Author Submission Guidelines
Author Guidelines
For Special Issues & Themed Issues Submission Guidelines, see this page.
Alignment with journal aims and scope
ACME is an international journal for critical analyses of the social, the spatial, the ecological, and the political that publishes work in a wide array of formats, each of which are described in more detail below. Across all these formats, submissions must engage and reflect the core commitments of the journal as outlined in ACME’s Mission Statement.
All submissions are through our online Open Journal System ACME submissions page. Details on the various submission formats—including research papers, interventions, roundtables, interviews, review essays, translations, visual analyses, creative works, letters, performances, podcasts, editorials, and tributes—can be found in the “Format Types and Guidelines” section, below. Manuscript lengths for various submission formats are specified in the Submission Formats section below. Please discuss with your ACME editor if your manuscript word count falls outside the guidelines.
Though ACME is rooted in geography, its critical mission is deeply interdisciplinary. The journal aims to amplify and bridge critical scholarship from an array of locations and contexts, and our authors hail from and draw on a multitude of intellectual backgrounds. To that end, we request you—as a prospective author—carefully consider the ways in which you may situate yourself and your work in relation to the following:
- contemporary concepts and debates at intersections among space, place, location, and relationality (from geography and other spatially-attuned disciplines);
- formations of race, gender, class, species, sexuality, disability, disciplinary training, and/or other axes of difference and intersectionality as pertinent to the the debates in which the paper+* intervenes (and as related to your own positionality, as appropriate); [* We use “paper+” to indicate the range of formats we accept—see “Submission Format Types” section below]
- the history of imperialism and colonialism in relation to the land studied with appropriate land acknowledgements; and
- the full breadth and diversity of relevant literatures pursuant to point 1-3 above, to enact citational practices that leverage diverse perspectives that question and challenge--rather than reproduce--status quo structures of power and knowledge.
This list is not intended to suggest that there is (or could be) any uniform requirement or formula for addressing the considerations outlined above. Rather, in keeping with the critical, boundary-bridging spirit of the journal, ACME the list is simply intended to signal considerations that we expect you will do your utmost to address reflexively and conscientiously. Such reflexive practices extend and enrich the intellectual content of and capacities for generative connections across the diverse critical scholarship which ACME is proud to support.
Review types and choices
As a submitting author to ACME, you can select a double-bind, single-blind, or open peer review process. To facilitate a closed, double-blind review process, manuscripts must include a separate, supplementary file in the form of a title page that includes all authors' names and affiliations; four to six keywords for indexing; and any acknowledgments, funding sources, and/or conflicts of interest. You must also remove any author names or identifiers from the manuscript. When submitting the manuscript in the comments, denote that you are choosing a double-blind peer review.
Alternatively, authors may choose an open review process or single-blind review process. In an open review process, reviewers’ and authors’ names are both known to one another. In a single-blind review process, the reviewers know the authors names but not vice versa. In open or single-blind review processes, manuscripts may contain personal information and identifiers, and a title page is not required. To choose either of these options, when submitting the manuscript indicate in the comments that you are choosing either a single-blind or open peer review.
See the “Submission Preparation Checklist” below for more details about manuscript preparation.
Figures, images, and multimedia elements
Please ensure that figures (maps, photos, graphs or charts) are of high resolution and good quality. You can place these figures directly into the manuscript, and please be sure to label and then refer to them in the text as Figure 1, Figure 2, and so on. Also be sure to confirm in advance any necessary permissions and the ability to reprint these materials by contacting a university-based librarian, public archivist, or other appropriate resource for making these determinations.
Your manuscript submission may be accompanied by multimedia or supplementary files. Please upload interactive content such as audio, video, or data visualization files as Multimedia files. The editor will share a link to these documents with the reviewers. At this time, ACME is only publishing in PDF format, which means we cannot embed interactive content into the article text, but we can create live links in the PDF and store materials from those links in perpetuity. We can also embed interactive contents in article abstracts[CA1] . Therefore, we ask that authors provide still images for inclusion in the PDF. The types of submissions for which there can be interactive or multimedia components are noted with an asterisk (*) in the Format Guidelines section below. You may submit supplementary files such as research tools, data-sets, or creative works along with the manuscript. Supplementary files are intended to enhance the readers' engagement with the primary submission.
Reciprocity and data privacy
There is no fee to publish in ACME. However, as a measure of reciprocity, authors whose papers+ are accepted for publication in ACME agree to participate in the peer review process that is necessary for the journal's operation. In this regard, we ask that you complete a minimum of two peer reviews per published article. By agreeing to have your paper+ published in ACME, you agree to these terms.
All manuscripts will be screened using a reputable text-matching software for possible plagiarism, a practice increasingly common to academic journals. No manuscripts or identifying information will be stored outside of secure ACME servers. As stipulated by our copyright (see Copyright Notice below), authors retain copyright of their manuscript during the review process and, if selected, after publication of their manuscript. To that end, authors can choose to republish their manuscript elsewhere as a chapter or as part of a monograph, or have it translated into another language. ACME’s permission is not needed for any of these actions since the author retains copyright; however, we ask that you notify us of these reprints. We believe it is important to share with our funding agency (SSHRC) that the work published in ACME is valued and sought after in diverse venues and places.
Please direct questions about the scope and focus of the journal, the review process, or anything else to our Editorial Collective: acmegeography@gmail.com. Note that editors cannot preview or approve manuscripts prior to submission.
