About the Journal

Mission

The MOSF Journal of Science Fiction seeks to uphold the spirit of educated inquiry and speculation through the publication of peer-reviewed, academic articles, essays, and book reviews exploring the interdisciplinary nature of science fiction. We welcome unsolicited, original submissions from academics around the world about science fiction across all forms of media (literature, film, television, video games, art, oral history, etc.). On average, the Journal produces two open themed peer-reviewed issues a year consisting of perspective essays, articles, and book reviews, and at least one special issue on a topic of interest.

Our focus and scope is relatively capacious on purpose: if you think your work fits, we want to see it. By keeping our scope broad and interdisciplinary, we're encouraging authors to send us manuscripts that open our eyes to new analyses of the science fiction genre.

We are currently accepting scholarly articles, book reviews, and reflective, editorial essays for our Perspectives section. Please visit our Submissions section for more information on our guidelines or visit our recommended book review list.

Because MOSF Journal of Science Fiction is a Total Open Access Journal, authors submitting their work to the journal implicitly agree to make their accepted paper freely available online to the public. There is no submission or publication fee for authors.

 

Peer Review Process

Peer review is an essential tool for ensuring the quality, validity and relevance of scholarly research. All article manuscripts under consideration for publication in Journal of Science Fiction will undergo a double-blind peer review process (i.e., neither author nor reviewer names will be disclosed).

The Journal’s Editorial Team will use Open Journal Systems (OJS) to perform an initial screening of submissions and then to anonymously assign manuscripts to reviewers not employed by the journal. Editors will use OJS to request revisions by article authors when required. The final draft of the article that is published in Journal of Science Fiction will constitute the final, definitive and citable version of the manuscript.

There are no article processing charges for our journal.

Open Access Policy

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.

Plagiarism Policy

The Journal of Science Fiction's editorial team will not tolerate plagiarism in any form. Plagiarized submissions will be rejected.

The editorial team checks for plagiarism by ensuring authors properly source their information and by performing regular spot checks of text that are presented as the authors' own original analysis.

Should the editorial team discover that, despite our best efforts, we have accidentally published plagiarized content, the piece (be it an article, review, etc.) will be immediately removed from our publication and we will notify the plagiarizing author, the plagiarized author, the Museum of Science Fiction (our sponsoring organization), and journal subscribers of the incident.

Artificial Intelligence Policy

This journal will not accept submissions that include text generated by large language models (LLMs). We do not view this as original writing. Rather, it is the product of other authors’ work that has been scraped and used to train models – often without their consent. In this same vein, we do not accept AI-generated images as a part of one’s submission(s).

The only exception to this rule is if AI tools are used as part of a research methodology or creative practice. Authors using AI in such contexts are encouraged to disclose the nature and extent of usage during the submission process. This scholarship will be judged on a case-by-case basis; JOSF Editors may decline to move forward with manuscripts if AI is used inappropriately. 

Authors who use AI-assisted technologies as components of their research study or as aids in the writing or presentation of the manuscript should note this in the cover letter and in the Acknowledgments section of the manuscript. Detailed information should be provided in the Acknowledgements section: The full prompt used in the production of the work, as well as the AI tool and its version, should be disclosed. Authors are accountable for the accuracy of the work and for ensuring that there is no plagiarism. They must also ensure that all sources are appropriately cited and should carefully review the work to guard against bias that may be introduced by AI.

Reviewers may not use AI technology in generating or writing their reviews because this could breach the confidentiality of the manuscript.

MJOSF's Creative Commons License

Content published in the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND; detailed here).

This means you are welcome to share, copy, and redistribute the material published in our journal for non-commercial purposes in any format so long as you provide appropriate credit, provide a link to the CC BY-NC-ND license, and you may not transform or otherwise modify the content we have published. 

You may do so in any reasonable manner, but you must not suggest that the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction team, the Museum of Science Fiction, the University of Maryland, or the University of Maryland Libraries (our website host) endorse you or your use. 

You may not add further restrictions or legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything that our journal's license permits.