Policies

Submission Procedure
Authors are asked not to submit their manuscript simultaneously to any other journal before the internal review procedure is finished. After a negative recommendation, authors are free to offer their manuscripts to other journals. Moreover, authors are asked to carefully read the guidelines for authors before submitting a manuscript to Historical Life Course Studies and to respect those guidelines as much as possible. The manuscript itself should not contain any author-names in order to make sure that the review process is blind.

Review and Selection Procedures
All manuscripts are peer-reviewed in a scientific manner, i.e. for every paper it is evaluated if the content and the applied methods are sound. Also it is evaluated whether the manuscript adds new knowledge and insights to the broader field of studies working with large historical databases. In practice, a submitted manuscript is evaluated first by the editor or associate editor(s). If this recommendation is positive, a member of the editorial board will be asked to read the manuscript to take it in portfolio and to be responsible for the peer review.

HLCS follows a double-blind peer-review process, which means that the quality of the papers is assessed by specialists in the field. At least three external persons will be asked to do a peer review. During the review process the authors remain unknown to the reviewers and the reviewers remain anonymous to the authors, thereby facilitating a fair and impartial assessment of the quality of the manuscript. The peer review will be done by way of a standard form in which at least a general judgment is given with the marks A (to be accepted), B (to be accepted after revisions), C (not to be accepted; to be reconsidered only after major revision) and D (rejected).

If the portfolio-holder and all three peer reviewers accept the manuscript, it will be published. If at least two peer reviewers reject the manuscript it will not be published. In other cases the editor will make the final decision. The editors, the editorial board members and the peer reviewers are all asked to formulate recommendations to improve papers. Manuscripts can be handled in a second and third time after revisions on the basis of the recommendations that have been made.

Volumes and special issues
Every volume consists of both research articles and contributions on data handling. Every year one volume will be released. Once a manuscript is accepted, the article is put online as soon as possible in the current volume. Initiatives in the form of special issues are welcomed. Contributions to special issues go individually through the review process, which means that they are reviewed separately. They will be published as a ‘special issue’ of the current volume with its own page numbering. Special issues will be numbered in case there are more special issues per volume (like Volume X (2022), special issue 2).

Website and Open Access Policy
Academic research is funded through public revenues, and we therefore believe that the fruits of this research in terms of results, knowledge and insights, should be shared for free with the broader public. Moreover, we believe that author charges and paywalls perpetuate and increase existing inequalities in the world. In order to promote a fairer world, we maintain the Diamond Open Access model. All journal content is offered for free and no author charges (nor submission, processing or publishing charges) exist. In this way we explicitly aim to lower barriers for scholars from universities and research institutes from developing countries to gain insight in, and become themselves, active in the broader field of studies working with large historical databases.

The copyright remains with the authors and all articles, data and software are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, reproduction & distribution in any medium for non-commercial purposes, provided the original author(s) and source are given credit. 

The website of Historical Life Course Studies is equipped with simple statistical tools, which show how often articles have been viewed, as well as, how often articles have been cited. In this way, readers and authors, as well as the editors, are able to evaluate the relative impact of individual articles.

Archiving Policy
To ensure permanency of all publications, this journal utilises Portico, the PKP Preservation Network and the IISH archiving systems to create permanent archives for the purposes of preservation and restoration.

Repository Policy
In order to enlarge the visibility and citation chances of individual articles, authors are allowed and encouraged to store their articles in Open Access repositories. After publication they are obliged to use the latest version of their manuscript, which contains the lay-out of the journal.

ORCID ID
Authors are encouraged to use their ORCID ID when submitting their manuscript.