Submission of Articles
Academic authors are invited to submit an article for this journal.
Please send submissions by email to:
rechtundliteratur@uni-koeln.de
All submissions are assessed to ensure they are in line with the aims and scope of this journal. If the manuscript is accepted for publication, the author will receive the proofs electronically; these must be checked and returned before publication can proceed. Submission of the corrected proofs automatically constitutes authorisation for publication. For contributions submitted at short notice that are to appear in the issue shortly, we ask that you refrain from making changes to the content of the galley proofs and limit corrections to the bare essentials (printing errors).
Review Process
Submitted manuscripts undergo a two-stage editor-mediated peer review process with double-blind review.
1. Preliminary Review (Editorial Board): At least two editorial board members review each submission for compliance with the journal’s Aims & Scope, as well as for minimum standards of form and content. They may inform authors in advance if revisions are needed. Manuscripts that do not pass the preliminary review are rejected without being forwarded to the reviewer pool.
2. Peer Review: Manuscripts that pass the preliminary review are submitted to two independent reviewers from the reviewer pool for double-blind review. The reviewers are not members of the editorial board; overlaps with the editorial board are possible. The review is conducted using a questionnaire, which is subsequently made available to the author.
It results in one of the following decisions: Acceptance / Acceptance after minor revisions / Re-review after substantial revisions / Rejection
3. Revision Process: In the case of acceptance after minor revisions, the editorial team reviews the revised version upon receipt to verify that the required changes have been implemented. A re-review is generally not required. If a re-review is recommended following a major revision, the revised version is, whenever possible, re-reviewed and evaluated by the same reviewers.
4. Divergent Evaluations: If the recommendations of the two reviewers differ significantly, the editorial board considers both reviews and makes a decision based on them. In cases of doubt, a third reviewer is consulted, whose opinion is decisive.
5. Final Decision: If there are two positive reviews (acceptance or acceptance after minor revisions) and the editorial board’s approval, the manuscript is considered accepted for publication. If there are two negative reviews (rejection), the manuscript is rejected.
Upon acceptance of a submission, the author will receive the proofs electronically. These must be reviewed and returned before publication can take place; by returning the corrected proofs, the author automatically grants permission for publication. For articles submitted at short notice that are to be published promptly, we ask that you refrain from making substantive changes to the galley proofs and limit corrections to what is strictly necessary (printing errors).
Grant of rights
By submitting the manuscript, the author grants the RLit editorial board the right to publish the article in RLit. Likewise, for the duration of the statutory copyright, the author grants the right, without restrictions as to time or place, to reproduce and distribute the work in physical form; the right to publicly perform and make the work available; the right to include the work in databases; the right to store the work on electronic media; the right to distribute and reproduce such media; and the right to otherwise exploit the work in electronic form. This also includes forms of use not yet known today.
The author certifies that they hold the copyright usage rights to the article, including all tables, illustrations, and graphics contained therein.
Copyright remains with the author. The author is free to republish the article elsewhere.
RLit does not charge publication fees to authors or their institutions. Publication is free of charge for all parties involved.
No claim to compensation arises.
The author bears sole responsibility for the content of a contribution; the views of the publisher/editorial team are not reflected by the publication of a contribution.
Author Guidelines
I. Formatting, Structure and Footnotes
Please submit the text exclusively as an unformatted Word file attached to an email. Please do not use automatic heading formatting, numbering, etc. The heading levels are I., 1., a), aa). Please keep the number of heading levels to a minimum.
Each essay must be preceded by an abstract (in English and German). Emphasis in the text should – where actually necessary – be used very sparingly and should be in italics. Names of persons (such as authors or editors) and court names in the main text as well as in the footnotes are always set in italics.
Footnotes should refer to the entire statement. Footnotes should be placed after punctuation marks (full stop, comma, etc.). If footnotes refer to a contribution in a previous footnote, 'ibid.’ may be used or – provided the footnotes do not follow one another directly – a reference to the respective footnote may be made (e.g. cf. Schramm (fn. 3), p. 8). However, journal articles must always be cited in full and without reference to another footnote. A footnote always ends with a full stop.
In an initial asterisk footnote following the author’s first name and surname (not 1, but *), the author’s professional title or field of work and place of work must be specified.
II. Abbreviations
Standard abbreviations may be used. As a general rule, a full stop should follow each abbreviation (e.g., i.e., etc.). The only exceptions to this rule are legal texts (StGB, StPO), court abbreviations (OLG, BGH) and official collections (BGHSt). In cases of doubt, the editorial board shall decide.
German laws are cited using the following abbreviations: Abs., S., Nr., Alt., Hs., Var., lit.
E.g. : § 11 Abs. 1 Nr. 2 lit. c StGB.; § 264 a Abs. 3 S. 2 StGB
Non-German laws follow the respective relevant national standard.
Bundestag and Bundesrat printed papers are cited as follows: BT-Drs.; BR-Drs.
III. Citation Style
Authors’ names and court names should be written in italics (exceptions: Official Collection and publishers). Court names should be abbreviated.
Court decisions should be cited as follows:
Official Collection: BGHSt 22, 297 (300)
Journals: BGH, NJW 2012, 83 (84); OLG Frankfurt a.M., StV 2014, 13 (15).
Unpublished decisions: BGH, Urt. v. 12.8.2012 – 3 StR 27/11 para. 5.
Articles in journals and commemorative volumes should be cited as follows:
Cite the author’s name without the article title, followed by the journal title (abbreviation) or the honouree of the commemorative volume, the year and the page number.
Duttge, NStZ 2015, 13 (24); Heinrich, StV 2011, 26 (30); Hörnle, KriPoZ 2016, 4 (6).
Bottke, in: FS Rudolphi, 2004, p. 15 (19).
Commentaries, handbooks, textbooks and monographs should be cited as follows:
Commentaries, handbooks, textbooks and monographs should be cited for the first time with full bibliographical details, with the exception of the place of publication. For subsequent citations, the author’s name, section and marginal number are sufficient.
Fischer, StGB, 63rd ed. (2016), § 263, para. 4. Thereafter: Fischer, § 264, para. 12.
Gless, in: LR-StPO, 26th ed. (2012), § 136, para. 5. Thereafter: Gless, in: LR-StPO, § 136, para. 10.
Other commentaries: SK-StGB, MüKo-StGB, NK-StGB, SSW-StGB.
Wessels/Beulke/Satzger, Strafrecht AT, 45th ed. (2015), para. 100. See also: Wessels/Beulke/Satzger, para. 15.
Seier, in: Achenbach/Ransiek/Rönnau, Handbook of Commercial Criminal Law, 4th ed. (2015), Part 5, Chapter 2, para. 4. See also: Seier, in: Achenbach/Ransiek/Rönnau, para. 15.
Kochheim, Cybercrime and Criminal Law in Information and Communication Technology, 2015, p. 28. See also: Kochheim, p. 178.
If several monographs or textbooks by the same author are cited, the footnote in which the first citation appeared must also be specified, e.g. Kochheim (para. 2), p. 8.
III. Online sources:
Internet sources must be cited in the footnote as follows: available online at: [Link] (last accessed on [Date]).
Checklist for Submission
All submissions must meet the following criteria.
- This submission meets the requirements listed in the Author Guidelines.
- This submission has not been previously published, nor is it currently under consideration by another journal.
- All references have been checked for accuracy and completeness.
- All diagrams and figures are numbered and labelled.
- Permission to publish all photographs, datasets and other materials submitted with this article has been obtained.
- The submission represents the personal creative work of the author (see Section 2(2) of the German Copyright Act). In particular, the work was not created predominantly through the use of AI systems.
Copyright
All articles are published under the CC-BY 4.0 licence.