Fondo de Cultura Economica (FCE) is Mexico's best-known scholarly and cultural publisher, founded in Mexico City in September 1934 by the economist Daniel Cosio Villegas. It began with a single purpose - putting economics literature into Spanish for students at the Escuela Nacional de Economia - and grew into a Spanish-language publishing institution with a backlist of more than 10,000 volumes, roughly 5,000 titles in print, and branches across Latin America, Spain and the United States.

Two things matter if you are approaching FCE as an author. First, FCE is primarily a book publisher: monographs, translations, collected works, essay collections and reference titles in economics, history, philosophy, literature and the social sciences. Second, its journal program is small and specific - a handful of long-running academic periodicals rather than a large journal portfolio. This guide covers both routes, plus the open-access and cost picture, which is unusually author-friendly compared with commercial STM publishers.

• Books. The backlist exceeds 10,000 volumes, with about 5,000 titles in print and a growing electronic catalogue. Long-running collections cover economics, history, sociology, philosophy, literature, popular science and children's and young-adult books.
• Academic periodicals. A small program - principally El Trimestre Economico (quarterly, since 1934), Dianoia (with UNAM's philosophy institute, since 1955) and La Gaceta del FCE (cultural monthly, since 1954). If you have seen a much larger journal count attributed to FCE, it usually folds in co-editions and titles published by partner institutions such as El Colegio de Mexico.
• Co-editions. FCE co-publishes extensively with Mexican and Latin American universities, research centres and cultural institutions, which is why many well-known Mexican scholarly titles carry an FCE colophon alongside another institution's.
• International branches. Subsidiaries in Argentina (1945), Chile (1954), Peru (1961), Spain (1963), Colombia (1975), the United States (1990), Guatemala (1995) and Ecuador (2015) publish and distribute regionally.

FCE is a non-profit, state-supported publisher under Mexico's federal culture administration, and its journal economics look nothing like a commercial APC model.

Because FCE is subsidised rather than fee-funded, questions about waivers, discounts or transformative agreements generally do not apply: there is no fee to waive on the journal side.

El Trimestre Economico uses double-anonymised peer review with two referees. Manuscripts are screened editorially first for scope and formal requirements, then sent out; the editorial committee makes the final decision on the basis of the referee reports. Dianoia likewise operates a refereed process through its editorial committee. Book manuscripts in the academic collections are assessed by the editorial area and, where appropriate, by external specialist readers - the process is closer to a university-press model than to a journal workflow, and timelines are correspondingly less standardised.

1. Pick the right venue. Journal article, book proposal, or co-edition with your institution - these are three different doors at FCE.
2. For El Trimestre Economico, register on the journal's Open Journal Systems site and submit through it. Read the "Envios" (submissions) page first: it sets out scope, length, abstract and keyword requirements, and formatting.
3. Write in Spanish unless the venue's guidelines say otherwise - FCE's scholarly program is Spanish-language, and translation is handled editorially, not by authors.
4. Format your references in the style the venue specifies; Chicago and APA are the styles most commonly used across FCE's scholarly output. Use a SciSpace format to get the citation style and layout right before you submit.
5. For book proposals, send a synopsis, table of contents, sample chapters, an estimated length and an author CV to the relevant editorial area; contact details are on the FCE website, and the Mexican office and each international branch acquire separately.

FCE's periodicals follow standard scholarly-integrity expectations: originality of submissions, disclosure of conflicts of interest and of funding, anonymised refereeing, and correction or retraction where warranted. FCE does not appear in COPE's or OASPA's membership lists, which is common for non-profit cultural publishers outside the commercial STM system and is not in itself a quality signal either way - the relevant checks are the journal's own editorial policy page and its indexing status.

Copyright terms differ between books and journals, and between FCE's Mexican operation and its international branches. Confirm in writing what rights you are assigning, what you may deposit in a repository, and under what licence the open-access version is released.