About the Journal
Focus and Scope
Eikon is an Open Access journal on Semiotics and Visual Culture edited with a continuous publishing flow, supporting both thematic and general calls for papers. A call for reviewers is permanently open.
Open to a broad range of theoretical and methodological approaches, Eikon welcomes original research articles in the field of semiotics, understood as the systematic study of signifiers, meanings, and its effects. This study can take up many forms and objects: the significance constructions at the individual subject level; the outside world objects; and the inter-subjective relationship with others. In the first case it intersects with logic and theory of knowledge. In the second, taking care of physicalities, sensitive objects, touches both discourse analysis, and image scrutiny, in the various languages that the two comprise: literature, narrative, media text and framing, photography, film, advertising, art, and forms of expression emerging in these and other languages. Semiotics dealing with intersubjectivity is mainly concerned with the pragmatic dimensions of the production of meaning, and in this sense, it crosses paths with rhetoric and discourse ethics, advertising and political communication.
Eikon interprets the growht of globalized Western culture as a gradual transition from a logocentric world - focused on the rational use of the word as it emerged in Greece in centuries VI and V b.C - to an increasingly visual culture builded around image and its use, so well expressed today in the diversity and ubiquity of screens. This passage from a logocentric world to a visual universe represents also a movement from logos towards pathos, speech towards impulse and action. The transition from discourse (symbol) to imagery (icon), tends today to be perceived as a section, a real epistemological cut that would mark the shift between paradigms. Instead, Eikon chooses to emphasize the continuities and dependencies of the coexistence between the two regimes, and the intimate link on which both depend.
Eikon is interested in semiotics and its objects, starting with man’s most basic question about meaning: "What does all this mean?". Id est, it is interested in "how" and "why" things mean; and in "what do certain things mean"; how do they bespeak those who used them to mean something. These issues are terribly old, and sparkingly new: they have been changing and evolving as new and different media are becoming available for man to signify.
All Eikon’s content is freely available without charge to the user or his institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles in this journal without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author.
Eikon, by LabCom, is licensed under a Creative Commons Atribuição 3.0 Unported License. By submitting your work to Eikon you confirm you are the author and own the copyright, that the content is original and previously unpublished, and that you agree to the licensing terms.
Eikon only publishes original content, and authors are responsible for verifying the inexistence of plagiarism, including self-plagiarism and previous publication.
By submitting your work, you also agree on the standards of expected ethical behavior, which follow the COPE's – Committee on Publication Ethics – Best Practice Guidelines, and the International Standard Guidelines for authors.
Peer Review Process
Submissions are screened by editor to ensure minimum academic and professional standards. After this pre-screening, papers are attributed to two rewiewers from different institutional and geographic belongings.
Criteria for recruiting reviewers: Academic or business-related experts from a wide range of areas in the field Semiotics and Visual Culture; One of them being native-speaker of the language of the text in review; Who accept Eikon policy of double-blind peer review and criteria for publication.
Criteria of Reviewing: Double-blind Peer Review process (where both reviewers and authors remain anonymous throughout the review process); Timely Review accordingly to the Reviewer Guidelines, Criteria for Publication, and Review Confidentiality statement.
Open Access Policy
Eikon is an Open Access Online journal curated by LabCom/Universidade da Beira Interior, Portugal. All articles will be permanently published online, and a print version of the journal will be published twice a year.
