Submission Policies

The editors reserve the right to determine the suitability of submissions. For additional information, please contact the editors.

Scholarly Essay or Commentary

We publish three forms of writing: scholarly essays, commentaries, and reviews. We also have a page on our website devoted to book and media reviews. The distinction between scholarly essays and commentaries deserves clarification.

During the submission process, authors are asked to choose one. During the review process, we may suggest authors consider the other category.

By “scholarly essay,” we mean those analytical essays which critically draw from and contribute to the contemporary scholarship on Indigenous Studies methods and theories. By “contemporary scholarship,” we mean that our journal’s scholarly essays critically engage (not simply reference) those methods and theories in the field of Indigenous Studies published within the last eight years.

In contrast to this scholarship, our published “commentaries” may take the form of how-to articles, still uninterpreted case studies, opinion pieces from situated Indigenous perspectives that may provide insights for scholars and/or other Indigenous communities. We think of commentaries as being less concerned with drawing from and contributing to contemporary scholarly literature, though they may do so.

Since we have only these two possible forms of submissions (besides book reviews), please note that for all formats that are not scholarly essay, we ask the submitters to use “commentary” as their submission type.

All articles and commentaries are peer-reviewed. We expect both forms of content to embody original, fluid, well-reasoned, and persuasive prose. Commentaries are demarcated as such in our issues, either within a secondary section entitled such or in a subheading of the work’s title.

Our special issues may include poetry, art, and mixed-genre submissions. Please see our “Special Issue” category under our website’s menu item, “Submissions,” to learn more about proposing special issues.

Removal

Once published, a journal article cannot generally be revised or removed. We owe our readers and researchers perpetual access to materials published whenever possible and appropriate. However, we will remove publications under special circumstances, including in the case of submission errors, rights violations, or inappropriate content. Please see “Our Ethics” on our webpage. Please be aware that even after the removal of a work, a citation to the work will remain in our system, along with a URL, retraction information, or in some cases the originally published essay along with watermarked “retracted” on the pages.

If you would like your work removed from eScholarship, please contact the editors.

Changes to Our Published Issues

As an open access, fully digital, journal, we must balance our ability to make changes to published text with our responsibility to be a reliable distributor of information.

We wish to clarify to our readers and librarians everywhere that we do not make changes to the content of our published issues unless not doing so could cause harm to a community or constitute an injury to an individual, such as in the cases of research ethics or misrepresentation. 

In the cases when we find it necessary to edit a published essay or the biographical entry for an author, we will note such changes explicitly on the landing page of the respective essay within that essay’s abstract.

In the case of retractions, we will leave the essay’s URL intact and note the date of the retraction, while leaving the issue’s originally published page numbering constant. Following the guidance of the National Information Standards Organization (June 26, 2024), we will add “RETRACTED” to the title in the PDF and HTML (if feasible) and the embedded metadata. The date of retraction will be added on the first page, and a running header will be added saying “RETRACTED ON [DATE].”

Author-Initiated Changes

We are often asked by authors if they can make changes to an essay or their biographical information after an issue has been published. Please consider our publication pipeline below.

If you are an author working toward a publication with our journal, please note that we have four stages of editing after acceptance.

First, you may be asked to make changes between the revised and resubmitted version. You should not make substantial changes to the prose beyond those recommended by the editors and anonymous peer reviewers. Changes to the essay’s title are acceptable at this stage.

Second, after having your resubmission accepted, you will work with an editor for line editing. This editing process requires quick turn-around times and seeks to craft an essay that conforms to our readers’ expectations of our journal, including grammar, capitalization, and citational practices. During this second stage, you will be asked to confirm your biographical information, including any tribally specific words such as clans, honorifics, and placenames. Please note that changing tribal affiliations, or “self-indigenizing” issues may lead to retractions (See Our Ethics on our website or “Changes to our Published Issues above).

The next stage, or “page-proofs,” provides your last chance to make any changes; such changes must keep the pagination in place. In other words, any small changes must keep the same number of lines per page.

The fourth stage of editing is the sneak peak of the published issue. Our team has uploaded all the content of an issue. We make it public for authors to review the website’s content. You will have approximately three business days to review how your name, or authorial collective, and bios appear on the website. You will not be able to change the content of the already uploaded page-proofed essay or biographical information.

Rights and Permissions

Copyright for the American Indian Culture and Research Journal varies by volume, reflecting the history of the journal’s agreements with its publishing company. Rights to images in the journal generally have not been transferred to the journal, and inquiries about permissions for images should be directed to the artist, photographer, or other copyright owner.

Volume 46, Issue 1 to present

All articles published in the journal are subject to the journal’s author agreement, which is available in the first step of the submission process or by contacting us to request a copy. Before submitting an article to the journal, please be sure that all necessary permissions have been cleared for any third-party material, such as maps, figures, illustrations, and photography.

Authors do not transfer copyright to the journal. Instead, they grant the journal and eScholarship a nonexclusive license to publish their article. The journal is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license. For uses that exceed the permission granted by the CC license, contact the editor-in-chief.

Volume 16, Issue 3 to Volume 45, Issue 2 (except for Volume 22, Issue 4)

Authors (except those contributing poetry) in these issues transferred copyright to the University of California. For permission to reuse non-poetry work published in these issues in a way that exceeds fair use or other exceptions provided by law, please contact editorinchief@aisc.ucla.edu.

For reuse of poetry published in the journal during the above dates, contact the author.

Volume 1, Issue 1 to Volume 16, Issue 2; Volume 22, Issue 4

Authors publishing in these issues retained copyright in their work. For permission to reuse work published in these issues in a way that exceeds fair use or other exceptions provided by law, please contact the authors.

Open Access Statement

This is an open access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution (no APCs). The journal is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other purpose permitted by the license or by law, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. Rights to images in the journal generally have not been transferred to the journal and are not licensed under the same terms; any inquiries about reproduction of images outside the context of the journal should be directed to the artist, photographer, or other copyright owner.

Long-term Preservation Policy

All materials submitted to eScholarship are automatically deposited in CDL's Merritt Preservation Repository for long-term preservation.