Cambridge Opera Journal
Editorial Policy
Cambridge Opera Journal is published three times a year, in March, July and November. The editors are Sarah Hibberd (University of Bristol) and Ellen Lockhart (University of Toronto).
For information about submitting a paper, please see Submitting your Materials.
Text Preparation
Articles should typically be between 8,000 and 12,000 words; authors proposing longer or shorter submissions should contact the editorial office.
Authors should submit their text files in Word format via https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/opera
Files should be fully anonymised, double spaced throughout (including notes, etc.). Notes should be numbered consecutively. Italic and bold fonts can be used; right margins should be unjustified. An abstract of no more than 150 words should be included at the beginning of the article. Please attach a title page as a separate file. This should contain name, affiliation and email address, as well as a competing interest statement, a short biography and ORCID ID.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material in which they do not hold copyright and for ensuring that the appropriate acknowledgements are included in their typescript. Full details of the source and the full address of the copyright holder, if this differs, should be provided. For information about seeking permission to use copyrighted material, please see here.
Text Conventions
Articles must be written in English, using British conventions of spelling and punctuation when these differ from American usage, preferring ‘-ise’ to ‘-ize’ forms.
References to notation should follow standard British practice; ie ‘bar’ instead of ‘measure’, ‘crotchet’ instead of ‘quarter note’.
Single quotation marks should be used with double reserved for quotations within quotations. Punctuation that is not part of the quoted material should be outside closing quotation marks, as should footnote indicators. Longer quotations should be indented left without quotation marks and double spaced. Prose citations should be in English unless the original is of particular importance, unpublished or inaccessible, in which case the original should be followed by a translation in parentheses. Verse citations should be in the original language followed by a prose translation in parentheses.
Dates should be on the following model: c.1740, 1840s, 5 February 1943. References should be to: Act I scene 2, op. 1 no. 2 in E major, Ex. 12 and Exx. 12–14, Fig. 3 and Figs. 6–9, motif(s) and leitmotif(s). The following system should be followed for indicating precise pitch: C2 C1 C c c1 c2 c3, etc., where c1 is middle C.
Sample footnotes (please do not abbreviate journal titles):
1. Giusy Pisano, Une archéologie du cinéma sonore (Paris, 2004), 24.
2. Pierre Citron, ‘The Mémoires’, in The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz, ed. Peter Bloom (Cambridge, 2000), 125–45, at 132.
3. Ellen Lockhart, Animation, Plasticity, and Music in Italy, 1770–1830 (Berkeley, 2017).
4. Victor Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, trans. Alison Anderson (Chicago, 2008).
5. Susan Rutherford, ‘Voices and Singers’, in The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies, ed. Nicholas Till (Cambridge, 2012), 128.
6. Jean Mongrédien, Le Théâtre-Italien de Paris de 1801 à 1831: chronologie et documents, 8 vols. (Lyon, 2008), VII: 265–6.
7. Steven Rumph, ‘The Sense of Touch in Don Giovanni’, Music and Letters 88/4 (2007), 561–88.
8. Claudio Vellutini, ‘Cultural Engineering: Italian Opera in Vienna, 1816–1848’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2015).
9. Sandro Corti, ‘Duprez, Gilbert’, Grove Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/08364.
10. Ryan Thompson, ‘Operatic Conventions and Expectations in Final Fantasy VI’, paper presented at the 8th Conference of Music and the Moving Image, New York, 31 May 2013.
11. Daniel J. Wakin, ‘The Multiplex as Opera House: Will They Serve Popcorn?’, New York Times (7 September 2006).
12. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect, 87.
13. Vellutini, ‘Cultural Engineering’, 45n2.
14. Nicholas Payne, ‘The Business of Opera’, in The Cambridge Companion to Opera Studies, ed. Till, 53–69.
Publishing ethics
Author should check Cambridge Opera Journal's Publishing ethics policies while preparing their materials.
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Competing Interests
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.
Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.
If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
ORCID
We require all corresponding authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:
- Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
- Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
- Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.
See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
If you don’t already have an iD, you will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.
If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.
ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.
Supplementary materials
Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.
Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.
Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.
Author Hub
You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.