Discourse at the speed of relevance.

Submission Guidance

To better serve our readers (and help you get your message to them), we follow a simple principle: Promote the discourse at the speed of relevance. If it is well written, accurate, meets our standards, and follows a consistent citation style, we will publish it. If you wrote it in Chicago, we won’t force you to rework it to APA or our own style. That said, here are some things to consider.

We accept works in two general categories. These categories do not preclude us from publishing works that merit special consideration, but do not expect us to publish a 50-page opinion piece. Please note that anything longer than a 1500-word Op-Ed requires a 200-word abstract.

• Op-Ed pieces are 800-1500 words in length and advance an opinion or thesis on a current topic in a very tightly argued format.  While your opinion should be based on facts and figures, the length here does not permit elaboration of detailed support. These pieces should offer some form of policy prescription. That is, if you are going to criticize, offer a solution or a way toward one.
• Essays are approximately 2,000-5,000 words in length and provide more room for elaboration of concepts and provision of support. A 200-word abstract that states your thesis or argument must accompany your submission, this both assists in the editorial process and allows you to essentially advocate your argument in the hope that busy readers will invest their time in reading more.

Research papers, policy papers, or essays longer than 5000 words will only be published by exception on a case-by-case basis. ASU has peer reviewed Journals for this purpose including Inter Populum: The Journal of Irregular Warfare and Special Operations and El Centro, which focuses on Latin America. Original primary, source research, first-hand accounts of value to our readership, or truly unique and valuable arguments that require this amount of space for elaboration will be referred to InterPopulum, El Centro, or for special SWJ presentations marked “peer reviewed.”

Preferred Style Guide. Although we accept multiple styles, SWJ has a preferred style guide for submissions that we developed and constantly update based on user experience testing. So if you know you are going to submit to SWJ in advance, you should try to use our style guide.

Submit Your Piece

We are presently accepting:

• Original, unpublished works for publication in Small Wars Journal.
• Current news items and event announcements of interest.

Small Wars Journal publishes contributed content from serious, authentic voices from across the wide spectrum of participants and stakeholders in small wars. We welcome your submission of content suitable for our professional community. We will review what you submit and may publish original content as a Journal article; we also appreciate your assistance in pointing out relevant published works, news, and activities as we build a useful index of resources for practitioners. Authors submitting their original, unpublished work for consideration for publication in SWJ should review this section closely.

If you agree with the provisions on this page, submit through this link or the one further down. If you do not agree, don’t submit your work; if in doubt, contact us on any nuances before submitting.

Checklist

• You agree with all the terms on this page, including:
  • You are able to grant us rights to the work. (6)
  • You grant us those rights stated. (7-11)
  • It is READY TO GO (2-4), it’s good, you know it, and you’re thick-skinned. (5)
• You’ve included the right stuff (document, bio, misc files, info)
• Your submission constitutes acceptance of the terms on this page.

All the gruesome details

Thanks for considering Small Wars Journal as an outlet for your work. We aim to provide a responsive publishing vehicle for thoughtful work to enable it to quickly reach the broad community of small wars stakeholders. We depend on the high quality of contributed content from motivated professionals.

1. We will consider your submission for publication in Small Wars Journal which now includes Op-eds, essays, reviews, policy papers and by exception, longer form pieces.
2. We accept only ready-to-go original works. We screen them per our editorial policy and then work with the author to ensure rapid publication.
3. DO NOT SEND US DRAFTS FOR COMMENT.
4. We try to make minor editorial corrections as we format the article for publishing. Our target is authentic, really good, and right now. Unfortunately, the perfect has proven to be the enemy of the good. We will do some editing, but if a piece is riddled with errors, our staff will send it back. Please work with a good editor or proofreader before you submit to us.
5. You understand, accept, and hopefully even relish the fact that your work will be exposed to a broad, spirited, and opinionated audience that will have no hesitation at all about making public their high praise or scathing criticism of your work; likely some of both.
6. You represent and warrant that you are the sole copyright holder of the original work or are otherwise duly authorized to act irrevocably on behalf of the copyright holder(s).
7. You understand and agree that, if your work is accepted for publication, we will almost certainly publish it under a Creative Commons license that provides for some permissive uses of your work. See also our Terms of Use for more information on that license. Hint: that’s not the route you want to go if you are in this for the money.
8. You grant us 30 days to decide whether or not we will publish your work, during which time you will not withdraw your submission. If, at our sole discretion, we choose to publish your work within those 30 days or prior to our acknowledgement of your withdrawal of the submission, you grant us, without any further action on your part than the initial submission, a worldwide, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferrable right to use or to license to use your work in any way we deem appropriate.
9. We will always identify you as the author of the work. You must provide us with a 150 word bio and you may provide us with a headshot photo for our Authors page.
10. We do not expect to make money on the publication of your work. From time to time we do collect some license fees or royalties for reuse of published works. When we do, our practice has been to share proceeds with the author(s) and we expect to continue to do so, but this is at our sole discretion.
11. You retain copyright and are free to use your work or derivatives as you desire. If published with Small Wars Journal, we would appreciate you recognizing first publication in any future citations.
12. Authors, by submitting their content, also consent to republication of their article or essay in topical Small Wars Journal Anthologies in print and electronic format.

If you agree with all that stuff, then submit your work for publication. Be sure to include:

1. The original work in a format we can use. MS Word, rich text, etc. DO NOT SEND PDFs.
2. Your Byline as you would like it and a bio of a few sentences (150 words) as you would like it to appear.
3. If you have pictures, graphs, etc., we prefer that you embed them as you would like them to appear. You can also send us the originals as separate files. Ensure that these photos are your original work, in the public domain, or that you have permission. You will be held responsible for sending us proprietary photes or images.
4. Any additional contact info besides your current email (for us, not for publication). In particular, a permanent email address if you have one.
5. Is there anything interesting to say about the work? We can introduce things with an editor’s note that may not be appropriate in the introduction to or body of the work. In particular, commentary with regard to the genesis of the work or initial reception of it, etc. are often useful to set a context for readers.
6. If you have a Twitter account or a Facebook page that you will use to publicize the piece, please include that information so we can include your tags when we announce the piece via Twitter and Facebook.

You should hear a decision within 7 days. Please give us that long. But if you do not hear from us, feel free to poke us.

Terms of Use

All content is provided as is without warranty or further representation. No opinion or fact statement may be relied upon without further investigation on your part sufficient to satisfy you in your independent judgment that it is true.

Original SWJ Works are copyrighted by Arizona State University Media Enterprises and licensed for use under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 4.0 license.  All other rights are reserved. You may view a human-readable summary or the Legal Code (full license).

SWJ supports the broader Small Wars community’s legitimate use of original SWJ works through the privileges granted by that license.  That’s the whole reason why we exist and why we grant such a generous license. Please see our Rights & Permissions page for more information on details of use under that license, or permission requests for other usage.

SWJ may make use of others’ works in compliance with their terms of use when published, specific grants of permission, and/or generally accepted fair use.  If you are the copyright owner of material that you feel we are using inappropriately, contact us with your specific concerns so that we may address them.

Some material presented in SWJ may be subject to copyrights of other parties.  We take reasonable care to note it as such, include original source information, or use terms such as “reprinted with permission” that are indicators the work is not an original SWJ work. Re-use of such material is guided by the originator’s terms, not SWJ’s.

For member-generated content, including but not limited to the comments section of articles, you acknowledge that while we monitor and curate these to the best of our ability, we do not vet user and member generated comments proir to posting and that any opinions, advice, statements, services, offers or other information or content presented or disseminated on any commen section or on any other user or member generated pages are those of their respective authors who are solely liable for their content. From time to time we monitor or review discussions, postings, transmissions, and other user and member generated pages on the site, but are under no obligation to do so.  You may also contact us to report inappropriate material or use the reporting features within the site.  We reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or remove any material submitted to or posted on the comment boards or on any other user or member generated pages, and to suspend, ban, or terminate the account of any user. Our failure to exercise that right does not in any way constitute a waiver of that right, or endorsement or approval of any member-generated material.

These terms are subject to change and should be reviewed regularly. They are effective when published, unless otherwise specified.

Rights and Permissions

This page addresses the re-use of original SWJ Works by others. If that’s not your target, you may want to:

• For other general information, look at our Terms of Use
• If you are a copyright owner and fell we are using your material inappropriately, please contact us

If you really are here because you want to find out how to re-use original SWJ Works, keep reading this page. Thanks for your interest in the material and in doing it right with regard to copyrights and such.

Cutting to the chase for commercial publishers — contact us to arrange for paid use and a specific grant of permission. We are willing to work with your reasonable terms and typical fees. Please propose some and let’s make it a simple transaction.

For most other would-be rights seekers — we are big fans of the Small Wars community getting better by freely exchanging information. That’s why we exist in the first place. We practice what we preach by providing a generous Creative Commons license to allow other good folks like us to go forth and do even more great things with original SWJ Works. Original SWJ Works are copyrighted by Small Wars Foundation and licensed for use under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-Share Alike 3.0 license. All other rights are reserved. You may view a human-readable summary or the Legal Code(full license).

We find that most inquiries we receive are for simple reprint rights we have already granted via that license. Review the license details at the links for the specifics. In general, if your use of the material will be:

• Attributed, and
• Shared Alike, i.e. republished under the same Creative Commons license that we use

….then you are probably well taken care of by that license and just need to wade through its particulars.

Here are the issues we most often encounter, and how to address them:

Attribution

This is generally easy to accomplish. Industry standard attribution is acceptable. To really ace this, we ask that you:

• Prominently credit the works’ authors and its original title.
• Prominently and appropriately cite the works’ appearance in Small Wars Journal
• In print versions, provide the text http://smallwarsjournal.com.
• In online or electronic versions, provide a functioning hyperlink to Small Wars Journal and/or a relevant subordinate page where practicable.
• Do NOT in any way suggest our endorsement of you or your use of the work, unless we have explicitly provided a specific endorsement.
• Do us the extra favor of letting us know where and how you used or will use the material by sending us a note.

A sample citation that helps meet those requirements is:

[Title] by [Author(s)] is reprinted from Small Wars Journal per the Creative Commons license granted upon its <link to individual article page>original publication</link>.

Share Alike

Perhaps you are already publishing everything under a Creative Commons license. Good for you. On behalf of the community, thanks.

If not, or if you are but you are using a different style of CC license, we encourage you to consider broadening up access to your stuff for the community; however, you don’t need to change everything just to use our stuff. It is acceptable to us that  you explicitly add the CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 terms to your particular usage of SWJ works within your other work. That’s easy to do, see the links cited earlier for Creative Commons information. Note this applies to any derivative works as well as verbatim re-use.

Non-commercial

Under the license, you may not use the material for commercial purposes. Usually that’s pretty clear and you know who you are. Here’s what Creative Commons has to say about commercial purposes.

Usage will vary and will depend on the specifics of the situation and the intentions of the user. We cannot and will not provide you a safe harbor statement that your use in non-commercial. We can suggest several situations that we have seen that tend to indicate your use is commercial:

• You typically pay author fees.
• You generate significant revenue through distribution, perhaps by requiring users to pay for prints/access or by significant circulation-based advertising revenue in excess of incidental online banner ads.
• You are primarily in the publishing business rather than in the warfighting & governance business.

Simply put, if you are making money from the use of our work, we expect some of it. The Creative Commons license does not apply. Contact us to arrange for paid use and a specific grant of permission. We are willing to work with your reasonable terms and fees. Please propose some and let’s make it a simple transaction. By the way, we share royalties that we collect with the original authors, but that’s our business and we will take care of them on the back end.

Simply Confused

We get this a lot.

See again the non-commercial terms. If your use is commercial, you probably know it so follow the process for paid rights. We’ll probably know it, too, when we discover the infringement, but we don’t think it’s a violation of that license when a junior officer bundles an SWJ article into a PME reader reproduced on a government copier and freely distributed to their team. Re-read the license at the earlier links, double check the attribution and share alike terms, and press on.

If you are still confused, chances still are you’re an action officer or curriculum developer looking for gold-plated, belt & suspenders top cover to CYA or to satisfy a boss or a functionary gatekeeper somewhere.  Re-read the license terms. We bet you can live by them. Point your boss or publishing clerk at the license, have them read it, and if they still want more documentation, have their credit card handy. To reduce our own paperwork and workload, we only grant explicit permissions to paying customers, who should probably only be paying when the terms of our Creative Commons license do not apply.