Submissions

Author Guidelines

HCS publishes articles written in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese or Greek. Submissions may be addressed to the Editors at any time.

Contributors are fully responsible for the contents of the articles that they submit for consideration. They are expected to vouch for the originality of their work, the accuracy of the information they present, and the lack of any potential conflicts of interest. By submitting their work to HCS, they accept the validity of its review process, and they undertake not to submit the same piece of work elsewhere until a decision on its acceptance is reached. In principle, a submission to HCS should not have been previously published elsewhere, unless it had limited circulation.

We do not publish book reviews, although we may occasionally host papers or sets of papers that provide substantial discussions of recent contributions to the field. We do not consider for publication papers on the work of living scholars.

Peer Review Process

Manuscripts submitted to the journal are initially reviewed by the Editors. At this stage, they may be rejected without being sent out for peer review if they are deemed not to fit the aims and scope of the journal. If so, authors are promptly informed and do not need to wait for the review process.

Submissions that are not instantly rejected are assessed through a double-blind peer review process, involving at least one reader chosen outside the Editorial Board. A third view may be sought if there is a clear disagreement between the two readers, and the Editors do not feel qualified to resolve it independently. Referees are chosen and approached by the Editors, who may seek preliminary advice from individual members of the Editorial Board.

Submissions are assessed on the basis of their intrinsic originality, rigour, and significance, and irrespective of the ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, religious beliefs, and scholarly, political or ideological orientation of the author(s).

The Editors aim to reach a decision on a manuscript within three months of submission.

Periodicity and Publishing Schedule

HCS publishes one issue per year. There are no prescriptive deadlines for the submission of contributions to each individual issue: an accepted paper will be uploaded on the journal’s website as soon as it is ready to be published. There is no binding word limit; in principle, all papers should be clear and concise.

Contributors are required to resolve any copyright issues ahead of publication. HCS is committed to the free and open circulation of knowledge and does not apply any Article Processing Charges (APCs) at any stage of the review and production process. Articles published in the journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. Authors retain copyright over their articles without any restrictions.

HCS does not impose a single house style. However, submissions must be highly consistent internally in their referencing conventions (e.g. footnotes and bibliography). Text formatting should be kept to a minimum. Please do not create a file that simulates or anticipates — graphically or typographically — an arbitrary layout. Any special requirements of the author must be discussed beforehand with the editors.

Final Copy Preparation Checklist

After the acceptance of their paper, authors will be asked to prepare their final version, which we will then typeset.

Authors should check their submission's compliance with all of the following guidelines:

  • The file is in Microsoft Word (2013 or later) format.
  • The text should contain no applied styles.
  • The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses).
  • Text-based tables and figures are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
  • Illustrations and images are provided separately in high resolution (300 dpi or more). Please insert captions in the text where you would like illustrations or images to be placed.
  • Please make sure that your footnotes are automatically generated (i.e., you have not numbered them by hand).
  • When indenting the first sentence of a new paragraph, use one tab stop. Do not use a combination of the tab stop + space bar, and do not use automatic first-line indenting.
  • Do not indent the first sentence at the beginning of a new section.
  • Do not add spaces between paragraphs, but do add one space before and after a block quotation.
  • Do not use hyphenation of any sort (automatic or manual).
  • A Unicode font is used for Greek text.
  • Where appropriate, URL details and the date of the last access have been provided.
Papers that do not comply with these guidelines may be returned to the author for a further round of changes. A set of proofs will be made available to the author for their scrutiny before publication.