SUBMISSIONS

 

Instructions for Contributors

The German Law Journal (GLJ) warmly welcomes submissions of high-quality, including articles, essays, comments and reviews, which focus on German, European, or international legal developments.  The Journal publishes in English.

GLJ is an open access journal: all content is free to access and read. From 2019, new content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0 as standard. There are no author-facing charges.

Submission guidelines: regular articles

Exclusive submission

GLJ receives submissions with the understanding that the content is original, unpublished material and has not been submitted for publication elsewhere, whether in print or in electronic form. Authors intending to republish articles, or to use previously published material as part of an article, must indicate this intention at the time they accept the invitation to publish or, in the case of unsolicited articles, at the time of submission.

Submission instructions

GLJ now uses ScholarOne Manuscripts, for online manuscript submission and peer review. The system brings with it a whole host of benefits including:

  • Quick and easy submission.
  • Administration centralised and reduced.
  • Significant decrease in peer review times.

All submissions to the journal must be submitted online at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/glj.

Full instructions and support are available on the site and a user ID and password can be obtained on the first visit. If you require assistance then click the Get Help Now link which appears at the top right corner of every ScholarOne Manuscripts page. For general inquiries, please contact the editorial office at submit@germanlawjournal.com.

Submission specifications

In submitting papers authors should observe the following:

  • Authors must submit their text as a Microsoft Word file.
  • All submitted texts must be written in American English. Texts must be saved in a simple format, i.e. without automatic hyphenation, automatic indexing of section headings, with a consistent script, with an unjustified right margin, and no activated hyperlinks or other macros.
  • Any and all information relied upon from other works, both published and unpublished, must be cited in footnotes. By submitting a work to the GLJ, the author guarantees that he or she is solely responsible for the content of the text and citations.
  • Authors should name their submission document in the following way: “Title of article ([first submission or second revised submission])”.
  • Authors should submit a fully anonymized manuscript.
  • We expect exclusivity. Thus, the author must confirm on ScholarOne that the paper has not been submitted to or reviewed by another journal at the same time. If the submission has been published before (e.g. in an edited collection) or has been published in a different language, this should also be indicated to the editorial team.
  • Authors should include 5 keywords and an abstract on ScholarOne along with their manuscript.
  • Internal cross referencing should be to footnotes only (not pages).
  • Authors are asked to make sure their typescript is carefully checked and finalised particularly with regard to internal cross referencing and the citation of references. Afterthoughts cannot be incorporated on proofs.
  • Authors are encouraged to include an ORCID (see below).
  • Authors are required to complete a Licence to Publish Form (see below).
  • Papers should adhere to the GLJ style guide (see below).

Any failure to comply with these requirements will result in a void submission, and the submitted piece will be returned to the author without consideration for publication.

Word limit

The German Law Journal does not have a word limit and at times publishes lengthy works. However, most of our articles are 10-15000 words long and that length should be used as a general guide. If the submission is much longer than that, the board will surely consider possibilities to shorten it. The guiding principle remains that the length should be justified by the content and argument.

ORCID

GLJ encourages authors to register for an ORCID when submitting a manuscript to the journal. ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. It is non-profit organisation supported by funders, institutions, publishers and other organisations, providing scholars with a unique, public identifier to help record their contribution to the scholarly literature.

For GLJ authors, ORCID could provide the following benefits:

  1. Discoverability: ORCID helps readers find the work that you’ve authored, as it becomes more commonly used across research and publishing systems
  2. Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your ID or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID profile, and will save you re-keying information multiple times.
  3. Keeping track: Your ORCID profile is a neat place to record and display (if you choose) validated information about your research activities.

If you don’t already have an ORCID, you can create upon submitting a manuscript to GLJ. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne or via https://orcid.org/register.

If you already have an ORCID, you can link this to your ScholarOne user account. Simply log in to your account using your normal username and password. Edit your account by clicking on your name at the top right of the screen and from the dropdown menu, select ‘E-Mail / Name’. Follow the instructions at the top of the screen to update your account.

Tables, figures and graphics

Please ensure that all tables, figures and graphics are provided in an editable format and are of a suitable quality and resolution to be published. Do not embed these files in the manuscript – they must be supplied in separate files, one file per figure. Please indicate the position of figures, tables and graphics in the text as follows:

Table 1: INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE
Figures, tables and graphics reproduced from already published work must be accompanied by the permission of the original publisher (or copyright holder, if not the publisher). Full information on how to prepare and supply tables, figures and graphics can be found here and should be followed with care.

Third party material 

Any third party material included in the article that is subject to copyright restrictions other than those owned or controlled by the author must be accompanied by appropriate permissions from the relevant copyright holder(s). We ask authors to be explicit towards copyright holders that the material is to be re-published under a CC-BY license.  See this template letter. 

Data and supplementary material

Authors must make publicly available any resources not in the article, such as data, materials or code, that are necessary for others to understand, verify and replicate any of the article’s findings.

General open data repositories that can be used for this purpose include Zenodo (funded by the European Commission) and Dataverse (funded Harvard University). These repositories are non-profit, do not charge users and give deposited materials a permanent identifier (DOI) so that they can be cited easily by the author or others.

Alternatively any resources – including files that are not essential to the understanding of the article but may be of interest to readers – can be provided as supplementary material when submitting to the GLJ’s ScholarOne system. These materials will be hosted as supplementary material on the Cambridge Core platform, alongside the article. As a general rule, supplementary material should not exceed 50MB in size.

Any resources that are in data repositories or provided as supplementary material should be noted in the article in submission. Resources in data repositories should be described in the first footnote alongside the DOI or permanent identifier giving access. Supplementary material should be cited in a “Supplementary Materials” references list at the end of the article text.

Pre-submission English-language editing
Authors whose first language is not English should ensure that their final draft is carefully checked by a native speaker of English, for accuracy. Authors for whom English is a second language may choose to have their paper professionally edited before submission to improve the English. Cambridge University Press offers a language-editing service in conjunction with third-party provider American Journal Experts: http://www.cambridge.org/academic/author-services/. Authors would pay for this service individually and there is absolutely no commitment that their paper will be accepted to a Cambridge-published journal if they use this service. Cambridge is providing this service in order to provide a convenient option for prospective authors, which comes with the reassurance that we have checked the quality of the provider, and will be continuously monitoring the quality of the service.

Peer review procedure

All unsolicited contributions are reviewed in a blind peer review procedure on a rolling basis. To this end please make sure that your paper is anonymised before submission by eliminating any reference to your name or other elements that might enable the reviewer to immediately recognise the author. The review of an article usually takes 6-8 weeks, but the Journal reserves the right to review texts for as long as necessary to reach a publication decision.

Submission guidelines: special issues

Special issue proposals

GLJ issues a call for Special Issue proposals approximately every 9 months. Any such calls will be published here. Interested parties should follow the submission instructions given on the call document.

Accepted Special Issues

Guest Editors of accepted Special Issues will be given separate instructions.

Special Issue papers should follow the practices outlines in the ‘Submission specifications’ section above and ‘Style guidelines’ below

Submission guidelines: book reviews

The German Law Journal does not accept unsolicited book reviews. The Journal does publish broader review articles which undergo the submission procedure for regular articles.

Submission guidelines: contributions for accepted special issues

If you are a contributing author to a special issue that has been accepted by the Editorial Board for publication, please proceed as follows:

  1. Submit your text to the guest editor (the person(s) who submitted the special issue proposal) on the agreed due date.
  2. The guest editors will review the texts. Upon approval, they will forward them to the assigned editor, a member of the GLJ editorial board.
  3. The assigned editor will again review the texts and approve of them for publication or request further revisions.
  4.  Once accepted, the GLJ student editors will take care of your text and return it to you for approval. This process may include one or two rounds.
  5. If you are happy with the edits, you may submit your final text via GLJ’s online submission system at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/glj choosing the ‘Special Issues’ workflow.

GLJ Style Guide

Authors must follow the style rules outlined in the GLJ Style Guide which can be found here. The GLJ reserves the right to restyle any accepted texts for publication according to the GLJ Style Guide. Submission to the GLJ indicates the author’s acceptance of the GLJ’s publication rules, style guidelines, and citation formatting.

Citation requirements

  1. All footnotes must comply with the GLJ Style Guide. When the Style Guide is silent on rules governing citations, all texts must comply with the latest edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation.
  2. Authors must supply the full names of authors, texts (i.e. book and/or article name), journal name, additional publication information (i.e. editors, volume number, edition number), case names, court information, and year of publication.
  3. Authors must provide specific page numbers for all cited materials. Any citation that does not come from a specific page range within a cited work must be cited as See generally.
  4. Subsequent citations to the same source must be signalled by Id. The use of op. cit. or Ibid is not permitted. For example: Id. at 15.
  5. Subsequent citations to a previously used source must be signalled by the source author’s last name, followed by supra, note [footnote number of first use], at [pin cite].
  6. For specific citation requirements of cases from German courts or other international courts, see the GLJ Style Guide.  All American case citations should be cited in accordance with the latest edition of the The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation.

After acceptance

License to Publish

Upon acceptance of their article, authors will be asked to complete a Licence to Publish Form. Authors hold the copyright to their work, giving the GLJ permission to publish the content. Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC-BY) as standard – allowing for free access, unrestricted sharing and adaptation of the work, as long as appropriate credit to the author and the GLJ is given – but authors are able to select other licenses if they have concerns about these terms. For more detailed information, see the License to Publish form and the Creative Commons website.

Copyediting and proofs

The journal reserves the right to copyedit and proofread all articles accepted for publication.Authors will be sent the edited manuscript for approval and any amendments must be submitted at that stage. Authors will see no further proofs and corrections cannot be made after publication.

Author access to their published paper

On publication, authors will receive a link to their GLJ article – which will be Open Access and therefore available to share with the author’s contacts, or in social networking sites, or on other platforms.

Long term preservation 

Articles in GLJ, like those of other journals at Cambridge University Press, are deposited in the following digital archives to guarantee their long-term digital preservation:

  • CLOCKSS
  • Portico

Publishing Ethics 

As a result of being published by Cambridge University Press, GLJ is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and adheres to its guidelines on research and publications ethics.

At the end of your manuscript, please provide statements covering the following.

Acknowledgements

You may acknowledge individuals or organisations that provided advice, support (non-financial). Formal financial support and funding should be listed in the following section.

Financial Support 

Please provide details of the sources of financial support for all authors, including grant numbers. For example, “This work was supported by the European Union Horizon 2020 programme (grant number XXXXXXX)”. Multiple grant numbers should be separated by a comma and space, and where research was funded by more than one agency the different agencies should be separated by a semi-colon, with “and” before the final funder. Grants held by different authors should be identified as belonging to individual authors by the authors’ initials. For example, “This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (A.B., grant numbers XXXX, YYYY); and the European Union Horizon 2020 programme (A.B., grant number ZZZZ).” Where no specific funding has been provided for research, please provide the following statement: “This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.”

Conflicts of Interest

Please provide details of all known financial, professional and personal relationships with the potential to bias the work. Where no known conflicts of interest exist, please include the following statement: “None.”