ABOUT: The Journal is an open-access, scholarly publication focused on pre-collegiate writing in the humanities, and specifically art, culture, innovation and design. The Journal publishes on a rolling basis through each calendar period and follows a refereed process in which our advisory board reviews and selects outstanding essays that show high scholarly promise. Our mission is to provide a venue to recognize excellence in pre-collegiate writing to help motivate and launch the next-generation of scholars who seek to pursue the humanities at the undergraduate and possibly even the graduate (Masters or PhD level) in the future.
SELECTIVITY: The Journal receives a large volume of submissions including via our pro bono fee waiver outreach program and accordingly publishes a limited number of submissions from an outstanding pool. Selected authors may be invited to apply for our Fellows Program, and we are gratified when our authors are admitted to highly selective colleges and universities, many of which have made humanities-focused candidates an institutional priority in their admissions process. Please do not consider our selectivity to be a bar to your participation. Outstanding work that does not progress to immediate publication may be noticed and waitlisted for future publication space permitting.
WE DO PUBLISH: Research-based and critical essays in the humanities that explore some aspect of art, culture, innovation or design, and where the purpose of the essay is to advance an argument in order to inform or persuade the reader, or to explore a research question and possible analyses of the topic by putting different texts in a curated conversation with each other. For example, AP/IB essays. We also publish literary non-fiction, where a literary style is used to present a non-fiction topic. Occasionally, a submission that doesn't quite fit our categories will be published on an exceptions basis to acknowledge its quality and merit in advancing scholarly discourse in the humanities at the pre-collegiate level. See Submissions for more details.
WE DO NOT PUBLISH: Creative writing, whether poetry, prose, scripts or otherwise. We value creative writing but this is outside our scope. We also don't publish scientific or technical research papers, though you are free to submit a critical or research-based essay about creative writing or the sciences from the perspective of a humanities scholar if your topic relates to art, culture, innovation or design.
OPEN-ACCESS: The scholarly academic community is in a period of transition from subscription to open-access journals because the public interest in making scholarship widely available has put pressure on academic publishing interests to change their traditional subscription=based business models. In this spirit, the Institute does not believe in putting your work behind a pay-wall subsidized by subscription access. Instead we hope that you will include links to your work in your online CV and that other scholars will read your work and as appropriate reference and cite your work, as a first step in developing your scholarly relevance and reputation. Therefore, we use the open-access business model for academic publishing in which your work is made publicly available to read under copyright license and our costs are subsidized by a submission fee to ensure you are sending us your very best work for our initial review and by an APC (Article Processing Cost) if your article is selected for article processing status to continue to the final article editing and preparation for publication. The APC fee subsidizes our costs in preparing, publishing and hosting your article as part of the Journal as well as those fees that are waived throughout the process for all fee waiver submissions and publications. There are fee waivers/reductions available, so please do not allow fees that you can't afford to be an obstacle in this process. Submit your work with your fee waiver request directly to editor@paloaltoscholar.com Ability to pay is not a factor in the selection process. To read about APC fees, which are standard in the academic publishing industry for open-access journals, see for example the APC policies of PLOS and Wiley. Our APC are substantially lower than standard APC fees; we also subsidize our costs by offering ancillary products and services apart from the Journal; these are separate and do not influence the article selection process.
ABOUT: The Institute is a social venture based in Palo Alto, California. It was founded and is staffed by Stanford students and Stanford affiliates who came together to encourage humanities scholarship at the pre-collegiate level. The mission of the Institute is to encourage, support and recognize the next-generation of humanities scholars through selective opportunities that include publication, contests, awards, academic enrichment and scholarly engagement.
DISCLAIMER. The Institute is NOT sponsored or endorsed by Stanford University and is not affiliated with Stanford University in any way. It was founded by and involves Stanford students and other Stanford affiliates (e.g., alumni, along with alumni of Harvard University and other Ivy League institutions) who believe in our mission and support and serve our programs.
HUMANITIES FOR ALL. The humanities are a necessity, not a luxury good. Outreach is an important part of the Institute's mission. We want STEM-focused students to imagine the humanities connections of their work and consider an interdisciplinary approach to their collegiate studies, where they adopt a "renaissance" mentality and pursue the humanities either in relation to their STEM or adjacent to the same as a supplementary focus. If you're not sure how to explore your STEM research from a humanities perspective, write to us and we'll give you some suggestions. We also want to get the word out that any pre-collegiate student can aspire to become a humanities scholar. For this reason, we look to include underserved and underrepresented communities in our programs so that the Journal does not function as an echo chamber for existing elite social privilege. As part of our outreach program, Stanford student volunteers work with and mentor a limited number underserved students who submit work of great promise and whose circumstances meet our eligibility criteria.