About the Journal

Focus and Scope
Press Start welcomes submissions from undergraduate and (post)graduate students (and from those who have graduated within the last year), from any discipline and from any higher education institution. This policy acknowledges the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of game studies and the growing international interest in this area. We are interested in any academic work that relates to video games, non-digital games, and game design. Increasingly, students from more established disciplines (including, but not limited to, communications, media studies, psychology, philosophy, sociology, film and television studies, literature, history, computing science, and history of art) choose to do research on a game-related topic that intersects with their primary discipline: Press Start is an ideal venue for the publication of such work. Submitting work to the journal is also an excellent opportunity to hone your writing skills, as you will receive feedback on your writing from at least two of your peers.

Submissions may be based on a piece of work you have already written for your course, or you may opt to write an original piece for submission to the journal. We publish scholarly critical essays that contain 5000-8000 words (including references and abstract) and book reviews that are constructive but academically kind and contain 1200-1500 words. If you are unsure if your work is acceptable for Press Start, please post a question on our Facebook group or email the Editor-in-Chief directly.

The Editorial Board and reviewers are fellow students. We are keen to attract participants from a variety of disciplines: if you are currently a student and have an academic interest in games, please get in touch with the Editor-in-Chief (eic.press.start@gmail.com) or join our Facebook group to find out more about becoming a reviewer. Working with the journal is a great opportunity to develop critical skills and gain experience of working as part of a team (remotely, for the most part) – it also looks good on your CV!

In order to celebrate multilingual scholarship and to encourage non-native English speakers to send us their work, we have translated our open call for papers into 17 languages! Follow this link to see the full translations.

 

Peer Review Process
Press Start's current review policy means that submissions are not anonymized before being passed to reviewers, sometimes referred to as "double open." Furthermore, authors will know the names of the reviewers looking at their submissions when they receive their reviews. We feel that this more transparent approach helps to encourage generosity, kindness, and community-building. Contributors may request a double-blinded review process if they prefer – just let us know in the "Author comments" section of the submission form. All submissions will be assigned to three student (or recent graduate) reviewers. Members of the editorial board might also be asked to review a submission. Reviewers are asked to complete reviews within four weeks and to consider three main criteria: originality and quality; structure and presentation; and previous scholarship. For more information on reviewing, please see our Information for Reviewers page and our Guide for Reviewers.

Authors who wish to suggest names of reviewers they would prefer were not asked to review their work should use the "Author comments" section of the submission form to do so. Alternatively, authors may contact the Editor-in-Chief directly (eic.press.start@gmail.com).

Authors, reviewers, and editors may also view a statement on Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice.

 

Publication Frequency
Press Start is usually published biannually, though this is subject to change based on the number of submissions we receive.

 

Open Access Policy
Press Start provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. This journal understands "open access" in terms of the Budapest Open Access Initiative:

"By 'open access' to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited."

Press Start does not charge authors any submission or article processing charges.

The Editorial Board has taken steps to ensure that articles are included in relevant indexing services, including Google Scholar, EBSCO, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), InfoBase Index, and WorldCat. Press Start is also listed in the Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory.

 

Archiving
This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration.

 

ISSN

2055-8198

^{Press Start is published by Dr Matthew Barr, University of Glasgow.}