Submissions

WOW Stories publishes original contributions on all facets of international children's and adolescent literature from K-16. To have a manuscript considered for publication, submit this form along with a Word file of the article and any supplemental content (e.g., image files, charts, graphs, tables). Make sure your manuscript conforms to our submission guidelines. Manuscripts are reviewed anonymously by at least two members of the editorial review board. All submissions are acted upon as quickly as possible. Usually decisions are made within five months.

Do not submit your manuscript to WOW Stories: Connections from the Classroom if it is under consideration for a different journal or publication. Your manuscript must represent original work and cannot have been published previously.

Types of Submissions

Submit an individual manuscript as a vignette/classroom story:

Describe classroom or library practice (K-12) that connects children and literature in ways that promote intercultural understanding or that involves working with educators or university students around literature to build intercultural understanding

  • Take the form of a story or vignette that one educator might tell to another to share the responses of students to literature
  • Include student voices where appropriate through quotes of student talk, examples of student work, audio clips, or video clips.
  • Include charts, graphs, student artifacts, bulleted points and/or figures wherever possible to vary the format and enhance the content of the article.
  • Be between 2000-2500 words.
  • These manuscripts will be sent out for review by our editorial board, with decisions made within four months.
  • Browse examples of individual manuscripts included in WOW Stories.

Submit a proposal as a literacy community for an issue of the journal:

  • A group of educators from a school, library, project, writing group or university course can submit a proposal to put together an issue of the journal
  • Determine a theme/topic from the community’s work together related to using multicultural or global literature with students to create intercultural understanding.
  • Submit a 2-3 page proposal that describes the topic and provides a schedule for developing the vignettes along with the names of the authors who will contribute and the name of the contact person.
  • Issue begins with a short introduction of the focus for the issue and introduces the literacy community.
  • Issue contains 5 or more vignettes around the theme.
  • Browse examples of community-based issues of WOW Stories.

Issue proposals are accepted at any time.

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About

WOW Stories: Connections from the Classroom is a free, open access, on-line, academic publication of Worlds of Words Center of Global Literacies and Literatures containing blind, peer-reviewed vignettes written by educators about students' experiences reading and responding to literature. This journal is available to anyone to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of articles or use them for any other lawful purpose within our guidelines and according to stated copyright.

Focus and Scope

WOW Stories: Connections from the Classroom is a free, open access, on-line, academic publication of Worlds of Words: Center of Global Literacies and Literatures containing blind, peer-reviewed vignettes written by educators about student’s experiences reading and responding to literature.

 

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. The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, or RTF document file format.
  3. Where available, URLs and DOIs for the references have been provided.
  4. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of references and quotations. Authors should make sure they are correct, in substance and style.
  5. The text is double-spaced; uses Times New Roman 12-point font; employs italics, rather than underlining (except with URL addresses); and all illustrations, figures, and tables are placed within the text at the appropriate points, rather than at the end.
  6. If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, the instructions in Ensuring a Blind Review (below) have been followed.

 

Ensuring a Blind Review

To ensure the integrity of the blind peer-review for submission to this press, every effort should be made to prevent the identities of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other. This involves the authors, editors, and reviewers (who upload documents as part of their review) checking to see if the following steps have been taken with regard to the text and the file properties:

  • The authors of the document have deleted their names from the text, with "Author" and year used in the references and footnotes, instead of the authors' name, article title, etc.
  • With Microsoft Office documents, author identification should also be removed from the properties for the file (see under File in Word), by clicking on the following, beginning with File on the main menu of the Microsoft application: File > Save As > Tools (or Options with a Mac) > Security > Remove personal information from file properties on save > Save.
  • With PDFs, the authors' names should also be removed from Document Properties found under File on Adobe Acrobat's main menu.

Copyright Notice

Authors retain the copyright for Contribution and grant the journal right of first publication in an issue of the electronic journal WOW Stories with a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

WARRANTY: Authors warrant that their Contribution is original; that it contains no matter which is libelous or is otherwise unlawful or which invades individual privacy or infringes any proprietary right or any statutory copyright; and authors agree to indemnify and hold WOW harmless against any claim or judgment to the contrary. Further, authors warrant that they have the right to retain copyright and have not granted copyright to anyone else. Authors acknowledge that the Contribution may include an educational record under FERPA, expressly consent to the use of such content under this Agreement, and affirm that you have written permissions to do so.

WOW Stories is an open access journal, which means that all content is freely available without charge to readers or institutions who may read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full text under the copyright assignment without asking permission from the publisher or author.

REQUESTS TO REPRINT: Any requests to reprint the Contribution, or any parts thereof will be forwarded to the author(s). WOW will not grant requests for reprinting. A credit line, “first published in WOW Stories,” with the URL must be added to any reprint.

Peer Review

Manuscripts submitted to the Editorial Review Board of WOW Stories will undergo double-anonymous peer review. To facilitate this process, names of the authors should not appear in the body of the manuscript or in any headings or citations. The title page with author contact information should be submitted in a separate file from the body of the manuscript. If there is more than one author, the title page should indicate who the main contact person is. The review process will take up to two months.

Licences

The following licences are allowed:

  • CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

    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. NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes. ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Publication Fees

Journals published or hosted by the University of Arizona Libraries' Publishing Program do not charge author publishing fees. All journals hosted by the University of Arizona Libraries are fully open access, with no charges to access or to publish.

Publication Cycle

WOW Stories is published twice yearly.

Sections

Section or article type Public Submissions Peer Reviewed Indexed
Article Yes Yes Yes