Instructions for Authors
Articles should range from 5,000 to 10,000 words (excluding notes). Longer articles will be considered but may be edited for length. The submission should be anonymous throughout the text and notes. Please see Submitting your Materials for detailed instructions and a list of submission files. JSAM does not consider articles that are being considered for publication in another journal.
Formatting Your Article
The Journal of the Society for American Music employs humanities style for citations, following The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition. The submission should use 12-point type and be double-spaced with one-inch margins. Use footnotes for citations and explanatory notes that need not appear in the main body of the article. Provide a complete list of references and a separate discography if appropriate. For detailed information on our language, formatting, and style policies, please see our style guide here.
Figures and Images
All musical examples, figures, tables, and appendices should be numbered and contain a caption. The text should indicate them by use of a callout, e.g., < FIG. 1 ABOUT HERE >, where each item should be placed. Callouts should be placed on a new line after the paragraph where the figure or example is mentioned. A separate Word document listing all captions should be included, including a full citation and permissions information, where relevant, for each. Electronic images should be uploaded separately in high-resolution. Contributors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material for which they do not hold copyright and for ensuring that the appropriate acknowledgments are included in their typescript. The cost of permissions and of reproducing color illustrations will be the responsibility of the author. Charges apply for all color figures that appear in the print version of the journal. At the time of submission, contributors should clearly state whether their figures should appear in color in the online version only, or whether they should appear in color online and in the print version. There is no charge for including color figures in the online version of the journal. If you request color figures in the printed version, you will be contacted by CCC-Rightslink who are acting on our behalf to collect Author Charges. Please follow their instructions in order to avoid any delay in the publication of your article.
JSAM Colloquy Guidelines
JSAM has begun publishing colloquies and roundtables regularly in its issues. These formats will complement its ongoing publication of articles and reviews.
For guidelines and further information, please see here.
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 upload a separate document containing competing interest declarations for all authors that have contributed to the submission. These declarations 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 A is employed at organisation B, Author C is on the Board of company E and is a member of organisation F. Author G has received grants from company H." If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state "Competing interests: The author(s) declare none".
Copyright
The policy of JSAM is that authors (or in some cases their employers) retain copyright and grant the Society for American Music a license to publish their work. In the case of gold open access articles this is a non-exclusive license. Authors must complete an author publishing agreement form once their article has been accepted for publication; the journal is unable to publish the article without this. For information on the agreement form, please see here.
For open access articles, the form also sets out the Creative Commons license under which the article is made available to end users: a fundamental principle of open access is that content should not simply be accessible but should also be freely re-usable. Articles will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution license (CC-BY) by default. This means that the article is freely available to read, copy and redistribute, and can also be adapted (users can "remix, transform, and build upon" the work) for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, as long as proper attribution is given. Authors can, in the agreement form, choose a different kind of Creative Commons license (including those prohibiting non-commercial and derivative use) if they prefer.
For information about seeking permission to use copyrighted material, please see here.
Publishing ethics
Authors should check JSAM's Publishing ethics policies while preparing their materials.
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 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.
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.