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)

Open Screens is the open-access online journal of the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies. The scope of the journal is international and its vision is inter-disciplinary. It encourages innovative contributions from scholars of film, television and other screen-based media, publishing research articles, reviews and audio-visual research-by-film-practice.

In keeping with the mission of BAFTSS, contributions from both established and postgraduate scholars are considered, and contributors do not need to be members of the Association.

Open Screens ranges over the historical and the contemporary, and it aims to embrace film, television, screen and media studies, as well as screen-based research in related disciplines across the Humanities and beyond, such as area studies, gender studies and sexuality studies.

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 who do not adhere to these guidelines.

• 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).
• Any third-party-owned materials used have been identified with appropriate credit lines, and permission has been obtained from the copyright holder for all formats of the journal.
• The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
• All DOIs for the references have been provided, when available.
• Tables and figures are all cited in the text. Tables are included within the text document, whilst figure files are uploaded as supplementary files.
• Figures/images have a resolution of at least 150dpi (300dpi or above preferred). Each is no more than 20MB per file. The files are in one of the following formats: JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS (to maximise quality, the original source file is preferred).
• The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which are found under the Submissions tab. Please ensure that your article includes a competing interest statement in accordance with our Competing Interest Guidelines.
• Every effort has been made to ensure that author names are removed from the manuscript. The following link provides information on ensuring an anonymous review.
• Please indicate in the 'Comments to the Editor' box below if this article is submitted to a forthcoming Special Dossier.

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. If you would prefer to publish your work under an alternative Creative Commons License, please indicate this in the Comments for the Editor box below, providing reasons for your request.
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 the Editor-in-Chief or a member of the Editorial team, who determines whether the article is suitable to proceed to peer review. If deemed appropriate, the submission is assigned to a member of the Editorial Board and at least one additional independent expert. These reviewers assess the article for clarity, validity, and methodological rigour.

The journal follows a double-anonymous peer review process, meaning that both authors and reviewers remain anonymous throughout. The review period typically takes between six and twelve weeks, although this may vary depending on reviewer availability. We aim to identify two independent experts in your subject area and allow reviewers 6–8 weeks to complete their assessments. Reviewers are encouraged to provide constructive feedback, even if the article is ultimately not recommended for publication.

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.

If your institution is not currently supporting the platform, we request that you use our 'Recommend Us' tool. 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.

The journal currently operates on a rolling issue format. This means we do not wait to accumulate 6–8 articles before publishing an issue. Instead, we open an issue in January and publish articles as they become ready, continuing until the end of July. A new issue is then opened in September, with publication continuing until January.

We welcome proposals for Special Issues, which are published separately as and when they are ready. If you are interested in proposing a Special Issue, please contact the Editor for further information. You will typically need to provide the following:

A proposed title
A rationale for the issue
Names and affiliations of guest editors
The type of content you are seeking
Whether you already have contributors (if so, send bios and title of their contributions) or plan to issue a Call for Papers
A prospective timeline

The overall timeline from submission to publication is usually between 6 and 10 months. Conversations and reviews are internally reviewed and are usually ready in 4-12 weeks. If we are opening a new Issue, we might wait to have one research article or practice piece before publishing a review or conversation. Articles covering broader subject areas tend to be easier to place with reviewers, whereas more specialised topics may require additional time to identify suitable experts. This can affect how many reviewers we need to approach before securing one, as well as how many review requests they may be managing across journals in the field. A three-month review period is common when there is a wide pool of available reviewers. However, if reviewers initially accept and later decline after their deadline has passed, the process must be restarted. 

If the reviews recommend publication, you will receive the feedback and be given time to make any necessary revisions. This revision period typically ranges from 4 to 12 weeks, depending on the nature of the suggestions. Once your revised manuscript is resubmitted via your author area, the editorial team will review the changes and/or your response. This stage may take up to 4 weeks, depending on the time of year and the volume of submissions being managed.

If approved, your article will proceed to copyediting. During this stage, you may receive final queries or requests for clarification. Copyediting usually takes a couple of weeks, after which the manuscript is sent to the typesetters. The team at the Open Library of Humanities typically completes typesetting within 2 weeks. You will then receive proofs and any typesetter queries (e.g. formatting of headers or referencing inconsistencies). Once these are resolved, your article will be published and made immediately available.

Please note that Open Screens pauses during August. Submissions made during this period will not be processed until September. Submissions around UK holiday periods or bank holidays (e.g. the last week of December) may also be picked up a week later. All editors and reviewers are unpaid volunteers who undertake this work alongside full-time academic roles.