Information for Authors

Please send your article manuscripts, book reviews, and news to:

Prof. Dr. Andreas Thier
Centre for Legal History Research
University of Zurich
Rämistrasse 74/48
CH-8001 Zürich

E-Mail: fhi@ius.uzh.ch

Peer Review

The FHI ensures its quality through peer review. Each submitted text is evaluated by two reviewers for its scientific quality. The reviewers are chosen from among the co-editors according to the respective research focus. Alternatively, external reviewers will be used. Publication is only possible with two positive votes from the reviewers.
More on the Ethical Guidelines of FHI as follows:

ETHICAL GUIDELINES OF forum historiae iuris

(Adopted by the Editorial Board on September 23, 2022, and approved by the Advisory Board of forum historiae iuris)

These guidelines are compliant to COPE – Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing and aim to ensure the best possible editorial practices, support for authors and scientific standards and to be a helpful resource both for editors and associated members of forum historiae iuris (FHI from hereon) as well as authors and prospective contributors.

Submission Types

Most submissions to FHI can be categorized as either articles, which consist of original work and research in which a specific topic is explored in-depth by the authors, or book reviews, in which contributors to FHI review the work of other researchers to better contextualize or raise awareness of their findings. These two types of submissions are subject to different publication processes. An article is entered into a blinded peer-review process, where two different peer-reviewers assess the manuscript’s merits. In the case of a book review a single peer-reviewer
is sufficient for the blinded peer-review process. If, however, a book review was not sent in unsolicited, but has been requested by a member of the editorial board or team, the review and publication process can be expedited with the examination and approval of a member of the editorial board.

Confidentiality and Peer Review

Papers submitted to FHI undergo a blinded peer-review process and every involved person, be they editors, reviewers or authors,are thus required to keep the details of the peer-review process confidential. Manuscripts are anonymized by the editorial team before being sent for evaluation to the peer-reviewers, whose identities are in turn kept confidential from authors. When all completed necessary peer-review evaluations have been received by the editorial staff of FHI, the authors are informed
of the results of the examination and the further course of action. If there is no unanimous approval by the reviewers that the manuscript should be accepted, FHI has to decline publication. If the acceptance of the reviewers is contingent on changes (minor or major revisions), authors can submit revised drafts to gain publication approval.

Publication Ethics concerning Contributors

The FHI expects that all researchers adhere both in the course of their research as well as during the publication process to best academic practices. Contributors must adhere to the following regulations in particular:

To be recognized as the author of a manuscript, one must have contributed significantly both to the necessary prerequisite research as well as to the written draft of the submitted manuscript. By submitting a manuscript for consideration of publication in FHI, all the listed authors therein are assumed to be aware of the prerequisites necessary for recognizing authorship. Authors are responsible for the content of their manuscript, for ensuring that every person with claim to authorship has been included and have to supply FHI with reliable means for contacting all involved parties.

Plagiarism automatically disqualifies a work from being published by FHI. The term plagiarism (which includes self-plagiarism) in this context means the copying of text from another work or person without proper attribution and citation. This necessitates a certain clarity in writing, lest e.g., paraphrasing devolves into plagiarism. While there is some leeway when citing other papers written by the authors of a manuscript, these basic standards still apply.

A submission to FHI may not be submitted to another publisher at the same time or have been published previously. All manuscripts must consist of original and substantial new work. Solely translating an article into another language generally does not suffice to fulfill these criteria, though exceptions are possible after a preliminary check by members of the editorial or scientific advisory board.

Unprofessional academic practices in general, which include, but are not limited to the aforementioned plagiarism, will lead to a summary publication rejection. FHI reserves for itself the right to investigate cases which are deemed suspicious, e.g., with plagiarism identifying software, and expects the cooperation of involved parties
to expedite the process.

Please send us your articles as docx-files via email. Due to the international orientation, the following languages are initially desired: German, English, French, Italian and Spanish. Since we do not have a service apparatus, we cannot offer you a proofreading service for your manuscripts. Therefore, after we have prepared the manuscripts for publication, you will receive a "proof" of the text in PDF format from us for further proofreading.

We will then inform you by email about the publication of your contribution.

Guidelines for manuscripts

When preparing your manuscript, please follow the guidelines of the fhi stylesheet (download), which you can download here as a docx document and use as a document template.

We also ask you to include the following information with your manuscript:

• contact information (including, if possible, the location and institution of your work) so that we and subsequent readers can get in touch with you;

• for article manuscripts, an abstract in your native language and one in English language;

• an outline, so that a quick overview is guaranteed.

· For reviews, please preface the bibliographic information of the work in the header of your review, following the guidelines below:

Author or editor of the reviewed volume / title / translator, if applicable, and indication of the original language / series / publisher / place of publication / year of publication / number of pages / ISBN 

Please use the styles provided in our Word stylesheet to identify special sections of text such as titles, headings, bulleted lists, quotations. If this is not possible for you, please use the paragraph style sheets provided by your word processing program as an alternative. Avoid blank lines between paragraphs and between headings and text, do not use tabs for first line indents, and use footnotes, not endnotes. Use CAPITALS only for authors' names in annotations and use italics sparingly, especially for shorter foreign language terms.