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Submissions

 
 
It is necessary to agree upon standards of expected ethical behavior for all parties involved in the act of publishing: the author, the journal editor, the peer reviewer and the publisher. Our Ethic Statements are based on COPE’s Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors.
 
Relinquishing the respectable commitment of preserving the diversity of languages, the journal accepts English as the leading language of mediation, and is thus published in English only. In justified cases exceptions may be considered. All correspondence with the Editorial Board should be conducted in English.
    Any standard form of the English language is accepted, but consistency is expected within an article. Style, including proper use of English is the responsibility of the authors and a criterion for the final acceptance of the article. Non-natives are advised to have their articles proofread by native English speakers.
    Contributions should be well written in clear, concise language and be as free as possible of technical jargon. AΓION strives for all articles to be widely accessible to non-experts with university-level skills in other fields.
    AΓION adopts the Chicago Manual of Style convention for authors (for a concise version of it—based on the 15th edition of the CMS—see the online available AAA Style Guide). For general questions of style, grammar, punctuation, referencing, bibliographies and general formatting, the authors should refer to the CMS. Full bibliographical details are given in footnotes when an item is first referred to, and later notes contain a shortened form (“Oxford referencing style” or “notes and bibliography” style). Contributions which do not follow this style may be considered for review, but will eventually require revision by the author and will take longer to publish.
    For citations, transliterations and also conventional terms, authors of all types of articles should follow the general instructions given in attached files (for various languages & scripts see: Ancient Near Eastern (including Egyptian), Arabic, Aramaic, Chinese, Coptic, CyrillicGreek, Hebrew, Middle Iranian, Japanese, Ottoman Turkish, Persian (New Persian), Sanskrit and other Indic languages, Syriac, Tibetan; for religions and their holy scriptures see: Buddhism [Tibetan, PaliChinese], Christianity, Hinduism and other Indian religions, Islam, Judaism, Shinto, Zoroastrianism).
    Specialist editions of Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Sanskrit, or many other texts may not be easily accessible by readers. Therefore, citations from original texts should be given in full, usually in a standard system of transliteration, together with a translation in English.
 
As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission’s compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.
  1. The submission has not previously been published, nor is currently being considered for publication elsewhere (or an explanation has been provided to the editor-in-chief), neither is it currently available online or in print in any area of peer-reviewed scientific & academic publishing, in journal article, book or thesis form. However, authors are permitted and encouraged to post their formally unpublished 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.
  2. Submissions are expected in both .doc(x) and—for reference—.pdf formats, but in justifiable cases TeX (e.g. LaTeX, XeTeX), Open Document Format (e.g. odt files from OpenOffice and LibreOffice), HTML, XML and RTF are accepted. A list of typical common formats is available here.
  3. Where available, URLs have also been provided as references.
  4. In your file, please use the standard features of your word processor, such as italics, bold, and footnotes. Please place illustrations, figures, and tables within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end, and make sure to attach them in separate files (.jpg, .png etc.) as well. In short, use your word processor in the most natural way, and avoid special tricks or peculiarities as much as possible.
  5. Images, photographs, such as written works, are subject to copyright. Someone holds the copyright unless they have explicitly been placed in the public domain. Before you use an image/photograph/illustration, make sure that the image falls in one of the four categories: 1) own work; 2) freely licensed; 3) public domain; 4) fair use.
  6. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined above.
  7. If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review have been followed.
  8. Transliteration of non-Latin alphabets.
  9. Bibliography. If you use a bibliography manager such as BibTeX or Endnote, then if you can, please also send us your database file for the items you cite in your contribution, e.g. the .bib or an exported XML file, containing just the subset of items that you refer to.
  10. Unicode. If at all possible, please use a Unicode font and type your document using Unicode encoding. If this is a new idea for you, see some initial guidelines here.
 
If authors or referees don’t choose to disclose their names for an open peer-review, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other, to ensure the integrity of the blind peer-review for submission to this journal. This involves the authors, editors, and reviewers (who upload documents as part of their review) checking to see if the following steps have been taken with regard to the text and the file properties:
  1. The authors of the document have deleted their names from the text, with “Author” and year used in the references and footnotes, instead of the authors’ name, article title, etc.
  2. With Microsoft Office documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file (see under File in Word), by clicking on the following, beginning with File on the main menu of the Microsoft application: File > Save As > Tools (or Options with a Mac) > Security > Remove personal information from file properties on save > Save.
  3. With PDFs, the authors’ names should also be removed from Document Properties found under File on Adobe Acrobat’s main menu.
 
The journal respects religious sensitivities as long as scientific research is not impeded. The limits of religious sensitivity are defined by mainstream religiosity, so that neither the offensive secularist, nor the intransigent fundamentalist view can be realised.
    In certain cases, in order to avoid aggression against conscience, separate vernaculars (e.g. Jewish/Catholic/Protestant), traditional forms of citation of holy books, multiple forms of chronological abbreviations (BC/BCE & AD/ CE) are accepted.
    AΓION also expects authors to avoid a sympathising, pious tone. Widely used formulaic expressions, elements of the everyday religious vernacular are accepted, but editors will be critical when the “godliness” of a text exceeds the limits of everyday language.