Fountainhead Quarterly

Purpose of the policies
The editorial policies of Fountainhead Quarterly ("the Quarterly") provide a clear organizational code of ethics for use by members of the Quarterly staff and anyone contributing to the publication. These policies are posited on the fundamental idea that freedom of expression is the foundation of a healthy and vigorous society; that this freedom is essential to the effectiveness of educational and other communities; and that this freedom necessarily entails both rights and responsibilities. By strictly following these editorial policies, the Quarterly staff and contributors will avoid situations that would tend to diminish community trust in and reliance on the Quarterly as a fair and balanced source of news and analysis, and as a fit forum for scholarly and creative expression.

Mission of the quarterly
The Quarterly serves as a forum for the scholarly and creative efforts of people who live in the New River watershed of West Virginia. Accordingly, the Quarterly welcomes (in fact, actively solicits) scholarly and creative materials of interest or concern to this readership. The Quarterly staff will prepare and publish these materials in an online quarterly publication readily available to all members of this community. For any particular issue, the Quarterly staff will strive to include a balanced presentation of materials, including at least scholarly writing, creative writing, commentary and analysis, and works from the visual arts. When possible, the Quarterly will also feature the works of performing artists, using such media as audio files and streaming video.

Fairness and good faith doctrine
In keeping with the Quarterly's mission, the publication staff and contributors must recognize that the right to free expression implies the concomitant obligation to practice accuracy, fairness, and balance in content and to show ethical and constructive treatment of individuals and groups in practice. Staff and contributors must also recognize that the free exchange of ideas necessarily entails disagreement among various constituencies of the readership. The Quarterly commits itself to negotiating disagreement with fairness and good faith, especially by offering an open forum for the expression of all reasonable and rational views of an issue. The phrase "reasonable and rational" is meant only to exclude those views that ignore standards of accuracy, fairness, and balance in content, and that lack ethical and constructive treatment of individuals and groups in practice.

Editorial control
The Quarterly editors make all decisions regarding editorial content. The Quarterly will accept any and all submissions, but the editors reserve the explicit right to reject any material deemed editorially inappropriate or offensive to the Quarterly's mission. To ensure high standards of scholarship and writing, the editors also reserve the right to suggest (when needed) minor to extensive editorial revisions during the movement toward publication. The editors will make no unilateral changes to a published document, thus ensuring that contributors remain firmly in control of any submissions published in the Quarterly. The editors do, however, reserve the right to reject submissions when contributors decide to forego editorial revisions that the editors feel are needed to bring submissions into compliance with the Quarterly's mission or with the Quarterly's standards of scholarship and writing.

Guidelines for contributors
Because of the editorial range of the Quarterly's mission, the staff have decided that detailed submission guidelines would be unwieldy and incomplete, given that such guidelines would have to address the widely varying standards of many scholarly fields as well as the presently unreconciled platforms of media types. Thus, to both streamline and simplify submission guidelines, the Quarterly offers this protocol: