GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSION OF MANUSCRIPTS
Below are guidelines for authors who wish to submit a manuscript to the American Society for Premodern Asia (ASPA, formerly AOS), for the Monograph series, the Essay series, or the Journal (JASPA, formerly JAOS) (§§1,2,3) and for authors whose manuscript has been accepted (§4). The latter section applies to book reviewers as well; unsolicited book reviews are not accepted for submission. If your particular question is not answered here, feel free to write the editor whose mandate covers the field in which you work.
§1. All submissions to ASPA publications must be based on the author’s (or authors’) original research and original writing. Any AI use, including a detailed description of where and how used, must be fully disclosed upon submission of material; if omitted and found to be the case, ASPA reserves the right to reject the manuscript at any time during the publishing process, even if already approved for publication. Although the use of AI solely to check grammar and spelling is less an issue (but must still be disclosed), AI’s use in creating or manipulating any content, that is, text, figures, images, charts, or any graphics generated by AI (e.g., by ChatGPT and any other such tool) is completely unacceptable.
Manuscripts in draft may not be available on the web, whether an open-access (social media) platform, such as your academia.edu page, or to access AI help; they may not have been previously published or be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Authors will be asked to sign a License to Publish statement warranting originality and sole ownership before publication.
§2. For the Monograph and Essay series, visit https://www.aos-site.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=510948&module_id=527821.
§3. For the Journal
Materials—preferably not exceeding 15,000 words, including footnotes, appendices, bibliography, etc.—should be sent both as a Word document in Times New Roman font and in PDF format to the appropriate JAOS Sectional Editor. Submissions should include a paragraph abstract (not to exceed 200 words), and all submissions to the East Asian editor should include a bio or short CV. Keywords are not necessary.
For Ancient Near East, Gary Beckman
For Islamic Near East, Peri Bearman
For South and Southeast Asia, Stephanie Jamison
For East Asia, Thomas Mazanec
Text, including footnotes (not endnotes), should be double-spaced, in a uniform font size (12 is preferred for text and notes, 11 for block quotes) throughout, and paginated. A bibliography is not required if references are humanities style (see style sheet). Articles submitted for consideration should be shorn of all authorial identity markers, which includes acknowledgments, forthcoming publications, etc.
On the understanding that JASPA is not an art journal, so that imagery should not be decorative but imperative for clarification purposes, all illustrative material should be sent both separately, as a tiff or jpeg file, and be embedded in the text. Photographs should be no smaller than 300 dpi resolution, line art no smaller than 1000 dpi, in grayscale. For articles that have been accepted, permission for reproduction of illustrative material that is not taken from works in the public domain should be in hand and acknowledged in the figure caption. JASPA does not publish in color in print but can for the online edition if needed. The cost of any necessary and above average work on images required of the typesetter will be charged to the author.
Although the Journal can accommodate most non-Latin scripts, different instructions apply per section.
For the Ancient Near East section, all original cuneiform and hieroglyphic text should be transliterated, using a standard method. Transliteration of Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic script is optional. For Hebrew script, the SBL font is required, and directly preceding and following the Hebrew—whether punctuation or spaces—Times New Roman must be used. This is to avoid a right-to-left issue for non-Hebrew characters and is very important.
For the Islamic Near East section, all non-Latin scripts should be fully transliterated, using a standard method. Exceptions for original script are a block of text accompanied by a full translation and words relevant to the article’s argument that would suffer from the limitations of transliteration, e.g., a word with undotted letters.
For the South and Southeast Asia section, all original text should be transliterated, using a standard method.
For the East Asia section, transliteration—at first occurrence together with original script for disambiguation—is required for proper names, titles, and terms used within the English texts. Bibliographies should use both transliteration and original script for authors, editors, and titles, but not for publishers. For quotations, on the other hand, original script alone will suffice. If using original script for quotations, please use East Asian punctuation marks.
See additionally the JASPA Style Sheet.
§4. If your article has been accepted, it will undergo thorough editing by the respective editor. The waiting list for publication differs per discipline; ask your editor for an approximate date. Proofs are sent out as PDFs; a second proof stage is corrected internally. Please avoid the temptation of uploading any earlier draft than the published article—multiple differing versions should not be available on the web.
§5. Finally, JASPA is not open access in the Gold corporate-publisher sense of the word, but since the copyright of all material published in the Journal belongs to the author, the author is free to reprint, republish, adapt, and translate the published piece, or upload to a repository of the author’s choosing the offprint received upon publication of the journal issue.