Submissions

About The Entertainment and Sports Law Journal is a refereed, online, open access journal. It is located within a dynamic and rapidly expanding area of legal theory and practice. Whilst focused within legal study, the areas it encompasses are necessarily interdisciplinary. Entertainment Law, Media Law, Sports Law, IP Law, Licensing Law – these are all subjects that are taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level at increasing numbers of Law Schools in the UK and beyond.  Areas that are of interest to the Journal include the ways in which the law and regulatory frameworks operate in the following industries: music, sport, film, theatre and literature, art, gaming, the night time economy and the Internet and social media.

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Focus and Scope

The Entertainment and Sports Law Journal is a refereed online journal. It is located within a dynamic and rapidly expanding area of legal theory and practice. Whilst focussed within legal study, the areas it encompasses are necessarily interdisciplinary. Entertainment Law, Media Law, Sports Law, IP Law, Licensing Law – these are all subjects that are taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level at increasing numbers of Law Schools in the UK and beyond.  Areas that are of interest to the Journal include the ways in which the Law intersects with, or the regulatory frameworks that exists within, the following industries:

• Music
• Sport
• Cinema/Film
• Theatre/Literature
• Internet (both creation and distribution)
• Social Media
• Gaming
• The night time economy
• Art
• Gambling

This list should not be seen as exhaustive, but as indicative of the potential areas of interest embracing different theoretical approaches and/or empirical work.  In short the journal's wide range of subject matter naturally encompasses different perspectives and innovative approaches to the material are warmly encouraged.

The broadest aim of the journal is to provide an environment for considered discourse of this growing field of study. Whilst such discourse will generally be from an academic perspective, we also welcome material that stresses the practice dimension to the area and the interaction between theory and practice. We encourage submissions from across the world that embrace ground-breaking methods to dissemination and the Editors will be happy to discuss ideas for submission outside of the traditional article. 

We are particularly interested in work that adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the area as we believe that these areas of entertainment are particularly fruitful vehicles for this approach.

Submission Checklist

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check off their submission's compliance with all of the following items, and submissions may be returned to authors that do not adhere to these guidelines.

1. The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor).
2. Any third-party-owned materials used have been identified with appropriate credit lines, and permission obtained from the copyright holder for all formats of the journal.
3. All authors have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper and satisfy the authorship guidelines.
4. The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
5. All DOIs for the references have been provided, when available.
6. Tables and figures are all cited in the text. Tables are included within the text document, whilst figure files are uploaded as supplementary files.
7. Figures/images have a resolution of at least 150dpi (300dpi or above preferred). Each file is no more than 20MB per file. The files are in one of the following formats: JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS (to maximise quality, the original source file is preferred).
8. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal. Every effort has been made to ensure that author names are removed from the manuscript (following the instructions to ensure blind peer review).

Copyright Notice Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

Peer Review

All articles submitted to the Entertainment and Sports Law Journal are initially assessed by an editor, who decides whether or not the article is suitable for peer review. Submissions considered suitable for peer review are assigned to one or more independent experts, who assess the article for clarity, validity, and sound methodology.

The Entertainment and Sports Law Journal operates a blind peer review process, meaning that authors and reviewers remain anonymous for the review process. The review period is expected to take around four weeks. Reviewers are asked to provide formative feedback, even if an article is not deemed suitable for publication in the journal.

Based on the reviewer reports an editor will make a recommendation for rejection, minor or major revisions, or acceptance. Overall editorial responsibility rests with the journal’s three editors, who are supported by an expert, international Editorial Board.

Licences

Entertainment and Sports Law Journal allows the following licences for submission:

• CC BY 4.0 - More Information  
  Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Publication Fees

Article Processing Charges for this journal are paid for by the University of Westminster.  There are therefore no publication fees to pay.

Where possible, we encourage authors to ask their library/institution to support open access publishing from the University of Westminster and other open access based university presses and their associates open access publishing networks. 

Publication Cycle

The journal is published online as one continuous volume and single issue throughout any calendar year. Articles are made available as soon as they are ready to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in getting content publicly available once articles are accepted.

Special collections of articles are welcomed and will be published as part of the normal issue, but also within a separate collection page.

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