German Law Journal

Open Access to Comparative, European, and International Law

Journal Home

Preparing your materials

Aims and scope

The German Law Journal is a pioneering open-access forum for the publication of scholarship and commentary on comparative, European, and international law. It has been online and freely-available since 1999. Founded as a transatlantic newsletter on developments in German law, the Journal has secured a place among the world's leading law reviews disseminating scholarship across borders. The Journal combines high-quality theoretical research with reports on current developments and thematic special issues. Pursuing this agenda, the Journal has gained a reputation for innovative publishing - linking cutting-edge, border-crossing scholarship with open access and speed to publication.

Types of article

GLJ welcomes the submission of articles* (original scholarship on issues pertaining to the GLJ scope),

The journal occasionally publishes other types of article, including editorials, introductions to special issues, interviews, developments, obituaries and From the Headquarters (announcements from the GLJ), but these tend to be on an invited basis.

* All or part of the publication costs for these article types may be covered by one of the agreements Cambridge University Press has made to support open access. For authors not covered by an agreement, and without APC funding, please see this journal's open access options for instructions on how to request an APC waiver.

Preparing for submission

Exclusive submission

GLJ receives submissions with the understanding that the content is original, unpublished material and has not been submitted for publication elsewhere, whether in print or in electronic form. Authors intending to republish articles, or to use previously published material as part of an article, must indicate this intention at the time they accept the invitation to publish or, in the case of unsolicited articles, at the time of submission.

Submission instructions

GLJ now uses ScholarOne Manuscripts, for online manuscript submission and peer review. The system brings with it a whole host of benefits including:

Quick and easy submission.
Administration centralised and reduced.
Significant decrease in peer review times.

All submissions to the journal must be submitted online at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/glj.

Full instructions and support are available on the site and a user ID and password can be obtained on the first visit. If you require assistance then click the Get Help Now link which appears at the top right corner of every ScholarOne Manuscripts page. If you cannot submit online, please contact the editorial office at submit@germanlawjournal.com.

Submission specifications

In submitting papers authors should observe the following:

Authors must submit their text as a Microsoft Word file.
All submitted texts must be written in American English. Texts must be saved in a simple format, i.e. without automatic hyphenation, automatic indexing of section headings, with a consistent script, with an unjustified right margin, and no activated hyperlinks or other macros.
Any and all information relied upon from other works, both published and unpublished, must be cited in footnotes. By submitting a work to the GLJ, the author guarantees that he or she is solely responsible for the content of the text and citations.
Authors should name their submission document in the following way: “[Last Name] – Title of article ([first submission or second revised submission])”.
We expect exclusivity. Thus, the author must confirm on ScholarOne that the paper has not been submitted to or reviewed by another journal at the same time. If the submission has been published before (e.g. in an edited collection) or has been published in a different language, this should also be indicated to the editorial team.
Authors should include 5 keywords and an abstract on ScholarOne along with their manuscript.
Internal cross referencing should be to footnotes only (not pages).
Authors are asked to make sure their typescript is carefully checked and finalised particularly with regard to internal cross referencing and the citation of references. Afterthoughts cannot be incorporated on proofs.
Authors are encouraged to include an ORCID (see below).
Papers should adhere to the GLJ style guide (see below).

Any failure to comply with these requirements will result in a void submission, and the submitted piece will be returned to the author without consideration for publication.

GLJ style guide

Authors must follow the style rules outlined in the GLJ Style Guide which can be found here. GLJ reserves the right to restyle any accepted texts for publication according to the GLJ Style Guide. Submission to GLJ indicates the author’s acceptance of the GLJ’s publication rules, style guidelines, and citation formatting.

Citation requirements

1. All footnotes must comply with the GLJ Style Guide. When the Style Guide is silent on rules governing citations, all texts must comply with the latest edition of The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation.

2. Authors must supply the full names of authors, texts (i.e. book and/or article name), journal name, additional publication information (i.e. editors, volume number, edition number), case names, court information, and year of publication.

3. Authors must provide specific page numbers for all cited materials. Any citation that does not come from a specific page range within a cited work must be cited as See generally.

4. Subsequent citations to the same source must be signalled by Id. The use of op. cit. or Ibid is not permitted. For example: Id. at 15.

5. Subsequent citations to a previously used source must be signalled by the source author’s last name, followed by supra, note [footnote number of first use], at [pin cite].

6. For specific citation requirements of cases from German courts or other international courts, see the GLJ Style Guide. All American case citations should be cited in accordance with the latest edition of the The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation.

Tables, figures and graphics

Please ensure that all tables, figures and graphics are provided in an editable format and are of a suitable quality and resolution to be published. Do not embed these files in the manuscript – they must be supplied in separate files, one file per figure. Please indicate the position of figures, tables and graphics in the text as follows:

Table 1: INSERT TABLE 1 ABOUT HERE

Figures, tables and graphics reproduced from already published work must be accompanied by the permission of the original publisher (or copyright holder, if not the publisher). Full information on how to prepare and supply tables, figures and graphics can be found here and should be followed with care.

Special issue submissions

Special issue proposals

GLJ issues a call for Special Issue proposals approximately every 9 months. Any such calls will be published here. Interested parties should follow the submission instructions given on the call document.

Accepted special issues

Guest Editors of accepted Special Issues will be given separate instructions.

Special Issue papers should follow the practices outlines in the ‘Submission specifications’ and ‘GLJ Style Guide’ sections above.

Then, insert the following text at this position under the same headline:

If you are a contributing author to a special issue which has been accepted by the Editorial Board for publication, please proceed as follows:

Submit your text to the Guest Editor (the person who submitted the special issue proposal) on the agreed due date.
The guest editors will review your text. Upon approval, they will forward it to the assigned editor, a member of the GLJ editorial board.
The assigned editor will again review your text and approve it for publication or request further revisions.
Once accepted, the GLJ student editors will take care of your text and return it to you for approval. This process may include one or two rounds.
If you are happy with the edits, you may submit your final text via GLJ’s online submission system at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/glj choosing the relevant special issue when asked in the submission form.

Publishing Ethics

As a result of being published by Cambridge University Press, GLJ is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and adheres to its guidelines on research and publications ethics.

In your title page, please provide statements covering the following.

Acknowledgements

You may acknowledge individuals or organisations that provided advice, support (non-financial). Formal financial support and funding should be listed in the following section.

Financial Support

Please provide details of the sources of financial support for all authors, including grant numbers. For example, “This work was supported by the European Union Horizon 2020 programme (grant number XXXXXXX)”. Multiple grant numbers should be separated by a comma and space, and where research was funded by more than one agency the different agencies should be separated by a semi-colon, with “and” before the final funder. Grants held by different authors should be identified as belonging to individual authors by the authors’ initials. For example, “This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (A.B., grant numbers XXXX, YYYY); and the European Union Horizon 2020 programme (A.B., grant number ZZZZ).” Where no specific funding has been provided for research, please provide the following statement: “This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.”

Competing interests

All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article. Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations. If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.

We ask all authors (and reviewers) to declare any competing interests in relation to manuscripts. If no statement is present in the published article, no competing interests were declared.

Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author A is employed at organisation B. Author C is on the Board of company E and is a member of organisation F. Author G has received grants from company H.”

Videos and Podcasts

In an effort to make the content of the GLJ available to a broader public, including a readership increasingly native in and fluent with social-media and knowledge formats that depart from the written tradition, the GLJ Editorial Board has launched a video and podcasts series that is also intertwined with our social media efforts. Authors with an accepted article are welcome to reach out to us at eic@germanlawjournal.com if they are interested in adding this supplementary or “bonus material” to their publication.

Peer Review Process

All unsolicited contributions are reviewed in a double blind peer review procedure on a rolling basis. To this end please make sure that your paper is anonymised before submission by eliminating any reference to your name or other elements that might enable the reviewer to immediately recognise the author. The review of an article usually takes 6-8 weeks, but the Journal reserves the right to review texts for as long as necessary to reach a publication decision.

Policy on prior publication

When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.

Authorship and contributorship

All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.

Author affiliations

Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.

For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.

Open Access Model (Waiver Fund)

Since launch the GLJ has been open access (OA). The GLJ and its publisher Cambridge University Press (CUP) are committed to ensuring that GLJ authors without financial resources can still publish on an OA basis.

The majority of GLJ authors are supported by institutional open access agreement (Transformative Agreements) held with CUP, which allow authors affiliated with that institution to publish on an OA basis without needing to find additional funds to cover publishing costs. These agreements are triggered on the basis of the corresponding author's affiliation data as entered into the ScholarOne system; authors typically do not have to request or activate coverage through these agreements. See which institutions are covered through this tool and see the Open Access Options page for more details.

The small minority of GLJ authors who do not have a Transformative Agreement but do have access to grant funding that budgets for OA publication are expected to pay an article processing charge (see Fees and Pricing).

Authors with neither Transformative Agreements nor funding to pay an article processing charge (APC) are covered by a waiver fund that GLJ and CUP have set aside from the journal's finances. All authors can therefore submit to the GLJ in the knowledge that there is no hard financial barrier to publication. If you are accepted for publication but do not have access to funding, you can still publish on an OA basis in the GLJ.

Competing Interests

All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.

Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.

If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.

Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.

Supplementary materials

Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary material. Supplementary material will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary material may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.

Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please see our general guidance on supplementary materials for further information.

Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.

Author Hub

You can find guides for many aspects of publishing with Cambridge at Author Hub, our suite of resources for Cambridge authors.

English language editing services

Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.

In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services – including language editing – delivered in partnership with American Journal Experts. You can find out more on our Language Services page.

Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.

ORCID

We require all corresponding authors to identify themselves using ORCID when submitting a manuscript to this journal. ORCID provides a unique identifier for researchers and, through integration with key research workflows such as manuscript submission and grant applications, provides the following benefits:

Discoverability: ORCID increases the discoverability of your publications, by enabling smarter publisher systems and by helping readers to reliably find work that you have authored.
Convenience: As more organisations use ORCID, providing your iD or using it to register for services will automatically link activities to your ORCID record, and will enable you to share this information with other systems and platforms you use, saving you re-keying information multiple times.
Keeping track: Your ORCID record is a neat place to store and (if you choose) share validated information about your research activities and affiliations.

See our ORCID FAQs for more information.

If you don’t already have an iD, you will need to create one if you decide to submit a manuscript to this journal. You can register for one directly from your user account on ScholarOne, or alternatively via https://ORCID.org/register.

If you already have an iD, please use this when submitting your manuscript, either by linking it to your ScholarOne account, or by supplying it during submission using the "Associate your existing ORCID iD" button.

ORCIDs can also be used if authors wish to communicate to readers up-to-date information about how they wish to be addressed or referred to (for example, they wish to include pronouns, additional titles, honorifics, name variations, etc.) alongside their published articles. We encourage authors to make use of the ORCID profile’s “Published Name” field for this purpose. This is entirely optional for authors who wish to communicate such information in connection with their article. Please note that this method is not currently recommended for author name changes: see Cambridge’s author name change policy if you want to change your name on an already published article. See our ORCID FAQs for more information.