Submit a Proposal

Coming Soon…

CORPUS publications are currently in a soft launch phase before being more widely advertised. A proposal submission form is under development and will be posted soon. In the meantime, if you wish to submit a publication proposal, please send email to the Director of Publications, Dr. Miller Prosser, at corpus@uchicago.edu. Briefly explain your project and attach your curriculum vitae. It would be helpful also to include a link to a sample of the data you wish to publish.

The Editorial Process

The CORPUS publications staff consult with prospective authors to advise them on what should be included in their publication proposal and to guide them through the editorial process. After the proposal has been submitted, it will be sent to peer reviewers for assessments of the academic value of the proposed publication. The CORPUS Director of Publications will then circulate to the CORPUS editorial board both the peer reviewers’ evaluations and staff comments concerning the publication’s technical requirements. The editorial board makes the final decision about whether to accept a publication proposal.

Authors whose proposals have been accepted will then sign a legal publication agreement with the University of Chicago that is patterned after a traditional book publication contract. At that point, the author(s) will pay a publication subvention fee to defray some of the costs of the publication. This is a one-time payment whose amount will depend on the number of authors and the size and complexity of the data being published. For example, the fee for the publication of a typical research data set created by a single author is currently $5,000.

After the data has been compiled and edited, there is a final peer review and quality check of the finished product before it is released on the Web as a CORPUS publication under the imprint of the University of Chicago. All published data is stored permanently by the University of Chicago Library. A system of version control ensures that the data, once it is published, does not change and can be reliably cited by means of persistent URL hyperlinks to specific items of information. Data can be referenced in a highly granular fashion at whatever level of detail the author chooses. Additions and corrections may be published in subsequent versions, but earlier versions will always remain accessible. Thus, CORPUS publications not only have a reliable institutional host and assurance of quality but are sufficiently durable and citable to be considered as part of a scholar’s dossier for academic promotion.