Author Guidelines
At Futures Reframed, we want authors to spend less time dealing with bureaucracy and formatting, allowing you to focus on what you do best: thinking, writing, and sharing knowledge. That's why we've made the process as simple as possible for you. We do not adhere to unnecessarily complicated author guidelines but instead provide a pre-designed template that you can fill in with your text, plus a few general style-rules, which we briefly outline below: please read carefully.
1. Open the template and copy and paste your text in. Texts are less than 7000 words including everything: references, abstract, title, keywords, bodytext. Remove anything from the template that doesn't apply to you; for example, if you don't need a table, feel free to delete it. [Rv1] We appreciate your efforts to keep the article aligned with the template as much as possible. Please do not use your own fonts; instead, stick to the font and style provided in the template. We value the responsibility taken by our authors to review the document both textually and visually. You can find the template here.
2. We don't have a strict reference style (since, really, what's the point?), but it is important that your citations are accurate and that your sources are easily traceable for readers. Therefore, we ask that you be consistent and precise in both your bibliography and your in-text citations. If your source was published by a university press, feel free to save space and omit the city in which the press is located; we all understand that Oxford University Press is in Oxford and Amsterdam University Press is in Amsterdam. For inspiration, once again, we refer you to the template.
3. Futures Reframed is intended for a broad audience, and articles are aimed at both researchers and practitioners. Keep in mind that your manuscript should be understandable to both types of audiences. Additionally, please ensure that your text looks polished and has been proofread by an editor or a native English speaker. If you're unable to organize this, please send us an email, and we'll help you find a solution.
4. Please keep in mind that your submitted article may not simultaneously be submitted to another journal, nor can it be accepted for publication by another journal. This policy is in place because the editorial board and selected reviewers invest significant time in the review process, and it would be unfair to let that effort go to waste.
5. Please note that submitted manuscripts should preferably be based on unpublished data. If the manuscript is based on a text you have published elsewhere, you must ensure that you hold the copyrights and have the right to republish, and you should clearly indicate in the article that you are referring to previous work. At Futures Reframed, you, as the author, maintain the copyrights of your own article – unfortunately this is not the case with most other publishers yet, hence our warning.
6. We work with an open author, open reviewer system. This means that you don’t have to blind your manuscript and that all reviewers will see whose work they may help improve.
Here’s why, in short:
A) we believe in open, constructive dialogue in which scholars and authors help each other think. As reviews in this journal are published online for everyone to see, we encourage a thoughtful, generous and kind debate between reviewers and authors - this lessens the chance of the harsh, discouraging reviews many scholars have received in other publication trajectories; it also makes it virtually impossible to reject on the basis of authors’ hierarchical status or title, B) the field of futures-thinking is relatively small, and it has always been rather easy to guesstimate who wrote which paper, anyhow; in that sense, the standards double blind review process never existed, and served only to match the norm, while adding bureaucracy for all actors involved; C) we work with a team of regular, trusted reviewers and advisors, who were selected not just because of their expertise in their field, but also because of their willingness to mentor and encourage fellow authors. They are here to help, not to burn down, whomever writes. For each article, we ask several of these reviewers to read and comment upon your text. If the scope of your article falls outside of the expertise of all our reviewers, we will search for an external reviewer. If, for whatever reason, you do not wish to be reviewed by one of our reviewers or by a specific external reviewer, you can let us know by stating this in a very brief message to the editors-in-chief during your submission. There is no need to explain why; we will not share this with the reviewing team but make sure your work gets reviewed by other reviewers. If you have a good reason why you cannot share your name in the reviewed article (for example, because you write about something very sensitive) you may submit anonymously and we will consider together with you what to do, but we want to point out that after publication, names get known anyhow, and hence, anonymous reviews may not be an actual solution. In all other cases, please submit your article with your name on it, as per the template. We know this is new, and we acknowledge it might feel uncomfortable as we are not used to it, but if we want to change academia for the better, we need to be brave and set the right example together.
