About the Journal of the British Academy

Connecting knowledge – Deepening inquiry – Pushing boundaries

The Journal of the British Academy is an online, open access journal, showcasing the very best research in the humanities and social sciences. It aims to deepen and connect scholarship – not only within the humanities and social sciences, but across and between them – creating a platform for innovative interdisciplinary methods, perspectives and approaches.

The Journal promotes original, stimulating, and disciplinary-diverse knowledge as a vital dimension of broader engagement with multiple audiences. It welcomes research that pushes at boundaries and is accessible to different readerships. It seeks to sustain distinctive knowledge, which is necessary to inform the political, social, cultural and global challenges of the present, to critically re-examine the past, and to shape the future.

The Journal publishes high-quality articles that are in line with the Journal’s aims, written by those who have been supported through any of the British Academy’s programmes and activities, and by Fellows of the British Academy. Types of article include:

• full articles discussing innovative interdisciplinary methods, perspectives and approaches (up to 10,000 words);
• commentary pieces (typically 3-4,000 words), which can be reactions to events, policies, and developments in knowledge;
• responses to articles recently published in the Journal;
• articles derived from the programme of British Academy Lectures.

Some articles may take the form of conversations between two or more academics.

Articles should be inclusive and accessible to readers who are not specialists in a particular field. For some articles, the appropriate readership may include those with related non-academic expertise (e.g. practitioners or policymakers).

Articles are published on this Journal website as downloadable PDF files. Each article is posted once it is ready for publication. Each ‘Volume’ of the Journal is composed of articles that have been posted to the Journal in the course of a calendar year. The Journal also publishes themed collections of articles.

From 2024 content will be gathered into four issues a year. One of these will be a themed issue (though there may be themed sections within the other issues).

Open access

The Journal of the British Academy is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Authors may post the published PDF file version of record of their article to institutional or centrally organised subject repositories.

Funder requirements. Where an author acknowledges research funding that brings with it a requirement that the article should be published under a CC BY licence, the author should contact [email protected] so that this licence may be applied to their article. The British Academy recognises the extra protection that is afforded to authors’ work by the ‘No Derivatives’ element of the Creative Commons licence, and notes that some authors may be able to apply to their funder to allow their article to be published under a CC BY-ND licence.

Copyright in an article remains vested in the author(s).

Open access publication in the Journal is supported by the British Academy. Authors are not charged a fee for article submission or publication.

The Journal of the British Academy is listed in DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals):
https://doaj.org/toc/2052-7217.

The Journal of the British Academy has also been accepted for inclusion in Scopus (information to follow).

The Journal has two Editors: for humanities subjects, Professor Dawn Ades FBA (University of Essex, emerita); for social sciences subjects, Professor Fiona Williams FBA (University of Leeds, emeritus).

Themed issues have guest editors, working under the general supervision of the Editors.

Each article is reviewed by independent expert readers (normally at least two). The copy of the article text sent for review will not include the name(s) of the author(s) or other authorship information on the title page.

All correspondence on editorial matters – including any suggestions for possible future articles from anyone who has been supported through any of the British Academy’s programmes and activities or from any Fellow of the British Academy – should be sent to: [email protected], or to Head of Publishing, The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH.

The British Academy’s Publishing and Conferences Committee currently acts as the Editorial Board of the Journal: Professor Gurminder K Bhambra FBA (University of Sussex), Professor Brian Cummings FBA (University of York); Professor David D’Avray FBA (University College London, emeritus); Professor Elizabeth Edwards FBA (De Montfort University, emerita); Professor Lindsay Farmer FBA (chair; University of Glasgow); Richard Fisher; Professor Regenia Gagnier FBA (University of Exeter), Professor Gary Gerstle FBA (University of Cambridge), Professor Ann Phoenix FBA (University College London). A new Editorial Board will come into being in September 2023.

Notes to Authors on the preparation of articles for the Journal.

The Journal of the British Academy is owned and published by
The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AH

Contact: [email protected]

Ethics statement.

Archiving. The content of the Journal is preserved through CLOCKSS digital preservation services.