GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION OF MANUSCRIPTS
Below are guidelines for authors who wish to submit an article to the Journal and for authors whose article has been accepted. The latter section applies to book reviewers as well; unsolicited book reviews are not accepted for submission. If your particular question is not answered here, feel free to write the editor whose mandate covers the field in which you work.
Submissions to the Journal must be based on original research; they may not have been uploaded to an open-access (social media) platform, such as your academia.edu page, have been previously published, or be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Authors will be asked to sign a License to Publish statement before publication.
Materials—preferably not exceeding 15,000 words, including footnotes, appendices, bibliography, etc.—should be sent both as a Word document in Times New Roman font and in PDF format to the appropriate JAOS Sectional Editor.
For Ancient Near East, Gary Beckman
For Islamic Studies, Peri Bearman
For South and Southeast Asia, Stephanie Jamison
For East Asia, Thomas Mazanec
Text, including footnotes (not endnotes), should be double-spaced, in a uniform font size (12 is preferred for text and notes, 11 for block quotes) throughout, and paginated. A bibliography is not required if references are humanities style (see style sheet). Articles submitted for consideration should be shorn of all authorial identity markers, which includes acknowledgments, forthcoming publications, etc. Submissions should include an abstract (not to exceed 200 words) in the accompanying email, and all submissions to the East Asian editor should include a bio or short CV. Keywords are not necessary.
On the understanding that JAOS is not an art journal, so that imagery should be not merely decorative, but imperative for clarification purposes, all illustrative material should be sent both separately, as a tiff or jpeg file, and be embedded in the text. Photographs should be no smaller than 300 dpi resolution, line art no smaller than 1000 dpi, in grayscale. For articles that have been accepted, permission for illustrative material that is not taken from works in the public domain should be in hand and acknowledged in the figure caption. JAOS does not publish in color in print but can for the online edition if needed. The cost of any necessary and above average work on images required of the typesetter, will be charged to the author.
Although the Journal can accommodate some non-Latin scripts, different instructions apply per section.
For the Ancient Near East section, all original cuneiform and hieroglyphic text should be transliterated, using a standard method. Transliteration of Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic script is optional. For Hebrew script, the SBL font is required, and directly preceding and following the Hebrew—whether punctuation or spaces—Times New Roman must be used. This is to avoid a right-to-left issue for non-Hebrew characters and is very important.
For the Islamic section, all non-Latin scripts should be fully transliterated, using a standard method. Exceptions for original script are a block of text accompanied by a full translation and words relevant to the article’s argument that would suffer from the limitations of transliteration, e.g., a word with undotted letters.
For the South and Southeast Asia section, all original text should be transliterated, using a standard method.
For the East Asia section, transliteration—at first occurrence together with original script for disambiguation—is required for proper names, titles, and terms used within the English texts. Bibliographies should use both transliteration and original script for authors, editors, titles; not for place of publication and publisher. For quotations, on the other hand, original script alone will suffice. If using original script for quotations, please use East Asian punctuation marks.
See additionally the JAOS Style Sheet.
If your article has been accepted, it will undergo thorough editing by the respective editor. The waiting list for publication differs per discipline; ask your editor for an approximate date. Proofs are sent out as PDFs; a second proof stage is corrected internally. Please avoid the temptation of uploading any earlier draft than the published article—multiple differing versions should not be available on the web.
Finally, JAOS is not open access in the corporate-publisher sense of the word, but since the copyright of all published material belongs to the author, the author is free to reprint, republish, adapt, translate. or upload, to a repository of the author’s choosing, the offprint received upon e-publication of the journal issue.