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About The Journal of Play in Adulthood

The Journal of Play in Adulthood aims to provide a multidisciplinary open access forum dedicated to the discussion of play and playfulness in adults. The focus of this journal is on play in adulthood to explicitly distinguish it from children’s play, and to highlight that the motivations, contexts, and forms of play are, in many cases, different. It aims to increase understanding of the need for, and benefits of, play and playfulness after childhood, and to create a robust evidence base for the value of play throughout the life course for learning, working, and living well. It also seeks to explore the barriers to the use of play with adults, and potential solutions to increasing the role of play in lifelong education, the workplace, and wider society.

Focus and Scope for The Journal of Play in Adulthood

Key topics include the role of play in learning, work, our social and cultural lives, the benefits to individuals and society, and the interrelationship between play and other areas of adult life. In summary, it covers playful living, playful working, and playful learning. The journal accepts manuscripts based on original research from a wide range of disciplines, as well as extended essays, thought pieces, articles from practice, and reviews.

Submission Checklist

• If submitting to a peer-reviewed section of the journal, please note that authors and institutions should be replaced by anonymising text, eg XXX
• When available, the URLs to access references online are provided, including those for open access versions of the reference. The URLs are ready to click (e.g., http://pkp.sfu.ca).
• References are given in APA 6th format. 
• The submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration.
• The submission file is in Microsoft Word or RTF file format, preferably using the journal template.

Acceptance Criteria

Decisions are made based on the following key criteria:

• Does the article fit within the scope of the journal?
• Would it be of interest to potential readers of the journal?
• Is the content original, relevant, rigorous. and placed adequately within the existing literature?
• Are appropriate methodologies used?
• Is the article structured in a way that makes sense and allows the arguments to flow coherently?
• Is the argument understandable and accessible rather than hidden behind unnecessary academic jargon?
• Does the submission follow any guidelines set around formatting and referencing styles?

Copyright Notice The journal makes content available on an open access basis, with the default of a CC-BY 4.0 licence. Authors retain their own copyright of submitted material.
Licences

The Journal of Play in Adulthood allows the following licences for submission:

• CC BY 4.0 - More Information  
  Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Publication Fees

The Journal of Play in Adulthood is a Diamond Open Access journal. No fees are charged to read or publish in the journal.

Peer Review

The journal follows a double-blind review to further provide the fairness of the review process; this means that neither the identity of authors will be disclosed to the reviewers nor the authors know the identity of reviewers. Please refer to the COPE ethical guidelines for peer-review. Reviewers should clearly reference the section of the manuscript (line numbers) to which they are referring in their response. While critiquing the manuscript, reviewers should acknowledge the authors’ time and commitment for the piece of work and therefore should be constructive. While identifying the deficiencies, clear suggestions to improve the quality of the manuscript should be provided.

Publication Cycle

Continual publication with the option for edited collections, special issues and annual volumes.

Sections Publication Ethics and Publication Malpractice Statement

The University of Huddersfield Press follows the guidelines of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). As such, the Press and affiliated Editors adhere to the COPE Code of Conduct and Best Practice Guidelines for Journal Editors  and the Code of Conduct for Journal Publishers . This includes but is not limited to:

- Publishers and editors take reasonable steps to identify and prevent the publication of papers where research misconduct has occurred
- In no case shall the publisher or editors encourage misconduct, or knowingly allow misconduct to take place
- In the event that the publisher or editors are made aware of any allegation of research misconduct the publisher or editor shall deal with allegations appropriately
- The publisher and editors will publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed

Preservation of published content

The University of Huddersfield Press provides content to the preservation service Portico via the Janeway publication platform