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 the guidelines here, then register an account (or login if you have an existing account).

Digital Studies / Le champ numérique is a refereed academic journal that serves as an Open Access area for formal scholarly activity and as a resource for researchers in the Digital Humanities. It is published for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations under the direction of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN) by the Open Library of the Humanities.

Submissions to DSCN focus on the intersection of technology and humanities research. Articles on the application of technology to cultural, historical, and social problems, on the societal and institutional context of such applications, and the history and development of the field of Digital Humanities. Submissions focussing on issues of the practice of the Digital Humanities in a global, multi-cultural, or multi-lingual context are particularly encouraged.

As a rule, submissions to DSCN should be of generalisable import: project reports and technical notes are welcome when they discuss significant milestones in the history and development of the field or are clearly extensible. DSCN rarely publishes criticism of digital objects (e.g. game criticism, literary criticism of electronic art or literature); it does so primarily in the context of special issues.

Digital Studies / Le champ numérique is a Gold Open Access refereed journal. Articles published with DSCN are compliant with most national and institutional Open Access mandates including the Research Council UK (RCUK) Open Access Mandate (required by the HEFC for the post-2014 REF) and the Canadian Draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy.

All articles published by DSCN are published under a Creative Commons 4.0 CC-BY licence (required for compatibility with the RCUK mandate, but not offered by many journals in the Humanities and Social Sciences). This means that authors and institutions may also freely republish their work in their own institutional repositories or personal webpages ("Green Open Access").

Digital Studies / Le champ numérique is a refereed academic journal that serves as an Open Access area for formal scholarly activity and as a resource for researchers in the Digital Humanities. It is published for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations under the direction of the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques (CSDH/SCHN) by the Open Library of the Humanities.

Submissions to DSCN focus on the intersection of technology and humanities research. Articles on the application of technology to cultural, historical, and social problems, on the societal and institutional context of such applications, and the history and development of the field of Digital Humanities. Submissions focussing on issues of the practice of the Digital Humanities in a global, multi-cultural, or multi-lingual context are particularly encouraged.

As a rule, submissions to DSCN should be of generalisable import: project reports and technical notes are welcome when they discuss significant milestones in the history and development of the field or are clearly extensible. DSCN rarely publishes criticism of digital objects (e.g. game criticism, literary criticism of electronic art or literature); it does so primarily in the context of special issues.

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

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 have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper and satisfy the authorship guidelines.
4. The submission file is in Microsoft Word or RTF document file format.
5. Any use of generative Artificial Intelligence in the composition or editing of the submission has been identified and acknowledged (note: the use of AI in the composition and editing of submissions is acceptable, subject to the discretion of the editors; the authors retain responsibility for all content submitted to DSCN including that composed with the assistance of AI).
6. Tables and figures are all cited in the text (e.g., "see Figure 1"). Tables are included within the text document, whilst figure files are uploaded as supplementary files.
7. Figures/images have a resolution of at least 300dpi or above. Each is no more than 20MB per file. The files are in one of the following formats: JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS (to maximize quality, the original source file is preferred).
8. Citations have been formatted according the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition) Author-Date system. Example page here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pOqnNKHlLZn3ykF8Kh4dUCx6YKDRScd5wDRQAXuQrPg/edit?usp=sharing
9. All DOIs for the references have been provided, when available.
10. Footnotes have been incorporated into the main body of the article. There are no solely bibliographic footnotes (i.e., footnotes that contain only a reference to a cited work or URL). DSCN will not publish articles containing solely bibliographic footnotes.
11. The text adheres to all other stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found under the Submissions tab.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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).

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.

The journal operates a modified single-blind peer review process. This means that referees remain anonymous unless they recommend acceptance. Referees who recommend acceptance are identified in the article colophon should the article be accepted for publication.

We encourage referees to review the article as soon as possible, preferably within two to four weeks. Please let us know if you expect to require more than four weeks.

Reviewers are asked to provide formative feedback, even if an article is not deemed suitable for publication in the journal.

The following licences are allowed:

• CC BY 4.0 - More Information  
  Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

This journal 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 signup, institutional commitment is not required to publish with us.

The journal 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  publically available.

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