Celebrating 10 volumes of the Proceedings

 

To  celebrate the upcoming publication of the tenth volume of our proceedings, I wanted to write a wee post to reflect on the past ten years and share some thoughts on the future!

For those who don’t know our proceedings we are one of a handful of peer-reviewed student publications in Celtic Studies. We are very proud that we also publish in all six Celtic languages as well as English and have done so since our very first volume.

The proceedings was started at the same time as the first conference to allow students a further opportunity to share their research. Over the previous nine volumes we have published 71 papers of which 29 were in a Celtic language (that’s 41%!). Like our conference we accept a broad range of papers relating to Celtic studies and each volume usually contains a range of topics and languages. You can find all the paper titles and links to buy copies of the previous volumes on our proceedings page.

We accept submissions for each volume from all of the speakers at the most recent conference – so keep a look out for the volume 11 call for papers this summer!

We try to give some feedback to everyone who submits a paper, even if that paper isn’t ready for publication yet, although we aim to get as many papers through to publication as possible. The proceedings team are always helped in this by the many peer reviewers we work with for each volume, and we try to find a good fit for as many papers as possible. This feedback is what guides the team and editor when choosing the final papers for publication. We hope that even if an author is unsuccessful that they gain something from the process.

Our call for papers will include a guide for authors with details on referencing as well as a provisional timetable (this usually changes a bit throughout the process!)

So what is like to work on the proceedings?

Well we work as a team with the editor, which has been my job for volumes nine and ten, coordinating and doing a lot of the communicating with authors and reviewers. The rest of the team help with this as well as selecting reviewers, working with authors on feedback and changes to papers and finally proofreading. The proceedings team is always helped by the language officers in this so if you are interested in helping with future volumes please don’t be intimidated by the range of topics and languages!

Whilst we are very excited about our upcoming volume we are already making plans for future volumes. The whole Association has been working to make what we do more accessible, and this is the same for the proceedings. We have always published a print on demand book and last year we added a lower cost eBook to this. With the increase in Open Access publishing (and University interest in this) we have been considering how we might make this work for us. From this upcoming volume (10!) we hope to share free pdf copies here on the proceedings page, with the permission of the authors. We will continue to have both the physical and eBook versions though our current self-publishing platform for those that want them. We hope that sharing pdfs here will become a standard part of the proceedings from volume 11 and that this will make student research more accessible and usable. 

Freya Smith, Proceedings Editor