Preparing your materials

JRS Notes for Contributors (242 KB).

JRS Notes for Book Reviewers (242 KB).

JRS Policy Statement (121 KB).

To view the PDF files linked above, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader.

THE JOURNAL OF ROMAN STUDIES

All general enquiries should be addressed to the Editor, Professor Myles Lavan ([email protected]), University of St Andrews, UK.

Correspondence relating to reviews should be addressed to the Reviews Editor, Professor Neville Morley ([email protected]), Library of the Hellenic and Roman Societies, Senate House, Malet Street, London, WC1E 7HU, UK.

POLICY STATEMENT

The Journal of Roman Studies (JRS) has appeared annually for over a century, and is recognised internationally as one of the premier journals in its field. The Journal publishes papers in the wide field which the Roman Society was established to promote, namely ‘the study of the history, archaeology, literature, and art of Italy and the Roman Empire, from the earliest times down to about A.D. 700’. JRS welcomes submissions from across the full range of that field, including interdisciplinary approaches and reception. The key criterion for publication is that papers make a fresh and significant contribution to the understanding of the Roman world, and have the potential to stimulate further discussion. JRS also publishes Review Articles, surveying recent developments, and reviews of a wide selection of important new books in all scholarly languages.

SUBMISSION: Review Articles and reviews are commissioned by the Reviews Editor. Papers primarily concerned with the archaeology of Roman Britain should be sent in the first place to Britannia; those concerned with the archaeology of the Roman Empire at large are equally welcomed by JRS. The Editor will consider research papers of up to 15,000 words in length, including notes. Longer papers are accepted only in exceptional circumstances, and should only be submitted after discussion with the Editor. There is no minimum length: authors are expected to write concisely and the Journal welcomes papers of 10,000 words or less, so long as they address issues of general importance. All papers should be carefully thought through, with clear statement of the argument and of its broader significance, and adequate signposting to the reader of the steps in the argument. Papers should so far as possible be accessible to non-specialists. The language of publication is English, and we expect the English of submitted articles to be reasonably fluent. Please note that the Journal does not reprint material substantially published elsewhere (including online and/or in other languages, whether in original form or revised); nor will it accept papers under consideration elsewhere. Given the expectations of rigour and significance, we will not normally accept more than one submission from a given author in any twelve-month period. Submission is by e-mail to the Editor. Documents should be submitted in Word. All intending contributors must read the detailed instructions on format and style available online on Cambridge Core at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-studies/information/author-instructions/preparing-your-materials. The print volume is scheduled to appear in November each year. Individual articles appear earlier on FirstView.

EDITORIAL PROCEDURE: The Journal is run by an Editorial Board (for membership see Society’s website https://www.romansociety.org/). Submissions which are clearly not suitable for the Journal are declined at the initial review stage on the joint decision of the Editor and one further member of the Editorial Board (who receives the submission in anonymised form). If an article is declined at the initial review stage, the author may expect to be notified within two weeks. All other submissions are circulated at the Editor’s discretion to a minimum of two academic referees, at least one of whom will normally be a member of the Board; where appropriate, submissions may also be assessed by other specialist readers. In order to ensure maximum impartiality, all submissions are circulated to reviewers (including to those on the Board) without indication of authorship. The process of refereeing necessarily takes time, but authors may expect to receive a verdict within four to five months of submission. The Journal does not currently have a backlog of papers awaiting publication. Detailed comments are normally sent only to authors of submissions which have been sent for full peer review, or which are thought suitable for resubmission. Authors are frequently invited to revise submissions in the light of such comments.

ELECTRONIC MATTERS: The Society’s website (www.romansociety.org) gives the table of contents and abstracts of all papers in the Journal. Recent issues of the Journal of Roman Studies can be accessed online via Cambridge Core by subscribers at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-studies. Once editing is complete, individual papers or reviews may be accessed by subscribers via FirstView in advance of the printed journal. Appearance on FirstView (with the issuing of a DoI) constitutes formal publication; only the page numeration will differ in the printed version. It is not possible to alter papers or reviews before the Journal is printed. The Society permits JSTOR (a system of electronic archiving) to put on its website back issues of the Journal (for more information see www.romansociety.org).

COPYRIGHT: All authors are required to sign a form assigning the Society an exclusive licence to produce and publish. If a paper includes textual or illustrative material not in the author’s copyright, permission must be obtained from the relevant copyright owner for the non-exclusive right to reproduce the material worldwide in all forms and media. The author is held responsible for paying any fees required as a condition for obtaining such permission. Authors should initially seek the permission of the publisher to reproduce copyrighted material that has been published. For unpublished material, authors should seek permission of the owners, whether individuals or institutions.

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.

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.

ORCID

We encourage 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 can create one by registering directly at https://ORCID.org/register.

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.

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.

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”.

Author Hub

You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.

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.

The Journal of Roman Studies