Notes for Contributors

The Library is a peer-reviewed journal; all submissions are anonymized and sent to at least two expert readers.

Submission

Submissions are welcome at any time and may be sent as Word files to . Contributors are asked to include with their submission an abstract of no more than 300 words, and the postal address they wish to use for correspondence. Hard copy may alternatively be submitted to the Editors, The Library, c/o New College, Oxford, OX1 3BN. Copy should be typed double-spaced throughout. It would assist the Editors if contributors took steps to suppress all self-identifications from their submitted text, so that readers can appraise a suitably anonymized version; non-anonymized submissions will be returned to authors for emendation. Images, if any, should be included in a separate file and not embedded with the Word document. Graphs and tables are discouraged unless absolutely necessary to the presentation of data. The Editors will be happy to discuss particular questions about submission by e-mail at the above address.

Style

Contributions to The Library should be submitted according to the recommendations of the MHRA Style Guide (freely downloadable from http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/StyleGuide/index.html), with the following exceptions:

  1. in page ranges, the use of the leading zero is deprecated (so not ‘pp. 108–09’, but ‘pp. 108–9’)
  2. em-dashes are given unspaced (like—this, not like — this)
  3. life-dates are given in full (so ‘Charles Dickens (1812–1870)’ not ‘Charles Dickens (1812–70)’
  4. for foliation, the convention is for ‘fol.’ and ‘fols.’ (note that ‘fols.’ is given with a point, since ‘folios’ is a specialized usage and articulates a reference, which the point helps to clarify)
  5. be aware that the Public Record Office still exists as a legal entity under the portmanteau of the National Archives, and so references to the collections of the Public Records should still be made to ‘PRO’.

There is no fixed word-limit for articles, although the editors reserve the right to decline exceptionally long submissions, and shorter articles are particularly welcomed. Contributions shorter than c. 2,500 words will normally be treated, and published, as ‘Bibliographical Notes’. In general, publication follows order of receipt of contributions, with some precedence being given to papers read before the Bibliographical Society, and with the editors reserving the right to sequence publication in the interests of balanced content. Proofs are normally sent out three months before publication.

Author’s copies

Authors will receive a copy of the relevant issue of the journal, and access to an electronic copy of their article; hard-copy offprints (12 for articles and notes) will be supplied free of charge.

Images

If the article is to include reproduction of images then it is the responsibility of the author to ensure that all the requisite permissions have been sought to allow one-off reproduction. The Editors will require all authors to state formally that such permissions have been sought and granted.

Guidance is available at: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/access_purchase/permissions_guidelines.doc

Key requirements are:

  • non-exclusive rights to reproduce the material in the specified article and journal published by Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press
  • print and electronic rights, ideally for use in any form or medium
  • the right to use the material for the life of the work (i.e. to have no time-restrictions on the licence granted)
  • world-wide English-language rights.  If rights for all languages can be secured, this is preferable.

Open Access

For information, Oxford Open articles are published under Creative Commons licences. Authors publishing in The Library can use the following Creative Commons licences for their articles: CC-BY, CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-ND at a charge of £1,750.

For additional information about this, please refer to the following link:

http://www.oxfordjournals.org/en/oxford-open/licences.html

For general resources and information about Oxford Open, please see this link:  http://www.oxfordjournals.org/en/oxford-open/index.html