an organizational affiliation, please use "Independent Scholar," plus a relevant geographic identifier (i.e., city, region, or country).

Provide an email address, preferably an institutional email.

Abstract

Preface the main text of your article with an abstract of approximately 300 words that summarizes the main arguments and conclusions. This section must have the heading "Abstract" and be easily distinguished from the start of the main text. A good abstract provides readers with a complete overview of the article.

Add the abstract to the article metadata during submission.

Keywords

After the abstract, provide a list of up to six keywords or phrases that describe the subject matter of your submission.

Add the keywords to the article metadata during submission.

Competing interests

Competing and conflicting interests must be declared on the submission form. Guidelines for competing interests can be found here.

Main text

Structure the body of your submission in a logical and easy-to-follow manner. Provide a clear introduction section that affords non-specialists in the subject an understanding of the publication and a background of the issue(s) involved. Divide the remainder of the article into appropriate subdivisions and label these with descriptive headers in sentence case. As a rule, use no more than four levels of subdivision. If you use more than one level of subdivision, indicate this clearly using a style hierarchy (e.g., “Heading 1,” “Heading 2,” “Heading 3” in Word or LibreOffice).

Acknowledgements (optional)

If your article has acknowledgements, place these in a clearly labelled section after the main body and before the references.

Ethics and consent (if applicable)

Research involving human subjects, material, or data must be performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Experiments using animals must follow national standards of care. (Further information is available.)

If your research required approval by an appropriate ethics committee, include a clearly labelled statement after the main body and before the references detailing this approval, including the name of the ethics committee and the reference number of the approval.

Competing interests statement

After the main body and before the references, include a statement of competing interests in one of the following formats:

  • The author has no competing interests to declare.
  • The author has the following competing interests to declare:

Author contributions (multiple-author papers only)

If your article is written by more than one author, describe the contributions of each author using the NISO CRediT contributor role taxonomy. Place this taxonomy in a clearly labelled section after the main body and before the references. Use the following format:

  1. Explain the author order: “Authors are listed in alphabetical order,” “Authors are listed in descending order by significance of contribution,” “Authors are listed in a randomized order,” etc.
  2. Identify the corresponding author: “The corresponding author is XY.”
  3. List the author roles, following each item with the initials of the relevant author(s), separated by commas. Omit any roles not relevant to the article. The following is a hypothetical example using all elements in the typology for a six-author paper written by AB, CD, EF, GH, IJ, and KL.
  • Conceptualization: AB, CD, EF
  • Data Curation: AB
  • Formal Analysis: KL, AB, CD
  • Funding Acquisition: AB
  • Investigation: AB, CD, EF
  • Methodology: CD, EF
  • Project Administration: XY
  • Resources: EF
  • Software: GH, AB, CD
  • Supervision: AB
  • Validation: IJ
  • Visualization: EF
  • Writing – Original Draft: AB, CD
  • Writing – Review & Editing: AB, EF

References

List all references cited within the submission at the end of the main text file. Format these references according to the Chicago Manual of Style (18th Edition) Author–Date system. Authors are strongly encouraged to use a citation manager to manage and format their references (e.g., Zotero, Paperpile, Mendeley), though they should unlink such entries before submission (see your citation manager documentation for details). The journal reserves the right to charge a fee to authors whose references require significant copy editing, formatting, and/or research during production.