Fair Usage of Open Access Materials

Existenz kindly asks its authors to honor the trust given by making your essay available as an Open Access document and to honor the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. We would welcome if you upload only the Abstract of your essay that includes the Existenz link to your paper to commercial entities such as Academia, PhilPapers, ResearchGate, or similar academic social networking sites. This simple step supports a small independent academic journal and simultaneously directs online traffic to your peers who have also published in Existenz (and vice versa, you benefit from their compliance with the honor code).

Peer Review Procedure

The journal implements a double-blind peer review process for all essays that are directly submitted. The editorial procedures are designed to follow best practice concerning excellence, impartiality, transparency, purposefulness, efficiency, confidentiality, and integrity. All essays submitted to Existenz are reviewed by members of our advisory board or by external reviewers when confidentiality cannot be upheld due to an essay having been presented at a conference and a simple online search would disclose the identity of the author, and in the context of a rigorous editorial production process. We encourage the submission of papers presented at philosophical meetings as well as articles resulting from independent research and scholarship. Submitted papers are not returned to authors.

Every effort is being made to ensure a timely review result. This may take up to three months. Once a paper has been accepted for publication, authors will receive the bibliographical details needed in order to cite the essay as "forthcoming."

Conference Papers

Essays presented at an affiliated conference undergo additional scrutiny due to a multi-layered peer review process, starting with the program chair, additional scholarly feedback derived from panel members, followed by recommendations that are derived from one double-blind review, and lastly a rigorous editorial production process.

Ensuring the Blind Peer Review Procedure

For ensuring the integrity of the blind peer-review procedure for submissions to this journal, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to one another. This concerns authors, editors, and reviewers (who upload documents as part of their review) checking to see if the necessary steps have been taken regarding the text and also with regard to the file properties. The removal of personal identifiers in a document varies, depending upon the software being used.

Plagiarism

The editorial review procedure includes control measures to minimize the intentional or unintentional inclusion of content that appears to have been borrowed from other pieces of writings, or was generated by way of using artificial content creation. For this purpose we have developed clear manuscript guidelines and ask authors to pay attention when paraphrasing or quoting content from others.

Evaluation Criteria

We ask our peer reviewers to respond critically yet constructively to submissions. These are the questions that reviewers consider when evaluating submissions:

Does the submission make an original contribution to the field, or does it cover already well-known material?
Is the submission up to date, pertinent, and contextualised? Does it consider recent, relevant contributions to the field?
Qualtiy of argumentation: Does the submission have a clear focus and structure?
Style and presentation: Is there a clear argument discernible written in a concise style? Does the author resort to jargon or confusing language?
Linguistic and grammatical accuracy.
Bibliographical comprehensiveness: Are the references relevant to and consistent with the scope of the essay?

Manuscript Submission Guidelines for Authors

By submitting an essay to the review process, all parties act in the understanding that the essay has not been submitted elsewhere to a different journal or some book project, that it is an original piece of scholarly work that has not been uploaded to the internet, and that all subsequent usage of the edited material will credit its original place of publication. At the time when a manuscript is approved for production, the author accepts the herein stated conditions unless the author unequivocally declines them at that time.

Format

The length of your manuscript is expected to be around 6,000 words but no less than 4,000 words. The abstract, keywords, and text of the manuscript must be double-spaced. This includes also captions, tables, and graphic illustrations, if applicable.

Make sure to use a 12-point type size, preferably Times New Roman. All pages should have margins of 1 inch on all sides.
Do not justify the margins; paragraphs should be left-aligned.
Do not attempt to style your manuscript; keep the formatting to an absolute minimum and avoid using multiple fonts or multiple type sizes within the main body of the text.
Use only one space after periods and colons. Always use a tab, not the spacebar, for paragraph indents.
Use the indent function, not tabs, for setting off block quotations. Do not indent the first line of the paragraph under a subheading, yet all other paragraphs.
Be consistent in your treatment of any specific style element. A list of items within a sentence is set off with commas, including a comma before the last item.
Always allow the word-wrap function to operate; do not place hard returns at the end of a line of text. Use hard returns only to end paragraphs, headings, or items in a list.
Do not create running heads or style sheets or auto-lists. Use style "Normal" for all aspects of the main body, including title and headings.
Number the manuscript consecutively, beginning with the first page, and using Arabic numerals. Place all page numbers in font size 10 into the footer and center them.

Abstract

It is best practice to be mindful of the fact that researchers looking for information online will use search engines. By optimizing your title and abstract, you will increase the chance of someone finding it. Prepare a statement of 100-150 words that summarizes your key points and clearly states aim and significance of the essay so that the reader can easily understand what is original about your contribution. Avoid repeating sentences from the body of the essay.

Keywords

List between eight to ten keywords that are of central importance to your text. These keywords and the abstract will be included into searchable databases. Careful selection of adequate keywords will increase your readership. A note of caution: Unnecessary repetition of concepts stated in the title, the abstract, and the keywords will result in the page being rejected by search engines.

Headings

Try to use no more than three levels of subhead. Type each heading by using upper- and lower-case letters. Differentiate each level of head in the manuscript (for example, center level 1 heads in bold face, left-align level 2 heads in italics, indent level 3 heads in italics).

Superscript

The function of superscript numbers is to indicate footnotes and they are normally placed after full stops or commas only. Do not place note superscript numbers in headings or the abstract.

Quotations

Use block quotations for any quoted material exceeding 3 lines or any quotations containing multiple paragraphs. Single-space all block quotations, leaving an extra line of space above and below the quoted matter. Do not place quotation marks around the extract. Use three ellipsis points (without space before or after the ellipsis) to indicate deletions from within a sentence, four to indicate a deletion from the end of a sentence (the first ellipsis point represents a period and should be typed tight against the last word, there is one space after such ellipsis). Citations always need to be referenced with a page number from the source.

Typeface

Normal. All type should be in upper and lower case.
Bold. Use it only for the title of the essay and level 1 headers.
Italics. Never to be used for emphasis. To be applied exclusively for level 2 and 3 headers, foreign language words, book titles, or journal names.
Underline. Never use underscores.
CAPS. Only to be used for acronyms.
Small Caps. Never use them.

Abbreviations

Avoid, whenever possible abbreviations. Avoid using op.cit., cf., e.g., ibid., i.e., etc. (never use etc. at the end of a sentence, instead of it use "and so on"). Write fourth century instead of 4th century.

Notes and References

Notes are to be depicted in the form of footnotes and need to be put at the bottom of each page. Number notes consecutively using superscripts for in-text references and superscripts for the notes themselves. Style them consistently and according to the most recent online issue of Existenz. Make sure the notes are single-spaced and composed in 10-point font. Place references directly into the corresponding footnote. Only quote the source that is used, without additionally identifying different publication years or its first publication year. Do not adduce reading lists. Sources are to be listed exclusively when there is a direct reference in the text relating to clearly identified contents from this source. References should look like this:

Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, transl. Eden and Cedar Paul, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1957.

Karl Jaspers, Max Weber: Gesammelte Schriften, München, DE: Piper 1988, p. 94.

Karl Jaspers, "Die Methoden der Intelligenzprüfung und der Begriff der Demenz. Kritisches Referat (1910)," in Gesammelte Schriften zur Psychopatologie, Berlin/Heidelberg, DE: Springer 1963, pp. 142-190, here pp. 142-3.

Moritz Geiger, "Über das Wesen und Bedeutung der Einfühlung," in Bericht über den vierten Kongress für experimentelle Psychologie in Innsbruck vom 19. bis 22. April 1910, Leipzig: Barth 1911, 29-73. [Henceforth cited as WBE, all translation by the author.]

Charles Sanders Peirce, "The First Rule of Logic (1899)," in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Volume 2 (1893-1913), ed. The Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 1998, pp. 42-56, here p. 49.

Judith Green, "Jamesian Reasonable Belief and Deweyan Religious Communities: Reconstructing Philosophy Pragmatically with Philip Kitcher," Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 50/1 (Winter 2014), 69-96, here pp. 70, 76.

Antonio R. Damasio, Daniel Tranel, and Hanna C. Damasio, "Somatic Markers and the Guidance of Behavior: Theory and Preliminary Testing," in Frontal Lobe Function and Dysfunction, eds. Harvey S. Levin, Howard M. Eisenberg, Arthur L. Benton, New York, NY: Oxford University Press 1991, pp. 217-29.

Epicene

Since the pronouns they, them, their, and theirs cannot logically be applied to a singular person, Existenz does not use these in place of a common-gender third person singular pronoun, except in circumstances when the singular pronoun refers to a specific person who requested to be addressed with epicene characteristics. Skillful editing will most of the time find alternatives to replace pronouns, as there are many ways to achieve gender-neutral language. Constructions such as "he or she," "s/he," and their inflected forms are to be avoided.

Guidelines for Guest Editors

Guest editors are responsible for the following tasks:
- All manuscript guidelines are being observed
- All citations are fact-checked with their original source
- All bibliographical references are checked for accuracy and full details (including first name of authors or editors or translators, precise titles)
- Copyediting comprises that grammar and spelling are corrected
- Composition of the essay is carefully assessed for consistency of terminology, logical sequence, for narrative flow, precision, and a clear thesis statement
- Provision of a 330 to 360 words summary statement that outlines the scope and relevance of the papers (precise word count is needed for this task)
- All essays are submitted in individual files and with consistent formatting applied to them

Publication Fees

The journal does not collect publication fees for publishing the essay on its website.

Contact

Please send completed manuscripts in electronic format, preferably in Microsoft Word, to the editor:
Helmut Wautischer