About the Journal

Handwriting went through alternate events during the centuries. Created for commercial purposes, over time it was perfected, widely used, abandoned, and revived, following patterns dictated by the regard accorded to it by society.
Today, handwriting is not going through one of its finest hours. As it has been replaced in almost every context with more rapid and effective digital writing, its prestige is declining even in those areas where it should reign supreme: the school. Given a lack of a specific reference in the national guidelines provided by the Ministry of Education, and of ad hoc training for the teaching of handwriting – especially for primary schools – teachers have no option but to choose themselves, autonomously most of the time, what approach to take and how to teach their very young pupils to write. The consequences of this ‘freedom of action’ are quite visible on the recipients: dysfunctional hand grip, poor posture, unreadable scripts, and faulty learning which, in some cases, might evolve into fairly extreme forms of dysgraphia.
 This vexatious situation is urgently felt by all the researchers and professionals who deal with writing in various ways: pedagogists, psychologists, as well as teachers, educators of handwritten gesture, graphologists... All of them agree about the need to salvage handwriting, a basic ability whose complete and correct acquisition, from both the graphomotor and technical viewpoints, is a prerequisite for the development of complex cognitive abilities.
 It is in this very context – here briefly described – that Graphos. Rivista internazionale di Pedagogia e didattica della scrittura has come into being. The two founders, Cinzia Angelini and Roberto Travaglini – both university professors in pedagogy – have been sharing their interests, studies, and research on handwriting over the years. As a further stage of their fruitful cooperation, Graphos is intended to be a meeting point for all those who wish to share their research findings in the pedagogic and educational fields with the international scientific community. These results must be primarily focused upon the learning processes and the development of writing abilities, involving recipients of various ages, as well as every sort of writing tools and surfaces.
The Scientific Committee, made up of professors and researchers from Italian and foreign universities, will guarantee the scientific quality of the published articles, besides ensuring the international character of the journal. On a half-yearly basis, Graphos will invite interested parties to submit papers in Italian or in English, preferably about studies on handwriting, while allowing possible contributions on any theme, to be framed in the large field of educational sciences.
All contributions will undergo a double-blind referee procedure and will be published only after a meticulous review.

Editorial process

For the editorial production process, Graphos relies on three different bodies: the editors, the editorial board, and the scientific committee. The editors are responsible for the entire editorial process, the transparency of the publication methods, and the composition of the issue summaries. As stated in the Ethics Statement, the editors ensure that all actors involved in the review and production process fulfill their obligations. The editors are responsible for the initial evaluation of submissions, which are judged on the basis of the completeness of the material provided, scientific integrity, and compatibility with the journal's scientific objectives. Only the editors can decide whether to initiate the review process, to skip it (in very rare cases, due to an author's exceptional prestige), or to reject the proposal ex officio. The direction liaises with the editorial board to ensure a transparent peer review process, linguistic appropriateness of submissions, and adherence to the journal's editorial standards. Members of the editorial board may not be involved in the peer review process as reviewers, except in rare cases where such members are considered to be the leading experts on a particular topic. In such cases, which the editors and the editorial board undertake to limit, the other members of the editorial board will manage communication with the author(s) while protecting their identity and that of the reviewer(s); if the proposal is published, any coincidence will be declared on the first page of the paginated article. The sole function of the scientific committee is to guarantee the scientific prestige of the journal. Its members are never involved in the editorial process of the issues. If they are asked to act as anonymous reviewers, the editorial board will exercise its function as in other cases. 

Publishing schedule

Graphos is issued twice per year, in May and in October/November. In order to be published in the issue of May, a paper must be sent for evaluation within the previous November 30th. To be published in the second issue of the year, the deadline is May 30th.

Submissions arriving after the deadlines might still be published in the following issue, on account of the time required for evaluation (6 weeks), revision (4-6 weeks), and production.

Open Access Policy

This is an open-access journal which means that all content is freely available without charge to the user or his/her institution. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. 

This journal does not charge Article Processing Charges (APCs) and Article Submission Charges (ASCs).

The content is published under the CC BY 4.0 license (Creative commons 4.0, by) as presented at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Graphos has been an open access journal since its first issue (2022).

ISSN 2785-6690