Instructions to Authors
The Journal of Human Rights Practice invites submissions on any topic that is related to the application and implementation of human rights. Our aim is to publish readable papers of high quality that will stimulate debate between academics and practitioners, across disciplinary and geographical boundaries, and within and beyond the human rights mainstream. Our main criteria for assessing submissions include originality, quality of analysis, potential impact, and relevance to contemporary and emerging debates.
Manuscripts are accepted for publication on the understanding that they have been submitted solely to the Journal of Human Rights Practice and that they have not been previously published either in whole or in part. Authors may not submit papers that are under consideration for publication elsewhere, and, if an author decides to offer a submitted paper to another journal, the paper must be withdrawn from the Journal of Human Rights Practice before the new submission is made.
Article Types
The Journal of Human Rights Practice publishes material in the form of original articles; shorter Policy and Practice Notes; Review Notes and Review Essays.
Articles. Articles are expected to be in the range of 5,000 to 10,000 words. The Editors reserve the right to make literary corrections. When drafting your paper, please remember that the journal has a worldwide and interdisciplinary readership. Write clearly and explain any technical terms.
Policy and Practice Notes. The journal also welcomes the submission of shorter papers of between 1,500 and 5,000 words for the section on Policy and Practice. If you are uncertain about whether your paper fits this requirement, please contact one of the Editors to discuss your proposal.
Review Notes. Review Notes should be 800 to 1,200 words in length.
Review Essays. Review Essays are invited within a 2,000 to 4,000 word range.
Please consult the separate guidelines on Review Notes and Essays.
Manuscript Submission
Manuscripts must be submitted online. Once you have prepared your manuscript according to the instructions below, please visit the online submission web site. Instructions on submitting your manuscript online can be viewed here.
Electronic files for text and figures should be prepared and uploaded as directed in the online submission instructions.
Please email the Editorial Office with any queries regarding submissions.
The editorial office will make every effort to deal with submissions to the journal as quickly as possible. All papers will be acknowledged on receipt by email. All contributions will be reviewed by the editors as to their suitability for inclusion in the journal and be subject to peer review.
Authors will normally be notified of acceptance, rejection, or need for revision within 8 weeks of submission. Contributors may be asked to revise their contributions before final acceptance and will have an opportunity to review proofs before publication. However, no major changes can be included at proof stage, and corrections must be limited to typographical errors only. Contributors will be provided with an electronic pdf proof via email and corrections must be returned within 48 hours.
The editors reserve the right to alter submissions on legal grounds without notice.
Manuscript Preparation
The journal’s language is English. British English or American English spelling and terminology may be used, but either one should be followed consistently throughout the article. Spelling in references should follow the original. Articles must be word processed using Microsoft Word, 11 point font, and should be double-spaced throughout allowing good (1 1/2 inch) margins. Pages should be numbered sequentially.
The title page of the article should include the following information (where applicable):
- Article type
- Manuscript title
- Names and affiliations of all contributing authors
- Full address for correspondence, including telephone and fax number and email address
- One or two lines of biographical details (latest publications, previous posts…) should be provided for all contributors for use in the Notes on Contributors
- Summary: please provide a short summary of up to 300 words. The summary should not contain any undefined abbreviations or unspecified references
- Key words: please provide a minimum of 4 and up to 6 key words in alphabetical order, suitable for indexing. Ideally these words will not have appeared in the title.
- Funding Statement (see notes below)
- Acknowledgements
- Conflict of Interests Declaration (see notes below)
Section headings
Use up to three levels of heading.
Primary Level Heading (first letters capitalised and followed by one hard return)
Secondary Level Heading (first letters capitalised and followed by one hard return)
Third level heading: with the text carrying along the same line, and followed by a full stop.
References
Avoid over-referencing. Journal of Human Rights Practice aims to be a publication accessible to a range of audiences, both academic and practitioner. Use the author-date system for in-text citations (eg: Ngugi, 2007: 28-32), and list references alphabetically at the end of the article in a bibliography (see below). Court cases and other documents that do easily not fit into the Harvard referencing system should be referenced in full in footnotes.
Notes
Footnotes, not endnotes are used. Footnotes should be used sparingly, and only for explanatory information and should be marked clearly in the text in numeric order after a point of punctuation
Quotations
Short quotations should be incorporated into the text and are not indented. A single inverted comma should be used at the beginning and end of the quote. Quotations over 30 words in length should be indented from both margins, and quotation marks for such quotes are not required. Full stops and commas sit inside quotation marks.
Other matters
- spell out all acronyms on the first reference, except for those in general public use (USA, UN) - thereafter use capitals.
- numbers from one to nine should be written as words; higher numbers should be written as numerals.
- dates should be written as follows: 18 February 2003.
- acknowledgements should appear at the end of the article, and not in the footnotes.
Bibliography
The bibliography should only contain sources cited in the text. Authors are asked to pay particular attention to the accuracy and correct presentation of references.
Book
Clapham, A. 2006. Human Rights Obligations of Non-State Actors. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chapter in edited volume
Drèze, J. 2005. ‘Democracy and the Right to Food’. In P. Alston and M. Robinson (eds). Human Rights and Development: Towards Mutual Reinforcement. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 45-64.
Article in a journal
Alston, P. 2005. ‘Ships Passing in the Night: The Current State of the Human Rights and Development Debate Seen through the Lens of the Millennium Development Goals’. Human Rights Quarterly 27 (3): 755-829.
Conference paper
Cronin, J. 1999. ‘A Luta Dis-continua? The TRC Final Report and the Nation Building Project’. Paper presented at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Commissioning the Past conference, Johannesburg, 11-14 June.
Internet reference
Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) 2005. ‘A Call for Justice: A National Consultation on Past Human Rights Violations in Afghanistan’. Available at http://www.aihrc.org.af (retrieved 10 September 2007).
Interviews and e-mails
Doe, J. E-mail message to the author, 31 October 2007.
Naidoo, P. Interview with the author, 15 May 2005.
Figures and Tables
For preparation of figures for online submission and peer review please use the Online submission instructions. These should be submitted in separate files.
Authors should supply figures as high resolution .tif, .eps or .jpg files at the following resolutions: 600 dpi for line drawings and 300 dpi. for colour and half-tone artwork.
Figures should be saved in separate files without their captions. Files should be named according to DOS conventions, e.g. 'figure1.tif'.
Each figure and table should be numbered and mentioned in the text. Figures and tables should be placed at the end of the manuscript following the Reference section. Each figure and table should be accompanied by an explanatory legend. The figure legends should be grouped and placed on a separate page. Figures that are to be printed in black-and-white should not be submitted in colour. Authors will be charged for reproducing figures in colour.
In tables, footnotes are preferable to long explanatory material in either the heading or body of the table. Such explanatory footnotes, identified by superscript letters, should be placed immediately below the table.
Funding Statement
Details of all funding sources for the work in question should be given in a separate section entitled 'Funding'. This should appear before the 'Acknowledgements' section.
The following rules should be followed:
- The sentence should begin: ‘This work was supported by …’
- The full official funding agency name should be given, i.e. ‘National Institutes of Health’, not ‘NIH’ (full RIN-approved list of UK funding agencies) Grant numbers should be given in brackets as follows: ‘[grant number xxxx]’
- Multiple grant numbers should be separated by a comma as follows: ‘[grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]’
- Agencies should be separated by a semi-colon (plus ‘and’ before the last funding agency)
- Where individuals need to be specified for certain sources of funding the following text should be added after the relevant agency or grant number 'to [author initials]'.
An example is given here: ‘This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health [AA123456 to C.S., BB765432 to M.H.]; and the Alcohol & Education Research Council [hfygr667789].
Proofs
Proofs will be sent to the corresponding author via email as a pdf file. The corrected proof should be returned to the publisher within two days of receipt.
Proofs should be checked thoroughly for any possible layout or typographic errors. Significant alterations instigated at this stage by the contributor will be charged to the contributor.
It is the intention of the Editor to review, edit and publish your article as quickly possible. To achieve this it is important that all of your corrections are returned to the Production Editor in one all-inclusive email or fax. Subsequent additional corrections will not be possible, so please ensure that your first communication is complete.
Advance Access Publication
OUP uses Advance Access which allows for papers to be published online soon after they have been accepted for publication – reducing the time between submission and publication. Articles posted for Advance Access have been copyedited and typeset but not yet paginated for inclusion in a specific issue of the journal.
New papers are put into Advance Access at regular intervals and are then taken off the Advance Access page once they have been paginated, at which point the issue into which they are incorporated will be posted online.
Offprints
The publisher supplies a URL for online access to the article free of charge.
Page Charges and Colour Figures
No page charges are levied on authors or their institutions. Colour figures are published at the author’s expense only.
Author Self Archiving/Public Access Policy
For information about this journal's policy, please visit our Author Self-Archiving policy page.
Conflict of Interest Declaration
At the point of submission, the policy of Journal of Human Rights Practice requires that each author reveal any financial interests or connections, direct or indirect, or other situations that might raise the question of bias in the work reported or the conclusions, implications, or opinions stated - including pertinent commercial or other sources of funding for the individual author(s) or for the associated department(s) or organization(s), personal relationships, or direct academic competition. When considering whether you should declare a conflicting interest or connection please consider the conflict of interest test: Is there any arrangement that would embarrass you or any of your co-authors if it was to emerge after publication and you had not declared it?
As an integral part of the online submission process, Corresponding authors are required to confirm whether they or their co-authors have any conflicts of interest to declare, and to provide details of these. If the Corresponding author is unable to confirm this information on behalf of all co-authors, the authors in question will then be required to submit a completed Conflict of Interest form to the Editorial Office. This information must be provided at the point of submission. It is the Corresponding author’s responsibility to ensure that all authors adhere to this policy.
If the manuscript is published, Conflict of Interest information will be communicated in a statement in the published paper.
Copyright
Contributors will retain the copyright in their work. It is however a condition of publication in the journal that authors grant an exclusive licence to Oxford University Press to publish their contribution in both paper and electronic form. This ensures that requests from third parties to reproduce articles are handled efficiently and consistently and will also allow the article to be as widely disseminated as possible. In granting this exclusive licence, authors may use their own material in reworked form in other publications provided that the journal is acknowledged as the original place of publication, and Oxford University Press is notified in writing and in advance.
Permissions
Authors will also be asked to confirm that any necessary permissions have been obtained in writing from the copyright owners of any third party material included in the article.
It is the responsibility of the author to obtain written permission for a quotation from unpublished material, or for all quotations in excess of 250 words in one extract or 500 words in total from any work still in copyright, and for the reprinting of figures, tables or poems for unpublished or copyrighted material.
If text material (over 250 words) is to be reproduced from published sources, written permission is required from both publisher and author. For shorter quotations, it is usually sufficient to add a bibliographic credit. If illustrations or figures are to be duplicated from previously published work, written permission must be obtained both from the publisher and the author, and a credit line giving the source added to the relevant Figure Legend. The letters containing the permission for the reproduction of either text or illustrations must accompany the typescript. If you have been unable to obtain permission, please indicate this.
Disclaimer
Opinions expressed in articles and reviews in Journal of Human Rights Practice are the views of the authors and contributors, and not those of the Editors, the publishers or the editorial board.