Once an article has been accepted, Cambridge University Press will manage the process of copyediting, proofing, typesetting and publishing each piece of content. Your point of contact with Cambridge University Press will be the content manager, or production editor, of the journal. For more information about how production works at Cambridge University Press, please visit this page. Here, you will find basic information about how an article goes from accepted manuscript to fully published. There may be small differences between journals with this process. If you have a specific question about this journal, please contact the editorial office.
Copyright
The policy of Legal Studies is that authors (or in some cases their employers) retain copyright and grant Cambridge University Press a licence to publish their work. In the case of gold open access articles this is a non-exclusive licence. Authors must complete and return an author publishing agreement form as soon as their article has been accepted for publication; the journal is unable to publish without this. Please download the appropriate publishing agreement here.
Gold Open Access
Authors have the option of selecting Gold Open Access publication when they complete their publishing agreement. An author may be eligible for Open Access publication without paying any charge (or a discounted charge) if their institution is part of an Open Access agreement (also known as Read and Publish/Transformative agreements) with Cambridge. Eligibility can be determined here. If an author is not covered by one of these agreements they may still publish Open Access through paying an Article Processing Charge (APC); current charges can be found here.
If an author selects a Gold Open Access route they will be asked, as art of their publishing agreement, to select the Creative Commons licence under which the article is made available to end users: a fundamental principle of open access is that content should not simply be accessible but should also be freely re-usable. Articles will be published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC-BY) by default. This means that the article is freely available to read, copy and redistribute, and can also be adapted (users can “remix, transform, and build upon” the work) for any commercial or non-commercial purpose, as long as proper attribution is given. Authors can, in the publishing agreement form, choose a different kind of Creative Commons licence (including those prohibiting commercial and derivative use) if they prefer.
Green Open Access
Legal Studies encourages authors to take full advantage of its flexible Green Open Access policy. The Submitted Manuscript may be posted on a personal webpage, departmental, institutional or subject repository or social media site at any time. The Accepted Manuscript may be posted on a personal webpage, departmental, institutional or non-commercial subject repository immediately on acceptance. While the journal does not allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript on commercial repositories or the Version of Record anywhere, we encourage authors to post an earlier draft and abstract of their journal article and a link to the Version of Record that sits on the Cambridge website, to direct visitors to the definitive, citable work. Full details of this policy can be found here.
Copyediting
The journal reserves the right to copyedit and proofread all articles accepted for publication, but authors will be consulted in the case of any substantial changes.
Proofs
A working e-mail address must therefore be provided for the corresponding author. Authors will be sent a PDF proof and asked to return their corrections within 5 working days. Only essential typographical or factual errors may be changed at proof stage. Significant changes to typeset proofs require editorial team approval. Further instructions will be sent with the proof.
Author copy
Authors will receive a link to a freely accessible version of their article online for their personal use and to distribute to their personal contacts, subject to the conditions of their publishing agreement.
Online-Ahead-of-Print
All contributions will be scheduled for publication in the appropriate issue of Legal Studies. To reduce time between acceptance and publication, contributions may appear online as FirstView publications in advance of their scheduled publication in an issue. Designated issue number may be unknown at the time of FirstView publication.