Guidelines for Submissions, Women and Social Movements

Women and Social Movements welcomes proposals for online document projects. Co-directors Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin have established a Board of Editors who will referee submissions and offer support to prospective author/editors.

WASM is launching a new format: the Document Archive. Responding to user suggestions, we have developed the new format, which is more archival and less interpretive than the Document Project format that WASM users know. The Document Archive will offer manuscript material by individuals or organizations, typically 50-100 documents. Document Archives might be supplemented by biographical sketches (from Notable American Women or originally authored by the editor if not available in NAW). or by an introductory sketch of the organization–either one that has already been published or one authored by the editor. We invite you to consider authoring a Document Archive if that strategy seems to fit your materials better than the Document Project format.

Whether you are submitting a proposal for a document archive or document project, the submission process remains the same. Prospective submissions should be built around primary sources addressing a concrete question concerning some aspect of women and social movements in the United States. Ideally the project question should address issues raised in relevant secondary literature. The project should include a brief introductory essay with endnotes and 20-30 primary source documents (texts, images, audio or video) with headnotes that address the central question and annotations that identify obscure references within the documents. The project should also include a bibliography and a set of related WWW links. Author/editors of projects accepted for publication on the website will also need to secure permission for the publication of any copyrighted material. Staff of the Women and Social Movements website will provide support in this process.

Because so much work is involved in preparing a web-based document project, and there are limited venues for publication of such work, we ask prospective contributors initially to submit a 3-5 page abstract noting the project's central question, its connection to relevant historiography, and the central primary sources to be employed. The second component of a proposal is an annotated tentative list of documents in which you note the documents you propose to use and in one or two sentences for each, you indicate the way each particular document contributes to answering your central question. Staff at the website and members of the editorial board will offer responses and assistance to prospective contributors. Once your proposal is ready for review, it will be sent out for double-blind peer review—a step which will take about six weeks. Once the review comes in, the editors will contact you and indicate one of three possible outcomes: your proposal is accepted and you are authorized to begin work on the full document project; based on the review, we ask that you revise and resubmit the proposal for further consideration; we don’t find the proposal meets our publishing guidelines.

We encourage prospective contributors to contact Tom Dublin, co-editor, by email to discuss their prospective proposals before submitting them. All submissions must be electronic—most commonly on cd-roms, or via email or email attachments. We find it helpful to have considerable email exchange during the process of preparing a proposal and then a project because of the unique demands of the document project genre.

Professor Jay Kleinberg of Brunel University has written an article describing her experience preparing a document project for WASM and has kindly permitted us to mount the piece here for prospective contributors. You may find her discussion helpful if you are anticipating preparing your own document project.