About the Journal

Vestiges: Traces of Record

Vestiges is a diamond (pure gold has also been used) open access journal. Articles are copyright to the authors published under a CC license. We do not charge an APC. The journal is listed in DOAJ. ISSN: 2058-1963.

Our vision is for a journal which will publish detailed case studies of material which are of interest to researchers who use archives in the course of their research. We hope that the journal will attract submissions and readers from those working in history, political science, archaeology, anthropology and sociology, and other cognate disciplines. The purpose is to provide a place to put on record information about resources of interest to researchers, and about archives which may not have been recognised as such. Here we acknowledge the example of the British Library's Endangered Archive Programme (http://eap.bl.uk/) which emphasizes that archives are not only official (state or business-run) institutions with the word archive in their titles. Archives may be privately owned and may not be well organised or even recognised as such: all the more need for an account of what they hold to be published in Vestiges as a first step in gathering interest and support.
Formal and technical statement: we will publish in English and French. The journal is electronic only and all submissions will be published under Creative Commons attribution licenses, thus satisfying the requirements of so-called ‘Gold’ open-access publishing. We are currently applying for an eISSN as the issue goes to press. All submissions will be peer reviewed and the decision of the editors will be final. As an electronic only journal we are not subject to strict space constraints nor are we prevented from including images (although authors must obtain all necessary permissions when using third party imagery: please note that this includes maps as well as photographs). We expect most submissions to be between 5-10 thousand words in length but would be prepared to consider exceptions (either longer or shorter). Special issues e.g. containing papers presented at a conference will be considered if they fit the broad themes of the journal.

Note on archiving

As of late 2024/ early 2025 the contents of Vestiges will be archived in the Oxford Research Archive ORA. DOIs will be issued for the archived versions. See https://ora.ox.ac.uk/ and https://vestiges-journal.info/

Publication Schedule

We publish at least one issue each year. Special issues are occiasonally published after dicussion between the editorial board and the guest editors.