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Writing for The Post Hole

Information for anyone who wants to write for The Post Hole.

This document contains information for authors including details on how we use content provided by authors, the terms under which we use that content and the ways in which we may and may not make use of it. This document currently applies to any new material submitted for issue three onwards. In consultation with the authors of content published in issues one and two we will hopefully extend this policy to cover all content. You will find the following things on this page, click a heading to jump to that section:

Topics

We accept papers with any conceivable topic as long as it is archaeological! There is an inexhaustive list of topics if you're stuck for ideas.

Deadlines

The Post Hole is published on Monday of weeks 3 and 7 of each term (University of York). The deadline for submissions is the Wednesday before (Week 2 and Week 6).

Regulations for Submissions

All submissions must meet with the following requirements before they may be considered for publication. The decisions of the editor are final.

  1. All sources used must be fully referenced. Please use Harvard Referencing. For online resources which are not also catalogued publications, a URL and the date which the URL was accessed for the purposes of writing the article are required.
  2. NO PLAGIARISM.
  3. NO SLANDER.
  4. It is the author or authors' responsibility to secure permission to reproduce any material. Such reproduced material is fine, however it should not make up a significant proportion of the submission, must be fully referenced and it must be explicitly indicated in the text that permission has been sought and granted by the owner of the material which has been reproduced.
  5. Original material only. While "self-plagiarism" is a rather ambiguous term (and when strictly interpreted, totally stupid), it is never the less against the rules. Please respect the spirit of this rather than the letter of the law: do not simply regurgitate something you have published elsewhere, we are not interested.
  6. Please supply with all submission your full name as you would like it to appear and valid email address. Authors will be notified that their submission has been accepted for publication before it is published.

Copyright agreement for material submitted for publication

The following terms apply to any material you submit to The Post Hole for publication including but not limited to text, images or multimedia material.

  1. By sumitting material to The Post Hole you grant The Post Hole editorial team non-exclusive and perpetual rights to make use of that content in the following ways and as governed by the editorial standards. Here "material" refers to the text of a submission, any figures and biographical information on the author(s).
    1. To publish the material in any media format as part of an issue of The Post Hole.
    2. To publish an abridged version in print if an article is excessively long. If necessary, this will be done in consultation with the author. Articles will always be made available in full on the online version and the vast majority of articles will be published in full in print.
    3. To publish and archive the material in any relevant media format including but not limited to online and in print.
    4. To use elements of material submitted as part of promotional material for example, figures from a submitted article may be used to advertise The Post Hole.
    5. To authorise the use of the submission by third parties provided the terms for third-party re-use of material published in The Post Hole are met (see above).
  2. Authors must agree to be bound by the all the above terms upon submitting any work for publication in The Post Hole. While these terms may change over time, any work published under a particular version of these terms will continue to be bound by that version unless the author also agrees to the updated terms.
  3. Authors retain copyright of their submissions, however should note that once published an article is likely to be ineligible for publication anywhere else. This depends on the terms of other publishers but most academic publishers will require sole rights to publish your work. The Post Hole does not aim to publish fully referenced academic papers but rather thoughts, comments, notes and observations on elements of archaeological theory, practice and experience. You are free to submit any kind of content to The Post Hole, then, but if you want to publish something in an academic journal we would suggest you write a separate, shorter magazine style paper for us and save your completed paper for an academic publisher.
  4. Where a submission is reproduced in full (i.e. in the print or online version of The Post Hole) author(s) will always be given full credit for their work and may provide additional biographical information if they wish. When elements of a submission (e.g. "sound bites" or parts of figures) are reproduced as part of promotional material we reserve the right to include citation information only in the full version of a publication and not in that promotional material. An example of the above might be a particularly nice photograph submitted as part of a paper - we would have the right not to include your name on promotional material if we use part of that photograph in it. If promotional material is promoting a particular article then we will include author(s) details, if it is promoting The Post Hole as a whole, we may choose not to simply for stylistic reasons.

How to submit your work

Complete work can be emailed to the submissions team. Please include your name in the text of your submission, and we would very much appreciate it if you supplied a mugshot of yourself to go on your author info page (once those work).

In the future, it is planned to allow electronic submission and mediation of the editorial process via The Post Hole website, however at present submissions are handled manually by editors. When submitting work please consider that it must be published in a consistent style, so please limit your use of formatting such as different fonts, colours font sizes and paragraph spacings etc. as we will have to remove/alter all this.

Things to bear in mind...

  1. If you want to include links to web pages (that's great, please do!) please put the full URL in brackets after the text, rather than creating a hyperlink in whatever format where English text links to the URL.
  2. Please use Harvard Referencing where appropriate (but not for web pages which don't display scholarly articles).
  3. If you don't send us a mugshot, we might go find a terrible picture of you on facebook in its place - you have been warned! :-)

File formats for submission text

Whatever formats you choose to use, please do not submit anything in a non-editable format such as PDF and avoid embedding figures in a document. We request that all figures be submitted as separate files (see below for acceptable formats)

XHTML
When published online, everything is formatted in XHTML so if you are comfortable formatting text in this way then please do. Please limit your use of tags to the following selection: <h2>, <h3>, <ul>, <ol>, <li>, <p>, <a>, <table> <tr> <td> <thead> <tbody> and <img />. Remember to encode special characters as XHTML character entities.
Plain text
Plain text is fine for submitting papers in, if you don't want to do any formatting yourself we are happy to do it for you as long as it is clear from your submission where headings, figures etc. should appear.
Microsoft Word®
We'd prefer it if you didn't use Word, but if you must, please submit in either Word 2000 compatible .doc format or the new .docx bundled XML format.
  1. Do not embed figures in the document
  2. Do not use footnotes or any other nonlinear positioned elements or generated elements such as automatic tables of contents, floating text frames etc.

File formats for figures

Please do not submit figures in ANY format other than those listed below

JPG for photographs
Please submit fullsize, high quality JPG images for photographs. Please do not include caption text within the image itself but indicate this either in your submission text or via email when submitting work.
PNG for line drawings
For line drawings such as plans, artefact drawings, graphs or charts please supply them in PNG format if possible. High quality JPG is also acceptable but the format does not lend itself well to line drawings.
CSV if you don't want to make your own figures
If you would like to include charts in your paper but don't want to make them yourself, you may submit the data you want to show along with legends, captions etc. and we will make the figures for you. These data must be submitted in CSV (Comma Separated Values) format. You can save data in CSV format from any major spreadsheet or database application, usually by finding it in the "file type" list in the "Save As" dialogue or by using the export feature. If you need help with this, please contact .

For any technical questions not covered above, please email technical support.

 

 
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