Focus and Scope

The Pitt Political Review is dedicated to rigorous discussion of politics on the local, national, and global levels. Our intention is to publish non-partisan writing that analyzes issues, events and personalities, assuming nothing of the reader but a common interest in the subject. Our goal is to contribute to the lively political discourse at Pitt and beyond.

Driven by the ambitious vision and initiative of undergraduates, the University Honors College (UHC) added a new magazine to its publications in April 2005. Its creators sought to publish an undergraduate magazine committed to a serious discourse on politics and policy but not beholden to a partisan point of view. Hoping to avoid a narrow focus of opinion, they sought submissions that provided discussion of issues—even complex issues—like those published at other colleges and universities.

Like the UHC, Pitt Political Review stresses a multidisciplinary approach to all issues.

Section Policies

Articles

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Cover Story

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Features

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Also Inside

Open Submissions

Indexed

Peer Reviewed

Peer Review Process

All articles published in Pitt Political Review must undergo a rigorous peer review process. Reviewers can make the recommendation to accept the article, accept it with changes, or reject the piece.

Each article will be reviewed by one individual before entering the editing process. Reviewers are asked to check for factual errors and inadequate arguments, and to evaluate the article for academic legitimacy. Reviewers are asked to review submissions within the timeframe of 2 weeks. Reviewers will be recruited from university faculty members and post-graduate students.

Publication Frequency

Journal articles will be published at one time as part of an issue with its own Table of Contents. Issues will be published twice a year.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content. Our publisher, the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh, abides by the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of Open Access:

“By “open access” to [peer-reviewed research 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.”

Researchers engage in discovery for the public good, yet because of cost barriers or use restrictions imposed by other publishers, research results are not available to the full community of potential users. It is our mission to support a greater global exchange of knowledge by making the research published in this journal open to the public and reusable under the terms of a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Furthermore, we encourage authors to post their pre-publication manuscript in institutional repositories or on their Web sites prior to and during the submission process, and to post the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version after publication. These practices benefit authors with productive exchanges as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.

There are no article processing charges, submissions fees, or any other costs required of authors to submit articles to this journal.

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. More...