Submissions

Please attend to both the general guidelines that apply to all submissions and the specific guidelines for your submission type, listed below.

Before submission, TWC encourages authors to review previously-published submissions as examples of required formatting and structure.

General Guidelines

Preparation of text

Because TWC is an online-only publication, to ease citation of articles in other forums, TWC requires that authors number heads (1. Introduction) and all paragraphs  in brackets according to head: [1.1]. Only use one level of head. Display extract paragraphs/block quotes should be numbered in sequence as if they were regular text. The References head is numbered, but its individual entries are not. Do not use Word's automated numbering/heading; instead, keep all text in 'Normal' style.

Text should be ordered as follows: article type, title, [author], [affiliation if desired], abstract, suggested keywords, text broken up by first-level heads, acknowledgments, notes, and references. [Brackets indicate items left off for double-anonymous peer review. The author name and affiliation are omitted from the manuscript for peer review for Article submissions. However, they are not omitted from the manuscript for editorial review of Symposium and book review submissions.]

Supplemental files may be submitted at the same time as the manuscript file. Please upload images separately as supplemental files. Do not embed them in the paper.

For multi-authored contributions, a single author should be designated as the corresponding author, who will take charge of the submission through the submission and publication processes.

TWC encourages authors to consider using images and embedded media in their papers. TWC will not hide hotlinks under words; nor will TWC publish shortened URLs. A hotlinked URL will always appear in full.

Text file format

TWC prefers files to be submitted in DOC or DOCX format. Please delete identifying metadata from the file's Properties before submission. Files are uploaded through TWC's software interface. Authors must create a user ID and sign up as Author, log in, choose "Author" at User Home, and then submit the paper.

All active links should be removed from the text. This includes field codes for any element of a reference added by Zotero, Mendeley, or other such programs. This also includes URLs made active by Word, such as regular links as well as the program's automated headings and bulleted list styles.

Supplementary file format

In addition to the file containing the text itself, authors may upload supplemental files, such as JPG, MP3, PDF, or GIF files, as guided by the software during submission. Images should not be embedded in the paper. If they are, the file may be too large to upload. Please refer to images sequentially in text according to their number: figure 1, figure 2; video 1, video 2. Figure files (JPG images) should be numbered (e.g., figure-1.jpg) to expedite matching the image with the in-text callout.

Please provide a figure caption for each figure or video describing the image, placing the caption where you would like the image to appear. In addition to the caption that appears under the image that credits and contextualizes it, for accessibility reasons, we require separate text, no more than 125 characters, that briefly describes the image itself, to be placed within the image's coding. TWC may reformat or resize images to expedite production.

Video format

TWC does not host video. Articles can embed video code, as for YouTube. The embedding will be added during production, so for submission, authors should simply provide the video's URL and a caption for the video where the display item ought to be placed. If relevant, ensure that the URL conceals the identity of the author so as to retain anonymous peer review. If no embed code is provided by YouTube, then permission has been withheld for such embedding by the creator. In these cases, TWC will print only a hotlink. TWC recommends that authors download a copy of the YouTube video for their records.

Permissions

Authors, not TWC, are responsible for obtaining and paying for permissions.

TWC, like its parent organization, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), is committed to the free expression of ideas, particularly in the context of scholarly activity about derivative fan artworks. Therefore, we do not require the consent, explicit or implicit, of the original author of a transformative work under discussion, such as a piece of fan fiction or a vid. However, we do strongly recommend that permission be obtained from the creator for any fan work or blog post cited in a submitted article. All citation URLs to such texts need only be open to the public. 

TWC follows the tenets of online research laid out in the Association of Internet Research's (AoIR) most recent Ethics guide. Any paper that uses informants must provide an explanation of methodology, including receipt of institutional review board approval (if relevant), the form that informed consent took for the project, and the mode of interaction (face to face or online). Authors must be particularly wary of including informants who are minors because of the inherent problems in obtaining consent from guardians, particularly in online contexts. TWC will not consider papers that use informants but that do not explain the methodology.

TWC permits screenshots of media sources, such as television programs or films, and clips to be printed under our rationale of fair use.

Title, abstract, and keywords

Good titles will include the topic of the article in the first part of the title. Many indexing services omit subtitles altogether, so their use is discouraged.

An abstract must be provided. Do not quote or cite literature in the abstract. Abstracts should include the topic, the theoretical approach taken, the author's thesis, and a general take-away conclusion. We prefer abstracts that do not use first person and that avoid saying things like "this paper argues..." We prefer a dry, factual, neutral tone for abstracts. Abstracts for Symposium papers are two or three sentences long; in any case, abstracts may not exceed 250 words.

In addition to the topical keywords embedded in the first part of the article's title, please also provide several alphabetized keywords that do not duplicate words in the title.

Style

Submissions to TWC should be formatted according to the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) using author-year (Documentation II) style.  Style for TWC issues 26 and forward uses CMOS, 17th edition; refer to chapter 15, "Documentation II: Author-Date References." Style for TWC issues 1–5 was based on CMOS, 15th edition. Style for TWC issues 6–25 was based on CMOS, 16th edition.

In-text parenthetical literature citations should provide author name, year (using a, b after the year to differentiate otherwise identical citations), and, if relevant, a page number: (Jenkins 2006a, 3). If URLs are provided, the date of the original post should be given. Wayback Machine entries are acceptable. Date accessed is not provided. In text, page numbers need only be provided for direct quotations. Although informational endnotes may be used, they should be kept to a minimum. Acknowledgments, which must list the names of specific people in order to be included, should appear before the endnotes and should be redacted for peer review.

The dictionary used is Merriam-Webster Online. Compound words not in the dictionary appear as two words. Where CMOS and Webster's differ, Webster's will take precedence. TWC imposes American spelling and typographic conventions to ensure conformity across documents. Please note the styling, following Webster's, of the following common terms: Comic-Con, Doctor Who, email, fan fic, fan fiction, fan sub, fan vid, game play, internet, MediaWest*Con, Middle-earth, off-line, online, role-play, screen cap, screen capture, screenshot, story line, video game, voice-over, webmaster, website, YouTube.

Preparation of references section

The references section should include only works cited. Reference to general (base) URLs and ephemera may appear in text, without being included in references. Titles of texts mentioned in passing also may be omitted from the references. TWC prints DOIs instead of URLs for sources that have them. Authors may provide them; otherwise, they will be inserted during production. The CMOS guidelines for Author-Date Style provide specific examples of how to style individual entries for books, journals, websites, dailies, dissertations, etc. All active links should be removed from the section. 

Copyediting

All submissions, including interviews, will be copyedited to bring the document into conformance with TWC's style.

Guidelines per submission type

Article

These often interdisciplinary essays with a conceptual focus and a theoretical frame offer expansive interventions in the field of fan studies or analyze the particular, applying a specific theory to a formation or artifact; explicating fan practice; performing a detailed reading of a specific text; or otherwise relating transformative or fan phenomena to social, literary, technological, and/or historical frameworks. Articles undergo anonymous peer review. (maximum 8,000 words including notes and references, plus a maximum 250-word abstract)

Make a new submission to the Article section.

Symposium

Parallel to academia's tradition of compact essays, often published as letters, fandom has its own vibrant history of criticism (aka meta), some of which has been collected at the Symposium archive. In the spirit of this history, TWC's Symposium is a section of concise, thematically contained essays. These short pieces provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures. We have discovered that brief, thesis-only papers, particularly those providing overviews of topical subjects or illustrating a particular writing mode (such as a close reading of a single fan-created artwork), are frequently used in classrooms. Symposium submissions undergo editorial review. (maximum 4,000 words including notes and references, plus a 2-sentence abstract)

Make a new submission to the Symposium section.

Book Review

TWC reviews books and other texts of interest to the general fan studies audience and will only print reviews within 3 years of the text’s copyright date. Publishers and potential review writers should contact the Review Editor for more information. Reviews should be no more than 2,500 words long. For longer reviews, or for reviews of more than one text, please contact us.

Book reviews should include a critical engagement with the ideas explored in the book rather than just summarizing its contents, and they should also include a recommendation for the target audience. Provide parenthetical page references for direct quotations only, and include a references (works cited) list if necessary. It is not necessary to list every section and chapter title. Most reviews are in the following format, with a paragraph for each section (reviews may deviate from these guidelines): (1) a summary of what the text purports to do, the title of the most recent other work by the author/editor, and any other relevant contextualizing information; (2) a physical description, including the existence of images, index, tables, parts, and number of chapters—if multiauthored, a few names will be mentioned here; (3) several paragraphs comprising a chronological or thematic analysis of the contents, with specific points pulled out to relate to the book’s overall thesis, focusing on the book’s strengths; (4) a paragraph or two on the reviewer’s critical analysis of the text’s place in its field and how well the book succeeds in its goal, along with a brief analysis of the place the text holds in the larger corpus of its field; and (5) an assessment of the book’s overall usefulness and its target audience.

Make a new submission to the Book review section.

Guest-edited sections or issues