Submissions

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Focus and Scope Lifewriting Annual presents critical and scholarly essays on lifewriting in all its forms - biography, autobiography, memoir, journals, diaries, letters, and works in media other than print. It publishes articles that describe and assess scholarly resources for biographical writing, especially collections of manuscripts and letters, and includes reviews of recently published biographies, autobiographies, and other works of lifewriting. The annual is a forum for the discussion of all aspects of lifewriting - theoretical, critical, and scholarly. Its broad scope aims to foster lively discussion of the ways that various forms of lifewriting inform each other.
Copyright Notice

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Authors retain copyright. Works are released under a Creative Commons license, which provides unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons License stipulates that: "You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)."

The citation of articles published in Lifewriting Annual must include: the name(s) of the authors, the name of the journal, the full URL of the article (in a hyperlinked format if distributed online) and the DOI number of the article.

All articles published in this journal are available in full-text semantically rich JATS XML with metadata and structured citation data. Open OAI-PMH endpoints are available to crawl the articles.

Peer Review

All submissions will be double-blind peer reviewed by active researchers. All communication will be through the assigned section editor.

All submitted manuscripts are first reviewed by the editorial team. Those papers that seem most likely to meet our editorial criteria are sent for formal review. The editorial board reserves the right to reject manuscripts without sending them for formal review.

Promising submissions are sent for formal review, typically to two reviewers, but sometimes more. The editors make a decision based on the reviewers' advice from among the following options:

  • Accept: Your submission has been accepted as is.
  • Revisions Required: Your submission requires minor changes and will be accepted once those have been completed.
  • Resubmit for Review: Your submission needs significant re-working. A new file must be submitted and another round of review will take place.
  • Reject: Your submission was not accepted for publication with this journal, either because it was not seen to be of high enough quality, or its subject did not match the journal.

While reviews in all cases are blind, we recognise that articles that germinated in conference presentations are exceptionally hard to anonymize. In such cases we will, therefore, ask reviewers to disclose any conflicts of interest, disclose whether they know the identity of the author and to justify their comments solely on the basis of the article under submission. These factors will be combined and considered at the discretion of the editors in reaching a decision.

In the case of editors submitting, the submission will be handled by other members of the team who must adhere strictly to the recommendations of external reviewers.

Licences

Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies allows the following licences for submission:

  • 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.
Publication Fees

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 sign up, institutional commitment is not required to publish with us.

Publication Cycle This journal is published continuously all year round, although selections may be gathered into collections for print publication on occasion.
Sections

Public Submissions

Peer Reviewed

Indexed

Crossings

From the Archives

Articles

Book Reviews

Table of Contents