Submissions

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About

RadioDoc Review (RDR) is the only journal dedicated to the rich culture of audio documentaries, narrative podcasts, audio features and other examples of the crafted factual form (sometimes called ‘built speech’) around the world.

Audio documentary and narrative podcasts are flourishing, with huge numbers of talented and creative journalists and producers making content for global audiences for broadcast, streaming and podcast. This is giving rise to a growing field of scholarship and education.

RadioDoc Review plays an important role in supporting that growth. We aim to promote high quality criticism and to develop theory and praxis-based analysis of the craft of factual audio and audio storytelling more broadly. We provide a platform for debate among the international community of podcasters, audio documentary producers, broadcast industry professionals and academics.

We are based at the University of Wollongong, Australia but run by an editorial board of makers and academics from around the world, including Indonesia, the US, Australia, Mexico and the UK.

Aims and Scope

AIMS

RadioDoc Review is a unique space that brings together audio documentary makers and storytellers, researchers, teachers and other serious fans of audio from around the world.

By audio documentary we mainly mean radio and podcast documentaries, narrative podcast series, audio features and other examples of the crafted (sometimes called ‘built speech’) factual form. We celebrate the classic radio documentary form that developed in Europe, Australia and North America, but also the diverse and changing forms that factual audio takes around the world. We are keen to explore more output from the Global South and we are always open to featuring new formats and genres of creative, fact-based audio storytelling.

Unlike the film documentary, the audio documentary has not been the subject of consistent and coherent theoretical analysis and teaching. Mainstream journalism tends not to review audio with the depth and rigour it reserves for film and TV. Yet worldwide the quality, quantity and variety of audio documentary has only grown with the advent of podcasting and its producers, audiences and scholars deserve better.

‘Audio documentary’ at RDR can include audio stories, investigations, features, but not conversational studio podcasts, celebrity interviews, live commentary, radio phone-ins or news magazines. We’re not looking for sound art, soundscape or field recordings or oral history recordings, unless they have a narrative frame. We’re not thinking of anything that’s all fiction or dramatized, though documentaries can of course include elements of dramatisation.

So at RadioDoc Review, we aim to:

Showcase the best work from around the world and provide a forum for serious criticism of all aspects of the craft, format, genre, production, reception or content of audio documentary, narrative podcast and associated forms;
Develop critical language and theory for the audio documentary and crafted podcast form;
Chronicle developments within the field of academic study of the audio documentary/narrative podcast form;
Try out new modes of critique and discussion, balancing the rigour of peer-reviewed scholarship with the openness and speed of non-peer reviewed pieces and pioneering audio as a format for scholarship;
Support scholars and makers of audio documentary in developing their careers, including those in the Global South, through advertising opportunities to contribute to the journal with supportive editorial and peer review, to assist on our team, and by reviewing audio work;
Make available for posterity a canon of diverse examples of excellent audio, interviews and articles for teachers, researchers and programme makers of the future.

SCOPE

As you can guess from our journal title, we publish in-depth reviews of audio documentaries, but we also publish book reviews, interviews with producers, comment pieces and peer-reviewed scholarly articles. Items can be written or in audio form, and range from short pieces (maximum 1500 words) to 6500 word articles. You can read more about the scope and criteria of each of these in submission policies.

Submission Checklist

Please check your article conforms to the guidance for authors on the Submission Policies page and proof read it to make sure it's free of spelling errors or missing words, so our Editorial team and peer reviewers can focus on the content of your work;
If you are submitting an article for peer review please ensure you have uploaded an anonymised version of your manuscript: without your name and author details, any reference to eg your project website, university or your own previous publications. You can add them back in to the final version, post-peer review. Please also check the Word document for any identifying hidden metadata (For more on how to do this https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/office/help-protect-your-privacy-252a47ec-1b31-4fd0-8450-e66d6c2de950);
If you want to include any copyright material (eg audio, scripts or images), please check you have secured permissions to publish it here.

Peer Review

Our scholarly essays and articles are double-blind peer reviewed (you and the reviewer do not know each other's identity) by two reviewers. Their peer reviewed status will be displayed when they are published.

You can expect fair and constructive reviewer feedback within three months of submitting your work. If there is a delay, we will let you know. Most of our articles are published within 6-9 months of submission, but it does of course depend on how long you need to complete your revisions and how many rounds of revision are needed to make your article the best it can be before publishing.

Open Space, interviews, book reviews and audio reviews undergo editorial review by two reviewers from our editorial team or the journal's board. This process is not anonymised and is much faster so we can publish your response to recent developments in the field in a timely way.

Licences

RadioDoc Review allows the following licences for submission:

CC BY 4.0
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

RadioDoc Review is an entirely open access journal and charges no publication or article processing fees.

Publication Cycle

RadioDoc Review is published twice a year.

Sections

Section or article type	Public Submissions	Peer Reviewed	Indexed
Open Space
Article
Interview
Review
Open space
Book review