Submitting your journal article

Once you have found the right journal for your article, the next step is to contact the general editor of the journal and to submit your article for peer review. You can find specific details of whom to contact on the dedicated webpage for each journal at www.brepols.net, or you can contact the relevant Publishing Manager for further information. Please note that many journals have their own individual author guidelines, and we recommend that you follow these when preparing your text.

Please note that if you wish to submit an article for publication in a journal published by Brepols, you must agree to the conditions set out in our ethics statement concerning good publication practice.

Text

The final manuscript that you submit should be definitive and complete. You can find a complete checklist of points to consider here. Brepols has its own in-house style guides, for both English and French manuscripts. In order for us to produce your manuscript as efficiently as possible, we ask that you follow these guidelines when completing your manuscript. Please note that some series have their own specific style guides; your Publishing Manager will be able to advise you if this is the case.

Download Guidelines
Guidelines for Authors (Short Reference System)
Guidelines for Authors (Full Reference System)
Guidelines for Authors (Author Date)
Directives pour les auteurs des publications en langue française

Please be aware that we require every journal article to have a complete bibliography containing all works cited; it is not sufficient simply to include bibliographical information in footnotes. This is to ensure that we can make your bibliography freely available online, complete with relevant hyperlinks to referenced works where possible.

Your list of ‘Works Cited’ should ideally be divided into the following sections, as relevant:

• Manuscripts and Archival Sources, and other unedited material;
• Primary Sources;
• Secondary Works.

You can submit your bibliography either as a list at the end of your article, or in a separate file, clearly marked with your name and article title.

Images

Images should be supplied separately from your manuscript. You can find full details of image requirements in our image guidelines. Please note that we expect you to be responsible for checking that basic image quality is in line with our guidelines, and for ensuring that you have the appropriate permission to reproduce images and figures in your text; where necessary we ask you to please apply for and obtain this permission for images in both print and online.

Open Access

If you are interested in discussing Open Access options for your article, please inform the Journal Editor or Publishing Manager when you submit your article. You can verify every Journal’s OA policy on the dedicated page of the Journal.

Figshare

Brepols supports the possibility for storing and sharing your research data as supplementary content, in an Open Access format. The supplementary content must provide extra information for Brepols’ publications and consists of open data collections, primary sources, tables, colour graphs, etc. available via the Figshare platform.

Peer Review

Once you have submitted your journal article, it will be initially assessed by the journal editor and the wider Editorial Board. If they feel that your article is suitable for inclusion within the journal, they will arrange for the article to be peer reviewed.

Producing your journal article

Once you have submitted your completed text and the Journal Editor has confirmed that it is ready for publication, we will put the volume into production.

Copyediting

We begin the process with basic checks on your article to make sure that everything is complete and that both text and images are ready to be worked on. If everything is in good shape, we can then move on to cleaning and copyediting your text. This includes applying a template for later typesetting, as well as standardization of punctuation, spelling, capitalization, numbers, and bibliography, and checks against the style guide. Please note, however, that this does not involve revising the style or ‘polishing’ unidiomatic texts, unless specifically agreed.

After your text has been copyedited, you will receive the pre-typeset proofs to read through and comment on. This will be the last stage at which you can make significant changes to the text so it is very important that you read through everything carefully and that you are happy with the text that you return to us.

Typesetting

Once we have your definitive text, it is ready to go on for typesetting. Our typesetter will finalise layout, including images, headings, fonts, and tables. You will receive a copy of the typeset proofs so that you can comment on layout, as well as checking cross references, images, fonts, and other formatting checks. We will ask you to add any comments directly to the PDF of the proofs, as explained in our guidelines. Once you have checked and signed off on the finalised proofs, we will send your article on to the printer and create the e-journal issue!