Submissions

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Submission Preparation Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  • The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
  • The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, or RTF document file format.
  • Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
  • The text is single-spaced; uses a 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
  • The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.
  • Provide enough information to confirm that you are an academic, broadly defined, in a field other than creative writing.

Author Guidelines

When academics write fiction, it is sometimes too long or short, too philosophical, or just doesn't find a home in a literary journal or magazine, where the many professionals in the field of creative writing are already jostling to publish. This journal provides a home for fiction of any length from flash fiction through to novelette that is written by an academic. Academic is defined for this purpose as someone with a PhD and/or who works as an educator and/or researcher in higher education. This includes not only university and college lecturers and professors but also academic librarians, archaeologists, museum curators, editors at academic presses, graduate students, and anyone pursuing what has sometimes been categorized as an "Alt-Ac" career. The aim is not to exclude others, but to carve out a space for the many academics who write fiction despite it not being part of their professional duties, who often struggle to find an appropriate place to publish their stories despite their being worthy of being read by a wide audience. While some of the fiction published here may be not only by academics but clearly written with them as the intended audience in mind, most of it is intended for a general readership. Like all fiction, some of it may be of more interest to some readers than others: historical fiction, alternative history, science fiction, romance, horror, and everything else you can imagine may be submitted, apart from fan fiction set in a universe or franchise created by someone else and which is under copyright. 

We encourage authors to write under their real name, especially those who have tenure. However, given that some academics may worry that writing fiction is not valued and appreciated by their employers, and may even have already published fiction under a pseudonym for this reason, we are open to publishing works with attributions that do not reveal the author's identity to anyone other than the journal editor.

Copyright Notice

Copyright to works published in AcademFic is retained by the author(s) who grant AcademFic the right to publish their submitted work online as well as in print annuals and anthologies. Articles published in this journal are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

Authors are free to engage in non-commercial distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. Authors are also free to republish any work elsewhere, provided it is accompanied by an acknowledgment that what they wrote first appeared in AcademFic.

Privacy Statement

The names and email addresses entered in this journal site will be used exclusively for the stated purposes of this journal and will not be made available for any other purpose or to any other party.