Submissions

This page is designed to help you ensure that your manuscript is ready to submit to the journal.

Before submitting, you should read over the 'Author Guidelines' and checklist below, ensuring that your submission also adheres to the 'Focus and Scope' of the journal, then register an account (or login if you have an existing account).

Please follow the below checklist before submitting your manuscript to Syntactic Theory and Research, ensuring that:

1. Your submission is in line with the 'Focus and Scope' of STAR. Submissions that do not address the theoretical implications of their findings—i.e. that are strictly descriptive or only report on (experimental) findings without discussing theoretical implications—will be desk-rejected.
2. The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in 'Comments to the Editor'). Please provide information about previous submissions elsewhere and, in case you have received reviews, how you have addressed them. This will help us facilitate our reviewing process.
3. Any third party owned materials used have been identified with appropriate credit lines. STAR requires authors to secure any permissions for the reproduction of images as figures within articles that are currently licensed to be reproduced under restrictive terms (e.g., an artist's estate, archive or gallery). Evidence of any granted permissions will need to be shown to the STAREditorial Team prior to an article's publication in the journal. Permission to reproduce images must be obtained from the copyright holder prior to submission, and details of the permissions obtained, including a copy of any agreed licensing terms, should be included with your submission. Image permissions should permit open access publication with no restrictions on duration of use or recurring renewal costs.
4. All authors qualify as authors and have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper, as per the publisher's guidance on authorship.
5. Authors should declare any competing interests when they submit articles to the journal. For information on the publisher’s 'Competing Interests' policy, see the publisher's 'Malpractice Statement'. Information on how to declare a competing interest can be found here.
6. The submission is provided as a single PDF file, containing all tables and figures.
7. All DOIs for the references have been provided, when available.
8. Tables and figures are all provided in the and correctly cited in the text.
9. Figures/images have a resolution of at least 150dpi (300dpi or above preferred). Each file is no more than 20MB per file. The files are in one of the following formats: JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS (to maximise quality, the original source file is preferred).
10. If your research involves human participants, please make sure you include an'Ethics and Consent' section in your manuscript indicating that your work was approved by your university's ethics board, mentioning the name of the committee and the approval number/ID for the project. If your research was not subject to ethical review at your institution, please include a brief explanation of why the research was exempt from ethical approval.
11. If your research makes reference to datasets and analysis scripts, please consult our' Data and Reproducibility Policy'. We ask authors to make their datasets openly accessible upon publication. These can be made available in an online repository or we can host the files as appendices to your article on the STAR website.
12. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the journal's 'Author Guidelines', should the paper be editorially accepted.
13. All references to the author(s) have been removed from the paper. Aside from omitting the author’s name in the title block, this entails only referring to your own work in the third person (do not use ‘Author 1’ or a similar replacement for your own name). Also check the acknowledgments and the funding information sections for identifying information. Author names must also be removed from the document properties of the manuscript file (check the File menu of your PDF software for document properties). Please refer to the publisher's 'Ensuring an Anonymous Review' for information on how to anonymise your manuscript.
14. The maximum word count has been adhered to. See Author Guidelines for more information.
15. For review purposes, make sure that your contribution has page numbers.
16. Please note that the journal does not charge Article Processing Charges to its authors. We only ask you to make a Voluntary Author Contribution (VAC) to financially support the journal *if* you have access to institutional or grant funding for this purpose on the basis of an honour system.

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. If you would prefer to publish your work under an alternative Creative Commons License, please indicate this in the Comments for the Editor box below, providing reasons for your request.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

This journal operates a double-anonymous peer review process, meaning that authors and reviewers remain anonymous for the review process. However, if reviewers happen to know the identity of the author, this does not automatically disqualify them as reviewers. This is due to the small size of the field of theoretical syntax, where leading researchers may be able to identify work based on its written style and content regardless of the author's anonymizing efforts. In such instances, the journal cannot guarantee fully double-anonymous review, however we believe that research benefits from being reviewed by the best possible candidate. In these cases, too, editors will also ensure that any conflicts of interest between the reviewer and author are avoided where evident.

We operate robust editorial standards, requiring three independent scholarly reviews by experts in the field(s), before editors decide on an article's acceptance. Peer reviewers are expected to return review reports after 6 weeks for editorial assessment although this can, in exceptional cases, take longer. Reviewers are asked to provide formative feedback, even if an article is not deemed suitable for publication in the journal.

Further information on the journal's 'Peer Review Policy' can be found on the 'Journal Policies' page.

The following licences are allowed:

• CC BY 4.0 - More Information  
  Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

There are no publication fees. This journal is published by the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). Unlike many open-access publishers, the OLH does not charge any author fees. This does not mean that we do not have costs. Instead, our costs are paid by an international library consortium.

If your institution is not currently supporting the platform, we request that you ask your librarian to sign up. The OLH is extremely cost effective and is a not-for-profit charity. However, while we cannot function without financial support and we encourage universities to sign up, institutional commitment is not required to publish with us.

Authors who have access to institutional funds or grant funding earmarked for Open Access publication (via a research grant or through their institution's department or library)—and only those authors—are kindly asked if they may use those funds to cover the £450 Voluntary Author Contribution (VAC) of their publication in STAR. For further information on this, please visit the journal's 'About' page or the publisher's policy on VACs.

The journal is published online as a continuous volume and issue throughout the year. Articles are made available as soon as they are ready to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in making content publicly available.

Special Collections of articles are welcomed and will be published as part of the normal issue, but also within a separate collection page.