online submissions
ebr articles are written for educated and informed readers interested in literary studies, broadly defined, and its critical engagements across the arts, humanities, and sciences. Many articles are commissioned by ebr editors or board members. However, unsolicited essays are welcome and can be submitted as plain-text files to our managing editor. We occasionally publish critifictions and multimodal works of designwriting, though these essays must meet ebr’s technical specifications. Submissions that are about an author’s own work, like all essays in ebr, should enter into dialogue with other artists, thinkers, and critics. Submissions should be sent to contact@electronicbookreview.com.
Read copy editing and illustration submission guidelines here >
submitting previously published essays and reviews
ebr will consider previously published work, but the editors ask that submissions meet the following criteria:
- the essay can’t be self-referential to other chapters in a collection
- the essays should not take for granted that the reader knows other discussed texts
- the work must avoid the overview style of literature reviews
editor’s note on riPOSTes
ebr has always intended to encourage continued conversation on published materials. We invite readers to submit formal responses to our essays for publication. The length of these “riPOSTes” can be a few paragraphs or a few pages, as the respondent wishes. A riPOSTe can be critical or celebratory, or, if the riPOSTing author prefers, the topic can be taken in a different direction.
Please send brief proposals for riPOSTes on recent essays (up to 1 year) to managing editor, Will Luers (wluers@gmail.com) and editor-in-chief, Joseph Tabbi (jtabbi@gmail.com). All submissions will be vetted by the ebr editors and at least one member of our editorial review board.
peer review process
All articles published in ebr have undergone a rigorous two-stage review process: anonymous peer review and public peer-to-peer (p2p) review. In the first stage of the review process, two or more ebr editors assess whether a submission is potentially suitable for publication. After this initial screening, the submission is subjected to an anonymous peer review by two referees – an editorial board member and another expert, typically a previous contributor – who are asked to write short evaluative reports giving specific publication recommendations. The editors request that referees’ positive reports be accompanied by substantive comments, which are conveyed to authors prior to publication, thereby formally initiating the intellectual conversation. Selections from the reports are published with the submission as glosses. More substantial responses may appear as ripostes or even free-standing articles.
After being accepted for publication, the submission proceeds to stage two: it is published on ebr’s staging site, where the submission and selections from the referees’ reports are made available for comment by members of ebr’s p2p network, all of whom have previously published in ebr or received an editorial invitation, on the basis of their previous writing, to contribute to ebr.
The ebr p2p network differs, on the one hand, from traditional academic communities, in which work circulates largely among committees, not primarily among authors, and, on the other hand, from commercial production, which is also networked but where value gets determined largely by non-writers concerned with marketing. Value at ebr, by contrast, is created through acts of evaluation occurring at every stage in an essay’s editorial circulation, initially by editors and referees, next by contributors in ebr’s p2p network, and eventually by ebr’s audience.
ebr articles are written for educated and informed readers interested in literary studies, broadly defined, and its critical engagements across the arts, humanities, and sciences. Many articles are commissioned by ebr editors or editorial-board members. However, unsolicited essays are welcome and can be submitted as plain-text files to our managing editor. We occasionally publish critifictions and multimodal works of designwriting, though these essays must meet ebr’s technical specifications. Submissions that are about an author’s own work, like all essays in ebr, should enter into dialogue with other artists, thinkers, and critics.
ebr asks its reviewers to recommend publication, revision, or rejection, with briefly stated remarks or recommendations. Responses can be as long as the reviewer wishes, but these generally run in the 300-500 word range. And we normally have reviews within a month or two of sending the essay under consideration.
publication frequency
In continuous publication since 1994, ebr is among the longest running open-access, literary-critical journals on the Internet. To take advantage of the Web’s medium-specific constraints, ebr adopted a rolling model of publication. Rather than publishing individual volumes or issues with preset publication dates, a paradigm inherited from print media, writing is accepted for publication after undergoing a networked peer-review process. Individual texts (articles, essays, ripostes, and reviews) are stamped with two publication dates: the date on which a text was first published online and the date on which it was last modified.
open access policy
ebr provides open access to all of its content on the principle that making research and scholarship freely available to the public on the Internet promotes a robust media ecology.
guest editing
The ebr editorial team welcomes proposals for guest-edited gatherings, collections of articles comparable to those published as special issues of a print-based journal, provided that the gathered material fits conceptually within current ebr threads and conforms to ebr’s peer-review policies.