Australasian Journal of Philosophy
Instructions to Authors Concerning Submissions
All submissions to the Journal are made via Unsolicited contributions (Articles and Discussion Notes) and Solicited Contributions (Reviews etc.). These must meet the Minimum Standard described below (except that solicited contributions do not have to be made anonymous). Before submitting, please read our editorial policy to determine whether your manuscript is a good fit for the Journal. The details of the reviewing process can be found in our editorial procedures.
Please note: the Journal's editorial office is closed to new submissions over the Australasian summer (typically closing in early December and reopening during February). This is to give the editorial office a chance to take a summer break and to handle any backlog in production or the processing of submissions; it also reduces the demands placed on our referees and associate editors over the holiday period. Dates for each closure period are posted on our submissions platform. Please bear this in mind when planning prospective submissions.
Contents
1. Before Submission
2. Minimum Standard
3. The Submission Process
4. Authorship
5. Journal Style
1. Before Submission
Authors are strongly advised to read the Journal's Editorial Policy, Editorial Procedures and Referees' Instructions pages before contemplating submission of a paper.
2. Minimum Standard
All submissions must be in English, formatted to be easily legible. This means a standard font, with linespacing of at least 1.5, and with margins of not less than 25mm. Any notes should be presented as footnotes, not endnotes, and every manuscript must be accompanied by a final consolidated bibliography matching the manuscript’s in-text citations.
Beyond those basic requirements designed to facilitate refereeing, the Journal imposes no style or formatting requirements on submissions.
For all submissions other than book reviews and book notes, a short but properly informative abstract (maximum 200 words for a full-length paper) at the beginning of the paper is required, followed by 3 to 6 keywords. Please note that the abstract must not merely be repeating a paragraph, say, from within the body of the paper. In other words, the abstract must add something new for readers.
Authors should also take special note of the Journal's policy on word limits: see Editorial Policy.
Typescripts must be carefully proof-read prior to submission so that referees do not have their time wasted in identifying and listing errors. The most common authorial error consists in failing to reconcile in-text citations with the final bibliography.
In order to facilitate dispassionate refereeing, your should prepare your submission for anonymous review. Neither the name(s) of the author(s) nor any institutional affiliation may be shown in the manuscript itself. All unavoidable references to an author's own work(s) must be disguised, either by suppressing any identifying bibliographic information, or by being made in an impersonal and neutral form. Acknowledgements and thanks must likewise be omitted. Self-identifying references may be restored after the evaluation process is complete. (But none of this paragraph's constraints apply to book reviews or book notes.)
The Editor requires that all the above conditions are met as a minimum standard before the paper is considered.
Although submissions meeting only the above minimum standard will be considered for publication, it is Editorial Policy that any submission which is accepted (conditionally or unconditionally) for publication must be brought into conformity with the more exacting standards of journal style. Once a paper has been accepted, the author(s) will be required to supply a final electronic version conforming to journal style before the AJP will proceed to publication.
3. The Submission Process
Submissions are made online at the Australasian Journal of Philosophy ScholarOne Manuscripts site. New users should first create an account; the Journal's referees have had an account created for them in advance. Existing users must ensure that their account details and research keywords are up-to-date before proceeding. If you are a new user, you will be prompted to enter some keywords: you should enter keywords identifying your areas of research expertise; there is provision to make these quite detailed. (They will help us if we later decide we wish to engage your services as a referee.) Once logged on to the site, users should submit their papers via the Author Centre. Online user guides and access to a helpdesk are available on this website.
ScholarOne Manuscripts offers authors the option of supplying a 'cover letter'. The AJP does not require authors to include such a letter. However, if there is anything about your manuscript or the circumstances of its submission that you believe would be helpful for the editorial team to be aware of, please include that information here. You will also have an opportunity to include 'acknowledgments of personal gratitude': we do request that you enter here any individuals who have helped you. For example, those who have offered comments, who you would propose to thank in the de-anonymized version of your paper, or who are already familiar with the manuscript. This information can assist us in avoiding potential conflicts of interest when approaching referees.
Manuscripts (other than book reviews or book notes; as to which, see below) may be submitted in a limited range of standard formats. Submitted files will be automatically converted into a .pdf file for the review process. Authors who write in LaTeX must convert their files to .pdf prior to submission, because the submission interface does not accept LaTeX files. Neither does it handle documents prepared in some recent word-processing formats such as .odt. Furthermore, the interface does not always reliably convert unusual embedded fonts, for example, those which may be used for special characters such as logic symbols or diacritical marks (as found in the rendition of, e.g., Sanskrit). Manuscripts which contain any such characters must be submitted as .pdf files. Authors who do not take this precaution are warned that their texts may contain non-obvious errors which can seriously mislead referees. In light of the foregoing, we encourage prospective authors to submit their files as a .pdf file, to ensure that any referees will see your manuscript as you intended.
Book reviews and book notes should be submitted as Word documents (.docx format). They must contain no footnotes or endnotes. Book notes must also contain no bibliography.
The submission process cannot be completed unless the author certifies that the manuscript meets the Journal's Minimum Standard.
4. Authorship
When submitting an unsolicited manuscript, the corresponding author must ensure that all and only authors are credited on the submission. The question, what is an author? is a surprisingly vexed one. (The COPE discussion paper 'Authorship' [doi:10.24318/cope.2019.3.3] provides a useful entry point.) For AJP purposes, this definition of authorship is a useful one:
Each author is expected to have made substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work; or the acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data; or the creation of new software used in the work; or have drafted the work or substantively revised it; AND to have approved the submitted version (and any substantially modified version that involves the author’s contribution to the study); AND to have agreed both to be personally accountable for the author’s own contributions and to ensure that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work, even ones in which the author was not personally involved, are appropriately investigated, resolved, and the resolution documented in the literature. (McNutt et al., 2018, doi:10.1073/pnas.1715374115)
This definition requires that submissions should not have 'guest authors' credited for work they did not substantially contribute to (such individuals more properly should be mentioned in the acknowledgements). Moreover, corresponding authors should ensure that anyone who has made significant contributions to the conception, design, or writing of the submitted manuscript, or to any prior work from which it derives, are credited as authors – 'ghost' or 'orphan' authorship must be avoided. This ensures appropriate credit in the scholarly ecosystem, as well as appropriate accountability for research findings and enables readers to assess potential conflicts of interest.
The general thrust of these remarks applies, mutatis mutandis, to the declaration of research funding and conflicts of interest: all must be declared.
One further aspect is worth emphasising. Authorship involves not mere production of text, but responsibility and accountability. No generative AI model can be responsible or accountable for its outputs. So while AJP is not policing authors' use of these tools in the refinement of their submissions, authors must acknowledge and document any significant use of generative AI tools (beyond, for example, the use of such tools to improve prose style or to address issues with grammar).
5. Journal Style
For purposes of assessment, only the much less exacting Minimum Standard need be met. The requirements of Journal Style are not imposed on authors until a paper has been accepted for publication. Authors with a decision of conditional acceptance should bring their final manuscripts into conformity with Journal Style before final acceptance.