How to Submit to JSO

If you would like to submit to  Journal of Social Ontology, please send your manuscript prepared for anonymous review (see requirements below) to submission.jso.philosophy@univie.ac.at. Manuscripts that do not adhere to our submission requirements will not be accepted. 

Journal Sections

The Journal of Social Ontology publishes regular journal articles, book reviews, book symposia, special issues and—newly introduced—the shorter, tighter, more focused format of discussion articles—which aim to provide space for a wider variety of contributions to foster ongoing conversations in the field. Articles published in this section (designated ‘discussion articles’) may be shorter than a typical journal article. They may also be more tightly focused in terms of their scope. (Read more about the new format of discussion articles.)

General Submission Process and Timeframe

After you have sent your manuscript to Journal of Social Ontology, your manuscript will be assigned to an editor for an initial assessment. The assigned editor will decide whether or not the manuscript will be sent out for peer review. If the assigned editor decides to send out the manuscript for review, you will receive an account with login details to submit your manuscript and relevant metadata in our Open Journal System. This extra step is added for security reasons. Once you have submitted your manuscript in our Open Journal System, your manuscript will be sent out for peer review following our Peer Review Policy (see below). If the assigned editor recommends to reject the manuscript without peer review, the editorial board will vote on the recommendation and you will be informed about this decision.

This review process takes several weeks, depending on how quickly editors can find referees, how quickly referees submit their reports, and whether or not the revised manuscript will be sent to a second (or even third) round of review. Once referees are found, they are are given four weeks to submit their reports. Currently, 80% of the manuscripts admitted to review reach a decision (for their first round) within 28 days. 

JSO‘s Peer Review Policy

Journal of Social Ontology practices double-anonymous peer review. This means that the identity of the author will remain unknown to the referees and the referees will remain anonymous to the author. All submissions receive an initial editorial review (i.e. desk review). Submissions that are rejected at this stage will not be accompanied by a report. Submissions that are not rejected at this stage will be send to at least two independent referees that are experts in the relevant subfield(s) selected by the editors.

Journal of Social Ontology is committed to maintaining the highest standards of scholarly rigor and requires two (2) positive reviews by independent reviewers as well as the Editorial Board’s approval for any decision to publish. Reviewers must be in no relevant relationship to the author, i.e. they cannot be affiliated with the same institutions or function(ed) as a supervisor. It is sometimes not possible to provide two reports for all manuscripts and the editorial staff will occasionally provide a decision with one report—though generally all submissions not rejected in the initial review will be returned along with two (2) reports.

Parallel submissions: Submissions of one and the same manuscript to multiple publications will result in immediate rejection of the submission and will not be allowed to be resubmitted. The author will be blocked from submitting for a year.

Plagiarism checks: Please make sure that the work of other’s is appropriately cited or quoted or otherwise marked. Submitted manuscripts containing plagiarism will be immediately rejected and not allowed to be resubmitted. The author will be blocked from submitting for a year.

Submission Manuscript Requirements:

Document: The document should be composed with a standard word processor (preferably Word). 

Anonymisation: Your manuscript must be fully anonymised. The manuscript should not contain any identifying information about the author(s). This includes references to audiences of talks, references to commentators or other indicators of personal relations and the file’s metadata. Please only submit only one document, which includes the title, the abstract, and the main text. We do not require any document containing your personal information, nor any further files. In addition, please remove all of the document’s identifying metadata, such as (Microsoft) account details. (You can find guides on how to do this here.)

Length: The maximum length (in characters including spaces*) is:
Articles: 60,000 characters  (12,000 words).
Contributions to Book Symposia: 20,000 to 30,000 characters (4,000 to 6,000 words).
Book reviews: 7,500 characters (1,500 words). Cumulative book reviews: 12,000 characters (2,400 words).
Discussion articles: 15,000–30,000 characters (3,000 to 6,000 words)
*The character count applies to the body text including footnotes, but excluding abstract and bibliography.

Manuscripts should be formulated as concisely as possible. Although we do accept longer submissions, we prefer articles that do not exceed the indicated limits. Submissions that exceed these limits will be evaluated according to a higher standard.

Language: Texts should be written consistently either in British or American English.

Page Numbers: Your manuscript should have consecutive page numbers.

Abstract: Your manuscript should include a short abstract (up to 250 words).

References: Your manuscript should contain references and a bibliography according to Chicago 17th edition Author-Date. However, you are not required to format your manuscript according to this citation style when submitting a manuscript, this will only be relevant when your manuscript is accepted for publication.

General formatting: Please use a typeface, font size, and page formatting that maximises the readability of the manuscript. It is recommended to stick to the defaults of your word processor. 

Before submitting, please see our detailed guide for authors here.

Special Issue Policy

Journal of Social Ontology is open to special issue proposals. We require these proposals to include an explanation of the topic of the proposed special issue and a list of the potential contributions. The propopsal must include a lengthy abstract (ca. 500 words) for each of the prospective papers. Guest editors will be responsible for handling the review process of these papers. As guest editor, you are permitted to contribute to the special issue with an own paper, however, this paper will be assigned to an internal editor from the JSO board. Please send your proposal to submission.jso.philosophy@univie.ac.at.