Proposing a special issue

Scholars who wish to organize a special issue of the journal are encouraged to draft a call for papers describing the topic that the issue will explore as well as its contribution to the field. Proposals should be submitted to the editorial board for review at ethnologie.francaise@cnrs.fr. The board of directors and the editorial board will review proposals (which should be between 700 and 1,000 words in length, not including bio-bibliographical notes introducing the organizers/editors of the proposed special issue) and accept with or without modifications or reject them. Once accepted, calls for papers will be posted on the journal’s website and distributed to other major human and social sciences distribution lists.

The organizer/s of the special issue and the editorial board will jointly review all submissions.

The organizer/s will present submissions that are accepted to the editorial board and will communicate any comments or suggestions resulting from the review process to contributing authors. At this point, the journal will add the special issue to the publication calendar and appoint an editorial board member to serve as ad hoc lead editor for the issue. Organizers will remain responsible for scheduling and supervising submissions, drafting an introduction, and compiling peer review reports and other comments.

Organizers will manage submission deadlines (to be set in consultation with the editor-in-chief of the journal), receive first drafts, and share feedback with contributors. Organizers will also ensure the articles’ quality and conformity with the journal’s standards and publication guidelines (see “Submission Guidelines” under “Proposing an article”) before forwarding all completed submissions to the journal secretariat, which will distribute them to readers, the journal editor, and the board of directors.

At this point, submissions will either be:

• “Accepted as is or with minor modifications” and invited to submit a final publishable manuscript;
• “Accepted pending substantial revisions,” with a second version to be submitted to the journal editor; if the second version is judged acceptable, the article will be published;
• “Rejected,” meaning that the article cannot be published at this time.

 

Once the table of contents of the issue has been agreed upon, the organizer/s should draft an introduction that goes beyond a summary of the articles to be published to offer a critical review of the contents of the special issue (of 6,000 to 10,000 words in length). The introduction should situate the collection of articles both within both the topic covered by the special issue and contemporary research in a manner that reflects the current state of the field. The introduction will thus be closely connected to the “Book reviews” section that will follow the collection of articles. Once the call for papers has been published, we ask that the issue organizer/s identify a minimum of five recent publications that are closely related to the special issue topic, in addition to providing a list of colleagues who are qualified to write critical reviews (See “Writing a book review”) for the “Book reviews” section. The journal will provide copies of the selected publications to the reviewers chosen by the organizers and edit the reviews.