Submissions

This page is designed to help you ensure that your manuscript is ready for submission. 

Before submitting to Orbit, please ensure your research fits the "Focus and Scope" of the journal and read over the guidelines here. To begin the submission process, register an account (or login if you have an existing account) and follow the steps on screen.

Orbit allows authors to submit manuscripts in the style of their choosing, so long as the author maintains an internally consistent style of writing and referencing for the article.

Articles are generally expected to be of standard academic length for the field of literary studies, of approximately 8,000 to 12,000 words, although shorter notes and longer pieces may be considered.

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.

1. 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).
2. The submission follows the expected word count and internal consistency of referencing as outlined by the "Author Guidelines" above.
3. The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
4. Where available, URLs for the references have been provided.
5. The text is double-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.
6. Manuscripts should be prepared according to any endnoted bibliographic style, submitted in a 12-point font in either Microsoft Office, or OpenOffice format.
7. Any third-party-owned materials used have been identified with appropriate credit lines, and permission obtained from the copyright holder for all formats of the journal. Orbit requires authors to secure any permissions for the reproduction of images as figures within articles that are currently licensed to be reproduced under restrictive terms (e.g., an artist's estate, archive or gallery). Evidence of any granted permissions will need to be shown to the Editorial Team prior to an article's publication in the journal. Permission to reproduce images must be obtained from the copyright holder prior to submission, and details of the permissions obtained, including a copy of any agreed licensing terms, should be included with your submission. Image permissions should permit open access publication with no restrictions on duration of use or recurring renewal costs. See OLH's guidance on image permissions and reproduction for further information.
8. If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the instructions in Ensuring an Anonymous Review have been followed.

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

Authors retain copyright. Works are released under a Creative Commons attribution license which provides unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The Creative Commons License stipulates that: "You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work)."

The citation of articles published in Orbit must include: the name(s) of the authors, the name of the journal, the full URL of the article (in a hyperlinked format if distributed online) and the DOI number of the article.

All articles published in this journal are available in full-text semantically rich JATS XML with metadata and structured citation data. Open OAI-PMH endpoints are available to crawl the articles at: https://www.pynchon.net/jms/index.php/up/oai/ . We ask that you respect our bandwidth capacity when mass-downloading articles but place no restrictions on this.

All submissions will be double-anonymously peer reviewed by active researchers. All communication will be through the assigned section editor.

Please see Orbit's "Journal Policies" page for further information on its peer review process.

This journal recommends that authors retain their copyright via a CC BY 4.0 attribution license. This means that users accessing the work must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. They may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses them or their use of the work. There are no additional restrictions, however the user may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

This journal is published by the Open Library of Humanities. Unlike many open-access publishers, the Open Library of Humanities does not charge any author fees. This does not mean that we do not have costs. Instead, our costs are paid by an international library consortium.

If your institution is not currently supporting the platform, we request that you ask your librarian to sign up. The OLH is extremely cost effective and is a not-for-profit charity. However, while we cannot function without financial support and we encourage universities to sign up, institutional commitment is not required to publish with us.

Orbit is a rolling format journal. This means that articles are published, under a Volume and Issue, as soon as they are ready. Volumes are numbered yearly, with up to four issues per year.