For Authors

Securitas Imperii: Journal for the Study of Modern Dictatorships is published twice a year, in June and December. The deadline for submissions is the last week of June (for the December issue) and the last week of December (for the June issue) unless otherwise specified in the call for papers. Papers submitted after the deadline may not be printed in the next issue. Papers in English, Czech, and Slovak are accepted for review.

Papers are reviewed anonymously by at least two reviewers. The content of the papers must meet both professional and literary criteria. The Editorial team reserves the right not to publish any article on the grounds of a reviewer’s references and reserves the right to edit received texts. Each study must be accompanied by an English abstract of 150-200 words (max. 1500 characters including spaces), 3-5 keywords in English, and a reference list. For the review, please include the title of the review and full bibliographic details of the reviewed work. If these conditions are not met, the study will not be included in the review process.

Submission Guidelines

Range of contributions (study, review article) :

  • study 15–45 pages = 1,800 characters (symbols and spaces), which corresponds to thirty lines of sixty characters or approximately 250 words of plain text without a bibliography and abstracts
  • submission of larger studies requires consultation with the editor-in-chief in advance, their publication is possible only based on the editorial board’s recommendation
  • please enclose an abstract of 15–30 lines and 3-5 keywords together with your article
  • the scope of papers that do not go through the review process is max. 10 NS (18,000 characters with spaces); submission of more extensive studies requires prior consultation with the editor-in-chief; their publication is possible only based on an explicit recommendation of the editorial board

Authors identification:

  • the paper’s introduction contains the names of all authors without academic titles and contact details;
  • the end of the article mentions the names of all authors, including the academic titles, employers, and contact e-mail addresses;

Funding source and contribution continuity:

  • the contribution’s first footnote indicates the financial support source;
  • if the contribution was created by dealing with a grant or project task of science and research, the research project identification will be mentioned in the first footnote;

Contribution originality:

  • the work must be original, plagiarism (copying other author’s work) or self-plagiarism (duplicating own work) is not allowed;
  • the work has not been published elsewhere in any language;
  • the work is not the subject of multiple submissions (will not be assessed at the same time by two editorial boards);
  • translations or excerpts of previously published texts can be in exceptional cases published within the non-peer-reviewed journal section – these cases are clearly marked in the introductory annotation of the contribution.

Quotation Standards

Text editing

  • quotations in italics, without quotation marks
  • omissions in quotations should be marked with […], in normal font (not italics)
  • comments on quotations in parenthesis and with notation (, author’s comment), in normal font
  • abbreviations should be mentioned in the full version with square brackets U[nited] S[tates] [of] A[merica]
  • absurd passage could be marked with [sic!]; it applies also to spelling or stylistic mistakes
  • titles of periodicals (newspapers, journals, etc.) and works of art (books, films, etc.) in italics
  • code names of undercover agents with quotations marks “Bureš”

Quotations and remarks

  • sources should be mentioned in footnotes[1] as following:

Monographs

  • SURNAME, Name: Title in italics. Subtitle(s) in normal font. Publisher, place year, page (p. XX)

ABRAMS, Bradley F.: The Struggle for the Soul of the Nation. Czech Culture and the Rise of Communism. Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham 2004, p. 24–25.

  • next references in the short form

SURNAME, Name: First three articles, page (p.XX)

ABRAMS, Bradley F.: The Struggle for…, p. 25.

  • immediately the following reference

ibidem, p. XX

  • immediately repeated reference (same page)

ibidem

  • co-authors are separated with a spaced hyphen

JUDT, Tony – SNYDER, Tymothy: Thinking the Twentieth Century. William Heinemann, London 2012, p. 127.

Collective Monographs and Anthologies

  • SURNAME, Name: Title of the Article. In: SURNAME, Name (Ed. or Eds.): Title of the Collective Monograph in italics. Subtitle(s) in normal font. Publisher, place year, page (p. XX)

EDELE, Mark – GEYER, Michael: States of Exception. The Nazi-Soviet War as a System of Violence. In: GEYER, Michael – FITZPATRICK, Sheila (Eds.): Beyond Totalitarianism. Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Cambridge University Press, New York 2009, p. 345–395.

Articles

  • Scientific Journals, Magazines, etc.

SURNAME, Name: Title of the Article. Title of the Journal in italics, Year, (Volume), Number/Issue, page (p. XX)

VARGA, Zsuzsanna: Agricultural Economics and the Agrarian Lobby in Hungary under State Socialism. East Central Europe, 2017, Volume 44, Issue 2-3, p. 284–308.

  • Daily Newspaper

SURNAME, Name: Title of the Article. Title of the Newspaper in italics, date, page (p. XX).

BELAM, Martin: Black or blue? Confusion grows over traditional British passport colour. The Guardian, January 3, 2018, p. 4.

  • initials or signs are indicated at the end in brackets

Stasi files. Scanner struggles to stitch together surveillance state scraps (¤POT). The Guardian, January 3, 2018, p. 7.

Archival sources

  • Name of the Archive, Repository, etc. in italics (Abbreviation), Collection, Inventory Number or Mark or Signature, Name or Description of the Source, Date, page.

The Library of Congress (LBC), The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress, Correspondence File, 1938-1976, n. d., General, 1938-1976, n. d., Letter to Walter Benjamin, n. d., p. 7–11.

  • Foreign Archives – please note the original, a proper English translation in brackets in italics, and abbreviation in brackets in the normal font; for next references use the abbreviations only

Archiv bezpečnostních složek (Archive of law-enforcement agencies, Czech Republic) (ABS), Fund (f.) Zvláštní vyšetřovací (Special Investigation), archive number (a. n.) ZV–45 MV, Odůvodnění k odvolání do rozsudku Vyššího vojenského soudu (Justification for the appeal to the sentence of the High Military Court), January 1, 1954, record number (r. n.) Pt 73/53.

Electronic and Web sources

  • electronic books:

KURLAND, Philip B. – LERNER, Ralph (Eds.): The Founders’ Constitution. University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1987, online http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/.

  • online articles:

SMITH, David: Trump Tower meeting with Russians ‘treasonous’, Bannon says in the explosive book. The Guardian, January 3, 2018, online https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/03/donald-trump-russia-steve-bannon-michael-wolff.

  • other web content:

Socialismrealised.eu, Looking for a traitor, online https://www.socialismrealised.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ST_traitor.pdf (January 3, 2018).

The author has to submit only a single version of his / her article in doc, docx, or rtf format.

If there is image material available, the author should and can indicate the ideal location of the photos in the text. He / she should enclose labels, explanations, and quotations of sources of the photos in a separate text file.

IMAGE MATERIAL scan ideally at 600dpi with a minimum of 500kB for small photos, and 1MB for large one-page photos.

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Review Process and Quality Control

  • each study and review article must go through a standard double-blind review procedure, in which it will be subjected to a double-blind peer review of anonymous review practice
  • in addition to the standard review procedure, peer-reviewed studies are subjected to evaluation by the editorial board, their comments on the papers are as relevant as the reviewers’ evaluations
  • the editors reserve the right to reject or propose revising those papers that they assess as inconsistent with the content of the journal scope or those papers that do not bring original findings and do not contribute relevantly to more general knowledge
  • a compulsory decision on acceptance of publication is issued exclusively by the editors of the journal
  • a binding decision on acceptance of publication is issued exclusively by the editors of the journal
  • the authors of the texts accepted for publication in the Securitas Imperii journal agree that these texts will be published online as study materials on the pages of the journal or the pages of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes

Publication Ethics

Authors’ responsibilities

Only articles and other contributions that have not been published in or submitted to another journal can be submitted in Securitas Imperii: Journal for the study of modern dictatorships. Authors are required to follow the author guidelines. Once a decision suggesting revisions has been reached, authors are obliged respond to reviewers’ comments and make the suggested modifications. In disputable cases they may appeal to the editor of the journal with particular objections or retract the paper respectively. By submitting a paper authors confirm that all data in the paper are accurate and authentic, that they are the sole authors and that they do not commit plagiarism.

Editorial responsibilities

The editor takes responsibility for the content of the journal and the quality of the published articles. The editor is objective and avoids conflict of interest with respect to all submitted articles. S/he respects the key criteria of article selection – the relevance of the article to the professional focus of the journal and the quality of the article. S/he is obliged to preserve anonymity of both reviewers and authors in the peer review process. In cooperation with editorial board, the editor addresses possible appeals of the authors against the reviewers’ comments and other complaints. The editor has full responsibility and authority to accept and/or reject an article.

Reviewers’ responsibilities

The reviewer has to be objective in his or her assessment and must not misuse information stated in the article under review for personal or other gain. S/he can refuse to review a paper for reasons of competing professional interests, such as:

  • the recognition of the author’s identity;
  • professional, financial or personal benefit from accepting or rejecting the paper under review;
  • fundamental difference in opinions on the topic of the paper under review;
  • cooperation on given project in the past five years (if author identity is recognized);
  • close professional or personal relationship to the author or some member of the group of authors (if author identity is recognized).

Unless the reviewer refuses to review for the above reasons, the editor takes it for granted that there is no conflict of interests.

Responsibilities of the editorial board

The editorial board constantly makes an effort to improve the professional and formal quality of the journal, supports the freedom of speech and plurality of opinions in the field of study. It issues instructions concerning the whole editorial work (instructions for authors, guidelines for peer review process and reviewers etc.) and guarantees observation of the above rules.