Cornelius Puschmann, the technical staff behind the LSA’s eLanguage project, has written an overview article about the technical side of the project, and of course it is freely available as an open access publication. Check it out!
In our last post, on the author agreement, the Creative Commons License referred to was the “Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works License”. But maybe that is not the right license to use. Maybe, we should use the “Attribution-Noncommercial License”. The issue is whether the license should prohibit “derivatives”. Does “true open access” mean that readers can freely use an article to create derivative works (with proper attribution to the original author)? Isn’t “fair use”, which is allowable anyway, enough?
The Budapest definition of open access reads as follows:
By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
The Bethesda definition says:
An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:
The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship [Community standards, rather than copyright law, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now], as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).
The Berlin definition says:
Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:
The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving.
So, the Bethesda and Berlin definitions make allowing derivative works part of the definition, while the Budapest definition does not. An article in PLoS Biology forcefully argues that open access should allow derivatives.
What is meant by “derivatives”? Perhaps, the most important kind of derivative at this time are translations. Wouldn’t an author who wants her work read by as many colleagues as possible welcome a translation into French (for example)? And wouldn’t it be better if that could happen without an additional permission process? Beyond translation, the PLoS Biology article just referenced argues that going forward, we don’t know what kind innovative uses could arise and that we don’t want to limit innovation.
We strongly invite discussion of this issue. We were hoping for guidance from an LSA working group on scholarly copyright but we don’t know when that might actually happen. So, we would appreciate it if potential S&P contributors and readers helped us figure this out.
When authors submit a manuscript to Semantics & Pragmatics, which they will very soon be able to do, they will have to agree to our Publication Agreement. In essence:
Below the cut is a draft of what the submission process will say about this. In the preparation of this agreement, we found two documents especially helpful: a model Science Commons publication agreement and the agreement used by The Australasian Journal of Logic. We re-used quite a bit of the language from those documents. We might get some further directions from an LSA working group on scholarly copyright, but we don’t know whether that will come in time for our first publication agreements. We’re pretty happy with what we have, but certainly would welcome any feedback prospective authors might have.
We are proud to announce the formation of the Advisory Board for Semantics & Pragmatics. It is important to us that we get the best advice possible as we get S&P underway. So, we asked some of the most foremost scientists in our field, among them the editors (or past editors) of the premier journals, to join our Advisory Board. We asked them to commit to providing us with solicited and unsolicited advice on all kinds of issues connected to running a high-quality journal, especially a pioneering one like ours. The response was overwhelming. Here is the line-up of the Advisory Board:
We look forward to much advice and support from these eminent colleagues. Thank you all!
PS. We may add a few more members to the Advisory Board in the near future. The intended size of the Advisory Board is between 12 and 15 scientists.
Along the same lines as the last post on stalking the perfect journal — and still awaiting your suggestions of features that the perfect journal should have —, I’ll consider the points made by Chris Leonard who wrote a blog post called “14 Steps to the Perfect CS Journal”, when he was publishing editor within Elsevier with responsibility for theoretical computer science journals. The original post is not on the net anymore, but there is a mirrored copy here. Here are the 14 points:
1. FREE ACCESS — at least at the point of use. Subscribers access the journal for 1 year, then all articles are available to everyone who wants them?
We’ll have free, open access to everyone as soon as an article is published.
2. DIGITAL PRESERVATION — the profileration of electronic journals is all well and good, but they need to be available in 100 years time. This could be done by independent 3rd parties.
Agreed. We have that covered, as documented earlier.
3. UPDATEABLE ARTICLES — following the example of versions on arXiv, authors should be able to update their articles whenever new date or results are available. Old versions remain available as well.
Interesting. We will consider how to implement that. At a minimum, we would like to be able to have a comment system associated with each article where the author(s) can make post-publication comments.
4. BETTER PEER REVIEW — open, on-going peer review. Anyone can comment on an article and suggest improvements or point out inaccuracies. Maybe also worth adopting something like F1000 or this reviewer rating system.
As we said, we won’t experiment just yet with peer review, but this will go on our to-consider list.
5. SOME PROFIT — a commercial company needs to make a profit to survive. What would be an acceptable level of profit to make (after tax)? Any excess could go to reducing the costs of the journal subscriptions.
We won’t be looking to make a profit. So, this does not apply.
6. INTERACTIVE ARTICLES — apart from readers being able to leave comments on an article, it would be nice to see some real functionality in CS articles. Maybe raw data for manipulation within Mathematica or Maple?
Unclear how this may apply to articles in semantics and pragmatics.
7. RAW DATA — all articles to have raw data available on the web in an open, interchangeable format.
Where applicable, this would be good to implement. Psycholinguistic articles for example might be accompanied not just by a sample of the data used but by the full data set.
8. INSTANT PUBLISHING — if we adopt a model whereby people can comment on articles when they are published, peer-review becomes an constant, ongoing process. Authors may choose to make sure the paper is refereed before submission. When the editor evaluates a submission, he or she is simply making sure it makes sense and is in the right journal — a 10 minute process, eliminating the need for lengthy review processes.
We will certainly do instant publishing, but not before an article has been peer-reviewed privately and before it has been copy-edited and type-set. As we will discuss in a later post, we certainly want to co-exist with the repositories in our discipline (Semantics Archive, LingBuzz), so we will at least encourage authors to put their submitted manuscript into the repositories. (Note that this is somewhat incompatible with allowing authors the option of submitting anonymous manuscripts. Clearly something to think about.)
9. OPTIONAL PRINT — electronic journals with an optional print version available for a small fee.
Yes, that’s part of our plan.
10. RSS FEEDS — all journals to have RSS feeds for Table of Contents.
Absolutely. This is part of the functionality provided by the Open Journal Systems software we’re using.
11. SOCIAL SOFTWARE — allow users to tag articles to create a folksonomy (good for discovering articles from other journals you wouldn’t normal consult). Adopt things like ‘interestingness’ but for journal articles.
This goes on the to-consider list. We haven’t figured out what kind of interactivity there will be for readers.
12. SEARCH ENGINES — abstract or full-text indexed in all search engines.
Yes, the full text of our articles will be indexed.
13. ADVISORY BOARD — alongside an editorial board, an advisory board of scientists and librarians to suggest and comment on new directions for publishing the journal.
That is indeed part of our structure. Stay tuned for the announcement of the line-up of our Advisory Board later this week.
14. CUSTOMER SERVICE — available via email, but also Skype, instant messaging etc. A regular weblog from this source would also help keep interested parties updated on what is happening behind the scences.
This editors blog is obviously the beginning of such a service to our community. And we are available via email (editors AT semprag DOT org). What else should we consider?
For professional linguists, Geoff Pullum’s “Topic … Comment” essays in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory were always a highlight. They are collected in the great volume called “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language” — highly recommended. Particularly relevant for us here, are three essays on the design and conduct of academic journals: “Stalking the perfect journal”, “Seven deadly sins in journal publishing”, and “Punctuation and human freedom”. The third one is relevant for the style guide for S&P and we’ll get to that soon. The other two advocate certain important features that the perfect journal should have. Let’s go through them one by one.
1. Dates of receipt and revision printed along with each article published.
We will do that.
2. Month of publication printed in each issue.
Since we will publish each article as soon as it is ready, we will publish the exact date of publication on the first page of the article as part of an entire block of crucial bibliographic meta-data.
3. Author’s full mailing address published with every article.
We will do that. (A question arises: should we update this information if an author moves?)
4. Contents list on cover.
In its electronic form, S&P has no cover, so this doesn’t quite apply. Nevertheless, we will advertise the full contents in many ways to provide as much convenient information about what we are publishing as possible.
5. Page numbers on spine of each issue.
Again, this doesn’t apply to the electronic form of S&P. But we’ll see what can be done with the print-on-demand version.
6. First/last page numbers printed on first page of each article.
We will do that, again as part of the comprehensive block of crucial bibliographic meta-data on the first page of each article.
7. Footnotes on the page.
Ah yes, of course. There’s no excuse for journals that still do not do this. Even the Journal of Semantics, which was a hold out for some years, now has footnotes rather than endnotes.
8. Announcements of articles to appear in forthcoming issues.
Since we publish articles as soon as they are ready, there is no time lag during which we would have to maintain such a list. But perhaps, we can list forthcoming articles as soon as we have received the final revised manuscript and while we do final copy-editing and type-setting?
9. Style sheet printed in each issue.
Again, this doesn’t apply to the electronic form of S&P. But we will print our editorial info including the style sheet in each print-on-demand copy (annual volumes and — if we have them — individual issues).
10. Squibs, notes, discussion.
Pullum would like to see journals publishing “short notes or squibs, presenting briefly statable observations or critical comments […] Such a forum is a very important one when a field is faced with an explosively growing literature”. We have already asked for advice on this question and will consider it for S&P. Perhaps, to some extent blogs could take over this function.
11. Blind refereeing.
We will give authors the option of submitting anonymous manuscripts. But it has to be acknowledged that it is hard to maintain anonymity in a small field and in the context of the internet, as discussed elsewhere (here, here, and here).
12. Heterogeneity of editorial influence.
We will have a very extensive Editorial Board, which will hopefully ensure that the journal can truly reflect the diversity of the field.
13. Publication of names of accepting referees.
This is a somewhat radical proposal, which we will not (yet?) adopt. As stated elsewhere, we plan to consider experimentation with the traditional peer review mechanisms at some future point, but not in the crucial start-up phase where we need to establish S&P as a reputable venue for high-quality research.
OK. I hope it’s clear that we have all the intentions to make S&P the perfect journal. Perhaps, you’ll help us by telling us about features that you would like to see.
Should S&P solicit and publish squibs in semantics and pragmatics? Apart from LI, which occasionally has a semantic squib, and Snippets, which of course feasts on squibs, there does not seem to be a venue for very short articles in our field. So, should we offer such an outlet?
Some considerations:
Comments, considerations, votes? Please advise us.
Glenn Ellison, from the MIT economics department, has a paper documenting and discussing the fact that “over the past decade there has been a decline in the fraction of papers in top economics journals written by economists from the highest-ranked economics departments”. Glenn argues that this trend is due to fact that “the necessity of going through the peer-review process has lessened for high status authors: in the old days peer-reviewed journals were by far the most effective means of reaching readers, whereas with the growth of the Internet high-status authors can now post papers online and exploit their reputation to attract readers.” He elaborates:
Journals serve two roles: they disseminate papers and provide quality certification. The Internet aids dissemination in many ways: papers are posted to authors’ websites and working paper archives; e-mail is used to inform potential readers about papers; Internet search tools help readers find papers; journals have been made more accessible; and so on. Many of these are substitutes for traditional journal dissemination, so the primary role of journals may increasingly be to provide quality certification. A shift in the role of journals could lead authors from top schools to withdraw from publishing in many journals for two reasons. First, highly-regarded and highly-visible authors will be able to make their work widely known (and widely read) without publishing it in journals. Such authors receive diminished dissemination benefits from journal publication. Second, highly-regarded authors may traditionally have been publishing in journals mostly for the dissemination benefits.
I believe that these observation are not just relevant to economics but may apply to our field as well. Established researchers have diminished incentive to publish in peer-reviewed journals, since their output will be noticed and cited wherever it appears. Of course, they have always had the venue of invited contributions to edited volumes (which are all too often only open to well-established or at least well-connected researchers). But with the internet and repositories like the Semantics Archive and LingBuzz, it has become even easier to make new research widely available. And if you’re a big cheese, everyone will read your new article on the archive.
Alan Prince, in a comment on phonoloblog discussing the announcement of our journal, wrote:
“Question. What is the marginal utility of ‘rigorous peer-review’? Specifically, is the difference in quality between article and a serious draft generally large enough to be worth the investment of time, energy, and stress on the part of all concerned? The alternative to a journal is simply an open archive, with matters of quality & improvement left up to the twin pressures of self-respect and the marketplace of ideas. How well does this work in comparison with the reviewing system now in place? This sounds like the kind of thing that social scientists would study (rigorously) — but, rigor aside, it might be interesting to gather some opinions.
Comment. In promotion cases, the publication list is a proxy for impact on the field (itself a proxy for value). With wholesale electronification and effective search engines, impact can be more directly assessed via citation indexing. It strikes me as possible that official use of the humanist hallmark of ‘publication by a major press’ [or other reputable entity] will dwindle as this becomes apparent.”
So, what is the role of peer-review nowadays? Why are we starting a new peer-reviewed journal?
The importance of peer-review is often used by traditional publishers as an argument that open-access journals are a threat to the time-tested system of science. But that is a spurious argument. The role of traditional publishing houses in peer-review is (almost) entirely clerical — a role that is now made obsolete by modern journal management software. All the real work (reviewing, editing, revising, etc.) has always been done by scientists themselves. We’re just taking the last logical step.
The only factor that is seriously impacted in an interesting way by the advent of journals such as ours is that there is no technical limit on the number of articles that can be published (L&P, JoS, NLS all have a limited number of pages they can fill per year). We believe, however, that there will still be a significant limit on what gets published in journals such as ours: the quality of the submitted articles. Just because we can publish a practically unlimited number of pages doesn’t mean that we should and will. The success of our journal will depend on the high quality of what we publish and we will not compromise in that regard.
Two final remarks:
PS. In the aftermath of Glenn’s paper, the topic has been discussed in a number of places:
We have been asked by several people whether S&P will be “just an electronic journal”. The question has two answers: “No” and “No”.
So, S&P will be a traditional high-quality peer-reviewed journal with printed issues available, but with crucial advantages opened up by modern technologies.
With our affiliation with eLanguage and its German IT infrastructure, the answer to the question of long-term preservation of the journal content has evolved. Here’s the info we have on that (from Jochen Schirrwagen, who is in charge of data management practices for eLanguage):
eLanguage is linked to the Digital Peer Publishing Platform (DiPP), which is operated by the Library Services Center (Hochschulbibliothekszentrum — HBZ) in Cologne.
The HBZ is taking several steps to assure the long-term preservation of e-journal content.
Fedora meets fundamental requirements as a long-term preservation application, like versioning, checksum validation and audit trails of digital objects. Its flexible object model allows the storage of complex digital objects with any metadata format. Fedora is not only useful for archiving but offers a full service framework for digital objects. There are several working groups on Fedora, such as Preservation Services by Ron Jantz from Rutgers University.
S&P: Editors' Blog 