Aims and Scope of the Journal
The journal, Lětopis, publishes academic articles on all kinds of sorabistic matters as well as on comparative research on minorities and reviews of works, in which the topics mentioned are treated. The journal is aimed at scholars who are conducting research in their specialist areas or in interdisciplinary research relating to the Sorbs or who are looking for information relevant to their research.
Keywords: Sorbian studies, Upper Sorbian, Lower Sorbian, Slavic languages, minority studies
As an interdisciplinary periodical of Sorbian and humanities research, the journal Lětopis is published by the Sorbian Institute since its foundation in 1952, from 2023 online, and with the subtitle “Journal for Sorbian Studies and Comparative Minority Studies”. Accepted articles appear online as separate publications, and subsequently also in print in an annual volume.
Languages accepted for publication are Lower Sorbian, Upper Sorbian, German, English, along with other Slavonic languages, preferably Polish, Czech, or Russian.
Open Access
“Lětopis” is a Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA) journal. This means that it is accessible free of charge and there are no publication fees – no APCs, no page charges, no color charges, etc. All content is freely accessible immediately after publication. The journal is jointly organized, academically supported, and non-commercial. All material is published under a CC license chosen by the authors, who retain the copyright.
Publications appear under the licence Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Should you, as author, prefer another kind of licence, please inform the editorial board to find out whether this is possible. Please note that images and graphics in your texts can only be published if you, as the author, own the copyright or have been granted the rights to them.
We explicitly point out that authors are also permitted to self-archive texts published in “Lětopis”. Authors can archive their articles themselves and deposit them in repositories such as arXiv, PubMed Central, or institutional repositories.
Publication Ethics and Safeguarding Good Research Practice
The journal "Lětopis” is committed to adhering to the highest standards of publication ethics. It complies with the COPE-Guidelines. The works submitted comply with the recommendations of the Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice by the German Research Foundation (DFG). Lětopis only publishes those works, which have not yet appeared elsewhere. Translations into Lower and Upper Sorbian also appear here to promote the Sorbian academic languages. They are explicitly marked as such.
Peer Review Processes
All texts in Lětopis are edited and checked by a specialist editor, the editorial assistant, and the editor-in-chief.
All the articles, which are published in category "Papers" of Lětopis, will have undergone positive peer-review. Peer reviewers following the double-anonymized process have been selected by the editors of Lětopis from external specialists. Exceptionally (e.g., for linguistic reasons, when texts in Lower or Upper Sorbian are being reviewed), colleagues from the Sorbian Institute, who do not belong to the editorial board, are chosen as peer reviewers. When selecting reviewers, the editorial team of Lětopis observes the DFG's rules on scientific bias and excludes from the review process any individuals who, to their knowledge, may be biased.
In addition, there is a section “Materials” (e.g., for annotated publications of documents). These are only subject to peer review in exceptional cases, which are marked explicitly. There is no peer review for the other sections of the journal (anniversary, obituary, review, book recommendation, conference report).
The editorial team assures that corrections, rectifications, retractions, and apologies will be published as necessary.