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CSMC
CSMCCentre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures

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Studies in Manuscript Cultures

About the Book Series

The series Studies in Manuscript Cultures (SMC) publishes monographs and collective volumes studying handwritten artefacts. It publishes research from disciplines such as art history, codicology, computer vision, epigraphy, history, material analysis, palaeography, and philology.

SMC encourages comparative approaches without regional, linguistic, temporal, or other limitations on the objects studied. It contributes to a larger historical and systematic survey of the role of written artefacts in ancient and modern cultures and in so doing, provides a new foundation for ongoing discussions in cultural studies.

All submissions should present original scholarship of the highest quality. Work that will soon be published in essentially the same form as part of another book or journal issue or made available on the internet should not be submitted. Submissions are considered for publication on the assumption that they are not being considered for publication by another institution.

SMC volumes are published open access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND by De Gruyter (Berlin): https://www.degruyterbrill.com/serial/smc-b/html.

If you are interested in reviewing one of our publications, please request a free review copy at De Gruyter.

Series editors: Imre Galambos, Konrad Hirschler, Caroline Macé, Cécile Michel, Jörg B. Quenzer, and Eva Wilden

Editorial Office: Michael Kohs

Information for Authors and Book Editors

If you wish to submit a book (min. 220 pages) for publication in SMC, please send a proposal (title, summary, provisional table of contents, expected date of submission) to the editorial officer. The editorial board will consider the suitability of the proposal to the scope of the series. You will be notified about the acceptance or rejection of the proposal within a few weeks. Final acceptance of the submitted book will occur only after the peer review process.

Please comply to the stylesheet regarding formal aspects of the submission:

The following instructions, with tentative timeline, are intended to help those who plan to publish an edited volume (or monograph) with SMC:

Peer Review

SMC operates a double-blind peer review process. Please refer to our Review Guide:

Refer also to the guidelines of the CSMC working group for ethical and responsible research:

The CSMC does not take a positive or negative stance towards the use of AI technologies in research and writing processes. If AI technologies are used, the following rules have to be followed:

  • The use of generative models has to be acknowledged in the publication.
  • The authors must make sure that the use of generative models does not infringe anyone else’s intellectual property and does not result in scientific misconduct, for example in the form of plagiarism.
  • All authors must explicitly consent to the use of each generative model.

Accessibility

All open-access books published after 1 June 2025 must be rendered more accessible by the inclusion of descriptions of all illustrations contained in the book. See De Gruyter’s guidelines for accessible manuscript preparation and a few examples:


Published Volumes