Annual of the British School at Athens Guidelines for Contributors 
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Annual of the British School at Athens publishes accounts of the School's projects as well as articles on a wide range of Hellenic subjects spanning a variety disciplines from art to archaeometry and covering Greece throughout history. It is the School’s major publication and one of the most important journals in the field.
The Annual is scheduled to appear in December each year, with individual papers appearing in electronic form via CUP’s First View system, over the course of the year. We encourage all authors to read and follow these guidelines carefully in preparing their paper.
Accepted submission types
Articles other than reports on BSA-sponsored projects
Please contact one of the Co-Editors, stating your proposed title, the length of the article and the number and type of illustrations. A text with figures (at low resolution at this stage, preferably pasted into a Word document (a ‘contact sheet’) should be sent to one of the Co-Editors by 1st April in the year before the intended year of hard copy publication. This should preferably already be in BSA format as described in the ABSA Guidelines, and in electronic form (Microsoft Word or a similar word-processing format, not solely as a pdf document). Please make sure the text and notes are double-spaced and in the same typeface (preferably Times/Times New Roman or Courier) and point size (no less than 12) throughout. The submission should normally be sent as an email attachment to one of the Co-Editors.
The text and figures will then be passed to referees for anonymous peer review. A summary of the referees’ comments will normally be sent to the author.
Reports on BSA-sponsored projects
If a report is to appear in the Annual, contact one of the Co-Editors by 1st June of the year before the intended year of hard copy publication, stating your proposed title, the length of the article, and the number and type of figures. Submit text and figures (for details, see preceding paragraph) at the same time, or at the latest by 1st September. The report will be subjected to a refereeing process.
The Annual does not normally publish preliminary or interim reports even of BSA-sponsored projects, especially where results are likely to change in the light of subsequent work within the life of the project. Brief reports, can be submitted to Archaeology in Greece Online through the Committee for Archaeology.
Submission dates for final versions
Unless a different date is agreed, send the final copy (revised in accordance with referees’ comments, if necessary) to the Co-Editors by 31st August in the year before publication, to allow time for editing. At this stage, it will also be necessary to send figures via a file-sharing service (WeTransfer is recommended) at a resolution suitable for publication, if you have not done so before; authors should also complete and enclose the checklist which they will have received from the Co-Editors. Acceptance for publication is subject to the final text and figures being satisfactory.
Before an article can be published, authors must supply details of figures or other material for which they do not have copyright, and secure any necessary permissions required for print and online publication (see Copyright below).
Formatting your paper including figures
All articles should be written in clear idiomatic English, using British spelling. Where British spelling allows the use of ‘s’ or ‘z’ (e.g. ‘recognise’/‘recognize’), the ‘s’ spelling should be used.
The Annual has detailed guidelines for authors on how to format their manuscript including use of headings, references, use of Greek and guidance for figures and tables. All authors must review and follow the ABSA Guidelines before submitting the final version.
Copyright
Authors retain copyright in their text and must grant a license to the Annual of the British School at Athens to publish their paper. A request for you to complete the author publishing agreement will be sent with proofs. This must be completed before our publisher, Cambridge University Press, can proceed with publication of your article.
Figures whose copyright does not rest with the author must be credited, and authors have sole responsibility for obtaining all relevant permissions before these can be included in an article published in the Annual. The appropriate form of words regarding copyright, as specified by the copyright holder, should be included in the caption and/or the main text as required.
Copyright of figurative material from British School excavations and other School material belongs to the School. Permission to reproduce figures of School material, other than in the Annual, must be sought from the Council of the British School at Athens.
Authors retain the right to reproduce their articles or adapted versions of them in any volume or volumes of which they are editors or authors, subject to normal acknowledgement.
Other rights of authors, including the right to post their articles on personal websites, are detailed on the copyright assignment form which will be sent to all authors with the proofs.
Online publication and Supplementary Material
The Annual now publishes articles online ahead of print, significantly reducing the time between acceptance and publication, through the Cambridge University Press First View system. Articles are published online in complete and final form; they have been fully peer reviewed, revised and edited for publication, and the authors’ final corrections have been incorporated. Because they are in final form, no changes can be made after online publication. Articles published through First View are fully citable and may be included in the list of publications submitted to REF panels, etc. Authors should note that the page numbers of articles in First View will not be the same as those which subsequently appear in the printed Annual.
Online publication allows for the additional publication of online-only Supplementary Material – such as additional images, or extensive data sets – which cannot appear in the printed version. Authors are encouraged to make use of this facility for any supporting material which is not essential to the main argument of their articles. For editing purposes, authors should treat Supplementary Material as a free-standing publication (with its own sequence of figures and its own References section). Authors are wholly responsible for the copy-editing of Supplementary Material, if the article is accepted, Supplementary Materials are not copy-edited or typeset, and are published online with the full article in exactly the format supplied by the authors.
Editorial changes and corrections
The text will be copy-edited, and the Co-Editors may emend the text; their decisions are final, but you will normally be consulted over any substantial changes.
The Copy-Editor may contact you directly to resolve any queries before your article appears in proof; alternatively, you may find queries marked on the proofs themselves. When you receive the proofs, please ensure that the article contains no errors, including any inadvertently introduced during editing/typesetting. It is important to check and return the proofs as soon as possible; otherwise, we cannot guarantee that any remaining errors will be corrected before publication.
Corrections to proofs should be made using the digital mark-up tools explained in the early pages of the pdf of your paper. The ‘Add sticky note’ option should be used only for comments on images. Textual changes should be made using the ‘Insert text’, ‘Replace text’ and ‘Remove text’ (strikethrough) facilities; for any comments/queries on the text, the ‘Add note to text’ option should be used.
It is essential at proof stage to ensure that factual mistakes or errors introduced during the editorial/typesetting process are corrected; however, polishing the prose or rewording purely on stylistic grounds is not acceptable at this stage.
Open access policies
Please visit here for information on our open access policies, compliance with major funding bodies, and guidelines on depositing your manuscript in an institutional repository.
Offprints
Each corresponding author will receive a final pdf file of their article the instant that their article is published online. This should not be disseminated via file-sharing platforms, such as academia.edu. It is, however, permissible to share versions of the article in their pre-copy-edited form.
Policy on prior publication
When authors submit manuscripts to this journal, these manuscripts should not be under consideration, accepted for publication or in press within a different journal, book or similar entity, unless explicit permission or agreement has been sought from all entities involved. However, deposition of a preprint on the author’s personal website, in an institutional repository, or in a preprint archive shall not be viewed as prior or duplicate publication. Authors should follow the Cambridge University Press Preprint Policy regarding preprint archives and maintaining the version of record.
Declaration of funding
A declaration of sources of funding must be provided if appropriate. Authors must state the full official name of the funding body and the grant number(s) if provided. Authors should also specify what role, if any, their financial sponsors played in the design, execution or writing of the study. If they played no role, this too should be stated.
Competing Interests
All authors must include a competing interest declaration in their title page. This declaration will be subject to editorial review and may be published in the article.
Competing interests are situations that could be perceived to exert an undue influence on the content or publication of an author’s work. They may include, but are not limited to, financial, professional, contractual or personal relationships or situations.
If the manuscript has multiple authors, the author submitting must include competing interest declarations relevant to all contributing authors.
Example wording for a declaration is as follows: “Competing interests: Author 1 is employed at organisation A, Author 2 is on the Board of company B and is a member of organisation C. Author 3 has received grants from company D.” If no competing interests exist, the declaration should state “Competing interests: The author(s) declare none”.
English language editing services
Authors, particularly those whose first language is not English, may wish to have their English-language manuscripts checked by a native speaker before submission. This step is optional, but may help to ensure that the academic content of the paper is fully understood by the Editor and any reviewers.
In order to help prospective authors to prepare for submission and to reach their publication goals, Cambridge University Press offers a range of high-quality manuscript preparation services, including language editing. You can find out more on our language services page.
Please note that the use of any of these services is voluntary, and at the author's own expense. Use of these services does not guarantee that the manuscript will be accepted for publication, nor does it restrict the author to submitting to a Cambridge-published journal.
Author affiliations
Author affiliations should represent the institution(s) at which the research presented was conducted and/or supported and/or approved. For non-research content, any affiliations should represent the institution(s) with which each author is currently affiliated.
For more information, please see our author affiliation policy and author affiliation FAQs.
Authorship and contributorship
All authors listed on any papers submitted to this journal must be in agreement that the authors listed would all be considered authors according to disciplinary norms, and that no authors who would reasonably be considered an author have been excluded. For further details on this journal’s authorship policy, please see this journal's publishing ethics policies.
Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools
We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.
In particular, any use of an AI tool:
- to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s)
- to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
- to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript
- must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission
Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.
Author Hub
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