Manuscript Review Process

Submitting a manuscript for review

If your proposal is accepted by our editorial department, an acquisitions editor will invite you to submit the completed manuscript for peer review. We will need two printed copies of your manuscript and one electronic copy with Microsoft Word files in .doc or .docx format. (These are easier for us to work with than .pdf or .wpd files.)

To ensure that manuscripts are easily readable, our reviewers appreciate when authors observe a few basic style rules at the assessment stage:

• The manuscript should be submitted unbound.
• The text should be double-spaced throughout.
• Use endnotes rather than footnotes. Notes should be in Arabic numerals and should begin at 1 in each chapter.
• The manuscript must be paginated consecutively from beginning to end (ie. pp.1-275, not beginning at page 1 in each chapter).
• If your work includes illustrations, please provide a full set of photocopied images and group them at the back of the manuscript. The illustrations should be individually numbered and should correspond to an accompanying list of numbered illustrations that indicates their desired placement in the manuscript.

For complete guidelines on the formatting of manuscripts according to MQUP style, please see our style guide.

MQUP requests the right of first refusal when we invite a manuscript for review, as the assessment process involves a considerable investment of our time and resources. When you send us your manuscript, we would be grateful if you would confirm that it is not being reviewed by another publisher. 

Peer Review

As a university press, MQUP is committed to the highest standards of scholarship. Acceptance of manuscripts for publication is subject to their approval by our Publications Review Committee (PRC) on the basis of external peer review and the author’s response to the readers’ reports.

In peer review, your acquisitions editor will obtain reports on your manuscript from at least two recognized experts in the appropriate field(s). We will do our utmost to provide you with thoughtful feedback within a reasonable amount of time and to keep you informed throughout. MQUP maintains a confidential review process and the identities of reviewers are not disclosed to authors.

Once the reports have been submitted, your acquisitions editor will forward them to you for your consideration and written response. If substantial revisions are suggested, authors may be invited to revise their manuscripts for a further round of review.

When a manuscript has passed successfully through peer review, it will be sent to our PRC, which consists of senior faculty members at McGill and Queen’s universities. The members of the PRC consider the merit of each manuscript and decide whether or not to recommend its publication on content grounds. A budgetary and marketing review is then conducted and a final decision on publication is made by the Executive Director of the Press.

Contracts

MQUP’s usual practice is to sign a contract after a book been accepted by our PRC. Advance contracts can be issued at an earlier stage on the understanding that publication is contingent upon successful peer review, the approval of our PRC, and the financial viability of the project. Requests for advance contracts are considered on an individual basis and can be discussed with your acquisitions editor. The Press is sensitive to the role of book publications in the academic job market and the tenure-review process and we work to provide the necessary support to authors with projects in development, under review, or in production.

Funding

As a not-for-profit press, our goal is to balance our budget while publishing as many outstanding books as we can. Every book is unique, as are the financial considerations surrounding each book, and our decisions about publication are made primarily on editorial grounds.

In order to maintain our high publishing standards and to enable world-wide dissemination of our books, MQUP seeks external sources of funding for many of our titles. For Canadian authors of scholarly works, our principal source of funding is the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program (ASPP), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and administered by the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences. We apply to the ASPP on our authors’ behalves. 

Funding of MQUP books also comes through yearly block grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Canada Book Fund, subsidies from other government agencies, grants from authors’ institutions, foundations, and endowments to specific series.