a note to authors

Besides speedy and wide circulation—there have been over 10,000 "hits" on the journal—PsyArt offers authors several things.

For one thing, PsyArt is a peer-reviewed journal. The editors will send to an academic author's department chair, dean, or other official, an authenticated copy of the article or its acceptance or the editors' comments for purposes of tenure, pay raises, job searches, and the like. (This practice is well established on other e-journals.)

PsyArt is indexed in both the MLA Bibliography and PSYCINFO. Articles are accessible through Google, AltaVista, Northern Light, and other Internet search engines. That means that literally millions of people could read your article. We have evidence that PsyArt is particularly popular with student researchers. As one of our European authors writes: “PsyArt does have a terrific audience from all over the world. At least half of the citations I have run across to my article give the PsyArt version rather than the print version, and I got a special kick out of finding a link to the PsyArt text on a New Zealand web site.”

Also, when an article is accepted, we post the abstract, as it appears in PsyArt, to the nearly 900 subscribers to our online discussion group, called PSYART. Since the article is, at that point, immediately available to them, we believe this is the equivalent of 900 subscribers receiving a print journal by mail—with the advantage that they receive it one article at a time.

PsyArt will accept articles that have already appeared in print (subect to review by the editors and to the permission of the previous publisher). Similarly, PsyArt has no objection to articles that appear here being published elsewhere. Authors who wish to appear in a print journal are free to seek print publication in addition to online publication in PsyArt. Our aim is the circulation of ideas rapidly and without restriction. By putting a great many articles in one place, PsyArt will, we hope, become an easily located and searched center for much current thinking in the psychology of the arts.

Because it is an Internet journal, a PsyArt article can contain color graphics, sound files, and even movie clips.

PsyArt is archived by the University of Florida library, so that, even if the journal should die, your article would still be accessible to searchers. As Florida's digitization project proceeds, your article will be directly available to more and more libraries.

Instructions for Contributors

Please read our Instructions to Editors, so that you will understand the steps and criteria in our review process. Note that all our processing of the article will take place by e-mail—the reason we can review rapidly. To submit an article, you must send an abstract first, using the online submission form. If your abstract falls within the scope of PsyArt, the editors will ask you to submit the full article.

We can only accept submissions of articles in English, but we can publish texts in the original language provided there is an English text as well.

Submitting the abstract

You should submit an abstract of your article first. You do this by using our our online submission form.

It will ask you for the following items:

  1. Your name, affiliation, addresses, and (most important!) an e-mail address. (The editors will remove these during the review process.)
  2. The title of the article.
  3. Keywords or catch phrases that describe the proposed article (no more than ten words, PLEASE!). Include words important to your article that do not appear in the title, such as repeatedly cited authors, important technical terms, titles of literary works referred to, and the like.
  4. If you are submitting an already-printed article, you should give a properly formatted citation for the previous publication. And, most important, you should indicate that the previous publisher has agreed to this new publication.
  5. A 150-word abstract. 150 words are the absolute maximum. You should model your abstract on those in PMLA or PSYCINFO, and you should use PMLA or PSYCINFO conventions about book titles and the like. In the final article, which will be maintained at our site, you can use tables, graphics, recordings of sound, and movies, but not in the abstract, which needs to be fully available to those without media-reading browsers. Remember, the abstract is the first and often, the only thing that readers of PsyArt will see of your article. Phrase it carefully.

Submitting your article

It is important that you read and follow the instructions in our "Checklist for Psyart Manuscript Submission." It contains complete instructions about formatting, anomymizing, how to handle footnotes, and so on. In submitting an article, remove from the body of your submission all indications of your identity. Then, in forwarding your article for review, we will remove your e-mail address. Similarly we will remove indications of the reviewers' identities unless instructed otherwise by them.

Send the article as an attachment to an e-mail. It should be in one of the common formats, HTML (the best from our point of view), MSWord, WordPerfect, or NotaBene. Be sure to let us know what format it is in if the file extension does not indicate its type.

Alternatively, if you have access to a home page or other Web site, you can upload the article to the site and e-mail the URL to the editor.

If your article has footnotes, tables, graphics, sound files, and the like, you must send them in separate files.

Once in final form, e-mail the article to the senior editor who responded to your abstract.

The senior editor will forward the article, rendered anonymous, by e-mail, to those reviewing editors we think appropriate. Two editors' consent is required for publication. Typically, we are able to complete the review process in four weeks or less from receipt of the article.

Editors may mark up the article online and return it to the editor-in-chief or simply comment by e-mail. Their verdict will be to accept, reject, or accept subject to large or small revisions.

If the last, the editor-in-chief will return the article to the writer (with comments) for revision and resubmission. A second trip through the editors might or might not be necessary. The editors' names will be withheld unless they wish otherwise.

Once your article is finally approved by the editors, we will insert the abstract in the journal home page with a link to the article itself at our site and announce the publication to the 900 or so subscribers to our online forum, PSYART...

The final abstact

On acceptance, authors should update their abstracts to final form (revised, as required by the editors). Remember, the abstract is the first and often, the only thing that readers of PsyArt will see of your article.

  1. If you also plan to maintain the article online yourself, provide us with the URL where you will keep it. (We will add the URL to the abstract listing for your article.)
  2. If you choose to maintain a site for comments, updates, or corrections to the article, provide us the URL for that site, and we will add it to the abstract listing for your article.
  3. Citations for any prior publication(s) of this article, either print or electronic. If the earlier publication is shorter or otherwise different from the publication in PsyArt, so indicate. If your article is published elsewhere after its appearance in PsyArt, you should inform the editors, and we will update your entry.
  4. We will include a copyright notice with your article and with your abstract, giving you copyright and all rights. It will be up to you to register copyright formally if you wish. If you want some other arrangement, let us know.

The article online

Readers of the journal PsyArt will be able to find your abstract by either the keywords or any word in the abstract. People using Google or other such search engines will be able to find your article by your name, any word in the title, or any word in the article.

You, as author, are free to maintain the article at another site of your own choosing, where you can update it, add reader's comments, add your own second thoughts—in short, modify it as you wish. PsyArt will include a link to your site, if you wish, with your abstract. If we do, you should notify the editor-in-chief of any changes in your own URL for your article.

Publication in PsyArt means that your article is, in principle, available to any of the 1,100,000,000 or more people estimated to use the Internet. We have had no indication that this many people read PsyArt, but we go on hoping.