Submissions

This page is designed to help you ensure your submission is ready for and fits the scope of the journal.

Before submitting you should read over the guidelines here, then register an account (or login if you have an existing account)

The Entertainment and Sports Law Journal (ESLJ) is an open access, refereed journal published by University of Westminster Press (UWP). It has an extremely wide reach, with articles from the journal having been downloaded more than 1,000,000 times and is abstracted via EBSCO and in Hein Online. The editors are keen to receive new submissions and are happy to discuss with interested prospective authors.  

The journal was first published more than 20 years ago with Frank Cass Publishers, and was originally known as the Entertainment Law Journal, the ESLJ eventually found its home at UWP after a period at the Warwick online journals project – we were early adopters of the open access model. The founding editors wanted to build on momentum in the area, both in terms of  the increasing breadth of research in the area, and the emergence of more and more taught degrees – the University of Westminster for example, in many ways the home of the ESLJ, ran the first Entertainment Law option on an LLB in UK in 1992, and created the first postgraduate LLM Entertainment Law degree in 1999. Sport was added to the journal title largely as a reflection of the amount of sport related papers we were receiving at that time, but the journal’s coverage has in fact always been eclectic as our original about section notes:

The Entertainment and Sports Law Journal is a refereed, online, open access journal. It is located within a dynamic and rapidly expanding area of legal theory and practice. Whilst focused within legal study, the areas it encompasses are necessarily interdisciplinary. Entertainment Law, Media Law, Sports Law, IP Law, Licensing Law – these are all subjects that are taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level at increasing numbers of Law Schools in the UK and beyond. Areas that are of interest to ESLJ include the ways in which the law and regulatory frameworks operate in the following industries: music, sport, film, theatre and literature, art, gaming, the night time economy and the Internet and social media. 

The very first volume, for example, included David Miers on gambling, Lee Marshall on the napster wars, Raymond Schneider on celebrity photographs and copyright, Paul Chatterton on governing nightlife, Tom Lewis on art and human rights and Lindsay Gregg on blasphemy in music contracts. We’ve had special issues on themes such as Celebrity Big Brother, and have a series of special collections that draw together articles from across issues and volumes on related themes. In addition to longer articles we also have Interventions (which are shorter, often policy related, although they could also be case note form etc) and have published interviews and are open to other creative ideas.

The current editorial team are Steve Greenfield (Westminster), Mark James (MMU), Ashley Lowerson (Northumbria) and Guy Osborn (Westminster). We would love to have more submissions from socio-legal scholars and are happy to talk to interested authors, contact details here. If you have a piece ready you would like to be consider for inclusion please see our author guidelines here.  

Guy Osborn G.Osborn@westminster.ac.uk 

Mailing List  RSS Feed Journal Blog

The Entertainment and Sports Law Journal is a refereed online journal. It is located within a dynamic and rapidly expanding area of legal theory and practice. Whilst focussed within legal study, the areas it encompasses are necessarily interdisciplinary. Entertainment Law, Media Law, Sports Law, IP Law, Licensing Law – these are all subjects that are taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level at increasing numbers of Law Schools in the UK and beyond.  Areas that are of interest to the Journal include the ways in which the Law intersects with, or the regulatory frameworks that exists within, the following industries:

• Music
• Sport
• Cinema/Film
• Theatre/Literature
• Internet (both creation and distribution)
• Social Media
• Gaming
• The night time economy
• Art
• Gambling

This list should not be seen as exhaustive, but as indicative of the potential areas of interest embracing different theoretical approaches and/or empirical work.  In short the journal's wide range of subject matter naturally encompasses different perspectives and innovative approaches to the material are warmly encouraged.

The broadest aim of the journal is to provide an environment for considered discourse of this growing field of study. Whilst such discourse will generally be from an academic perspective, we also welcome material that stresses the practice dimension to the area and the interaction between theory and practice. We encourage submissions from across the world that embrace ground-breaking methods to dissemination and the Editors will be happy to discuss ideas for submission outside of the traditional article. 

We are particularly interested in work that adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the area as we believe that these areas of entertainment are particularly fruitful vehicles for this approach.

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. Any third-party-owned materials used have been identified with appropriate credit lines, and permission obtained from the copyright holder for all formats of the journal.
3. All authors have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper and satisfy the authorship guidelines.
4. The submission file is in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word, RTF, or WordPerfect document file format.
5. All DOIs for the references have been provided, when available.
6. Tables and figures are all cited in the text. Tables are included within the text document, whilst figure files are uploaded as supplementary files.
7. Figures/images have a resolution of at least 150dpi (300dpi or above preferred). Each file is no more than 20MB per file. The files are in one of the following formats: JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, EPS (to maximise quality, the original source file is preferred).
8. The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, which is found in About the Journal. Every effort has been made to ensure that author names are removed from the manuscript (following the instructions to ensure blind peer review).

Authors who publish with this journal hereby agree to the following terms:

You agree to grant to us (University of Westminster Press) the right both to reproduce and/or distribute your article (including the abstract) ourselves throughout the world in printed, electronic (Open Access) forms, or any other medium. You agree that we may publish your article in the journal named above.

You warrant that the article is your original work, has not previously been published, and is not currently under consideration by another journal. If it contains material which is someone else’s copyright, you warrant that you have obtained the unrestricted permission of the copyright owner (please attach evidence of this) and that the material is clearly identified and acknowledged within the text. You also warrant that the article does not, to the best of your knowledge, contain anything which is libellous, illegal, or infringes anyone’s copyright or other rights.

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a CreativeCommons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. If you would prefer to publish your work under an alternative Creative Commons License, please indicate this in the Comments for the Editor box below, providing reasons for your request.

Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of OpenAccess).

All articles submitted to the Entertainment and Sports Law Journal are initially assessed by an editor, who decides whether or not the article is suitable for peer review. Submissions considered suitable for peer review are assigned to one or more independent experts, who assess the article for clarity, validity, and sound methodology.

The Entertainment and Sports Law Journal operates a blind peer review process, meaning that authors and reviewers remain anonymous for the review process. The review period is expected to take around four weeks. Reviewers are asked to provide formative feedback, even if an article is not deemed suitable for publication in the journal.

Based on the reviewer reports an editor will make a recommendation for rejection, minor or major revisions, or acceptance. Overall editorial responsibility rests with the journal’s three editors, who are supported by an expert, international Editorial Board.

The following licences are allowed:

• CC BY 4.0 - More Information  
  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. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Article Processing Charges for this journal are paid for by the University of Westminster.  There are therefore no publication fees to pay.

Where possible, we encourage authors to ask their library/institution to support open access publishing from the University of Westminster and other open access based university presses and their associates open access publishing networks. 

The journal is published online as one continuous volume and single issue throughout any calendar year. Articles are made available as soon as they are ready to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in getting content publicly available once articles are accepted.

Special collections of articles are welcomed and will be published as part of the normal issue, but also within a separate collection page.