Submissions

Verfassungsblog is a discourse platform and forum of debate for constitutionalists in Europe and beyond. We see ourselves as an interface between the scholarly expert discourse and the political public’s demand for informed opinion on topical matters of constitutional law and policy. We welcome article submissions. 

Information for authors

Open Access and Copyright

Verfassungsblog is and will remain open access. This means that all content is freely available without charge to the user, the author or their institution. 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 lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author as long as they give appropriate credit.
Verfassungsblog’s content is generally published under the Creative Commons Licence CC BY-SA. This means that you must give appropriate credit and share the content under a comatible licence unless otherwise indicated. Read more about Open Access and Licensing at Verfasslungsblog on our Open Access webpage.

Quality Control and Originality

Each submission will be reviewed by Verfassungsblog’s editors. Unsolicited submissions are also subject to review by Verfassungsblog’s associate editors in order to ensure the quality of the content.
Submissions must be original and owned by their authors. The author must disclose if the submission has been previously published, is under review with another publication at the time of submission or is under agreement to be published.

Plagiarism Policy

Authors must not plagiarize in their submissions to Verfassungsblog. We request that authors give credit to the original sources of text, ideas, and pictures. If we spot plagiarized content during our editorial review, we may reject the submission. In case plagiarism becomes apparent only after publication on Verfassungsblog, we will either publish a correction or remove the contribution.

Long-Term Archiving

The content published on Verfassungsblog receives a DOI and is transferred to the disciplinary Open Access repository <intR>²Dok for long-term archiving (ISSN 2366-7044).

FAQ for authors

 

We are always interested in well-written and thoughtful comment and analysis on topical events or developments (e.g. court decisions, legislation etc.) of constitutional law and policy. If you observe any of that in your field of research, you are warmly encouraged to submit a blog post. Just shoot us an email or a message on Twitter/Mastodon/LinkedIn, explaining briefly the relevance of the topic and your background as an expert. We’ll get back to you as quick as we can.

The most important thing in writing a blog post is that you make sure that you have a clear and sharp thesis. If you think of submitting an article, please state what thesis you are trying to make. More on this here.

Yes. The key is here. You can also reach us on Signal (+49 178 3005829).

Yes. In order to engage your readers, please keep your text accessible, particularly with regard to length. Most important: get straight to the point. No lengthy introduction like you’d usually be expected in a paper published in a traditional scientific journal. Tell your readers right away what is interesting about your article and why they should bother reading it. In the first paragraph, in the first sentence even.

We recommend 1500 words. If the post goes beyond 2000 words, we will probably ask you to shorten it.

As an online media, we can publish in principle 24/7, so there is no deadline in the strict sense of the term. Time is of the essence, however. You want to reach your audience when their demand for your expertise is highest. A comment on e.g. a court decision should be published ideally on the same day, the day after if that’s impossible, at any rate no later than by the end of the week.

Yes, if necessary. We often make a considerable effort to improve your article. Please don’t be offended and consider this an offer. Our aim is to make sure your text has the impact it deserves. All substantial changes will be, of course, submitted to your consent before publication.

A Verfassungsblog post usually has a short, suggestive title (50 characters max) and a longer, more conclusive and descriptive subtitle (100 characters max). The short title should entice the curiosity of your readers, the combination of title and subtitle (e.g. „Three Steps Ahead, One Step Aside: the Advocate General’s Opinion in the Commission v. Poland Case“) should look good as an entry in your publication list.

References are of course important and we encourage you to substantiate your claims that are not mere opinion and credit other authors whose ideas and research results you use for your argument – just like you would in any other scientific publication. As part of our editorial process we might thus ask you to add sources or make suggestions of our own. Again, any such suggestions will be submitted to your consent before publication. As a general rule, we ask you to use hyperlinks (cmd+k) and to hyperlink the DOI of scholarly publications when available. We only permit footnotes in exceptional cases where hyperlinks are not an option.

We try to keep our author profiles brief: name, position, academic affiliation. The author profile includes a picture. We ask you to send us a licence-free high-resolution foto we can use for that purpose. Please make sure that you own the copyright or have the photographer’s explicit consent.

 

You are free to republish your article elsewhere. We welcome crossposting and do so ourselves quite often. Please make sure that the crossposted article includes a reference and a link to the original publication on Verfassungsblog.

 

If you wish to submit an article please send it as a text document to submission (a) verfassungsblog.de. Before you submit: Please note our word limit. Ideally, your article should not be longer than 1500 words. For submissions exceeding 2000 words, we will likely ask you to shorten them to below 2000 words.

If you wish to communicate in an end-to-end-encrypted way, please use the address confidential (a) verfassungsblog.de with the public key AFF2B613802DADC3A55D5E05750233EEE76AB2F2. Thanks!

All posts on Verfassungsblog are published under a CC BY SA 4.0 license. By submitting a post to Verfassungsblog, you agree to that.

We have asked ChatGPT how to ask authors to disclose AI assistance, and this is what it came up with:

“If you have used any artificial intelligence or AI-assisted technologies in the writing process of your submission, you must disclose that to us and, if we decide to accept the piece, to the readers.”

So, yes, please do.