Submissions

Author Guidelines

Below are guidelines for authors desiring to submit to the Journal. We welcome unsolicited, original submissions from academics around the world about science fiction in all media (literature, film, television, videogames, art, oral history, etc.). We currently accept scholarly articles, book reviews, and editorial essays for our Perspectives section.

Except where noted below, all submissions should follow American Psychological Association (APA) style formatting and citations. Please reference the Purdue OWL guide if you have questions about APA formatting, particularly for in-text citations and your list of references.

Scholarly articles of criticism on the nature of science and speculative fiction in media of all kinds are welcomed for submission.

• Article manuscripts should be 5,000 to 8,000 words long.
• Include a 150-250 word abstract at the beginning of your article. Doing so speeds up the review process because we send abstracts to potential peer reviewers.
• Manuscripts should be submitted as .doc, .docx, or .rtf files. The text of the manuscript and the reference list should be submitted as a single file.
• Please use single-spacing and 12-point font, in Arial, Tahoma, Times New Roman,  orVerdana for readability.
• Manuscripts should be accompanied by a cover letter authorizing The Journal of Science Fiction to send out a blind, text-protected version of the manuscript for review.

Book reviews on science fiction, literary criticism, theoretical work, and histories are solicited and accepted on rolling basis. Here is a link to our considered titles, but please contact the Managing Editor to pitch a review. 

• A book review is a critical assessment of the positive and negative aspects of the work, examining the effectiveness of the argument, original contributions of the work, and its placement within the critical field. Whether it is fiction or non-fiction, we are not looking for a totally polarised assessment here – a good review will examine positive and negative aspects of the work, while providing an overall sense of whether the work ultimately succeeds as an effective piece of scholarship or literature
• Word count range: 1000-1500 words
• You might begin with background to the text being reviewed. This could include relevant biographical information about the author; an overview of their academic publications and interests; and a sense of scholarly field in which the author’s work is intervening, including recent works published by other scholars, critical lineage, and so on.
• Be sure to also offer a critical synopsis of the work, including overall arguments, brief chapter summaries, and key ideas or theoretical frameworks.
• At the beginning of the review, please also include your name, along with bibliographic information about the work in the following form:
• Name of author(s)/editor(s), name of text, publisher, year of publication, hard/paperback, number of pages (including different paginations), price, ISBN.

For example:   John Cheng, Astounding Wonder: Imagining Science and Science Fiction in Interwar America, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, pb, 400 pp, $24.95, ISBN 9780812222937.

Perspectives

Our Perspectives section is a reflective and editorial essay space for all kinds of science fiction lovers: P-12 teachers, college instructors, museum curators, artists, and other practitioners of science fiction and speculation. Here, we are looking for essays that offer a cutting-edge and thought-provoking perspective on an experience you had with science fiction. Maybe you ran a successful book club or a D&D session recently, or taught a new novel in a class, or noticed a sf author or film that deserves more attention--we are interested in your unique perspective.

We are also interested in interviews, roundtables, and other interesting formats of collaborative knowledge sharing.

If single-author, the submission should offer some critical perspective in 1000-2500 words. Other multiple-author formats can expand the word count as necessary but should not exceed 8000 words, a similar maximum of our scholarly articles.

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.

Copyright Notice

Authors whose submissions are accepted for publication will retain all copyrights to their work, meaning that authors will not need to request permission to reuse their articles as long as appropriate credit is given to MOSF Journal of Science Fiction. You have the non-exclusive right of republication of your article, in whole or in part, in any book, article, or other scholarly work of which you are an author or editor, provided you give credit to MOSF Journal of Science Fiction.  Similarly, MOSF Journal of Science Fiction shall retain the right to publish, republish, copy and distribute, in any current or future form of media, in whole and in part any article or work accepted for publication provided appropriate credit is given to the author(s).  Please note that the author’s right of republication does not apply if the paper is a work-made-for-hire.

Authors may post copies of their articles elsewhere on the Internet provided that the site is non-commercial or no fees are charged for access to the article in question. A link to the journal’s homepage or directly to the journal article should be included. We encourage you to use or refer to the final, definitive version of your article whenever possible.

Please be aware that if you intend to submit an article to MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, prior publication of that article or posting it online may compromise the confidentiality of the peer-review process and may delay or prevent a decision based on the paper’s merits. To avoid citation confusion, we discourage online posting of pre-publication versions of articles, but will not restrict posting of a paper accepted for publication provided that the conditions described in these Author Guidelines have been met. Please consult the journal’s editor for more information.