While we are busily working behind the scenes to get the journal open for submissions in the fall, we have put a temporary home page up at the future home of the journal: http://semprag.org. Not much to see there but we wanted to have a landing place for people interested in the journal. (Thanks to Barbara Partee, member of our soon-to-be-announced Advisory Board, for the advice to provide such a page.)
We are working on the style guidelines for Semantics and Pragmatics. Some help comes from the fact that there is now a Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics Journals — downloadable as a pdf file from LINGUIST List. The pdf version is marred by some change-tracking, so hopefully a cleaner version will be available soon.
Note that the style sheet really only concerns the formatting of reference lists at the end of article. Other formatting remains non-unified and each journal has their own house-style.
We will probably adopt the unified style sheet lock, stock, and barrel, except for one egregious mistake:
12. Names with “von”, “van”, “de”, etc. If the “van” (or the “de” or other patronymic) is lower case and separated from the rest by a space (e.g. Elly van Gelderen), then alphabetize by the first upper-case element:
Gelderen, Elly van
The addition of “see …” in comprehensive indices and lists might be helpful for clarification:
van Gelderen, Elly (see Gelderen)
There is really no excuse for mangling the names of the von/van clan. My own thoughts on this have been available for quite a while.
We will of course list Elly under “G” in the alphabet but with “van Gelderen, Elly” as her full name, since “van Gelderen” is her last name. If any member of the clan has divergent special wishes as to the treatment of his/her name, we should be able to accommodate that. Questions 7 through 12 in the BibTeX Tips and FAQ document give some very useful advice for some peculiar requirements.
The MIT Libraries News blog has an item about our journal, mentioning among other things that we will receive a modest amount of start-up funding from the MIT Libraries, who told us that they “look forward to this innovative addition to the peer reviewed literature in the field of semantics”.
Our announcement has had a bit of resonance:
It’s a great idea, and I think we can and should do something similar for phonology and phonetics for all the same reasons that David and Kai are doing this for semantics and pragmatics.
In the comments to his entry, there are interesting skeptical remarks by John McCarthy and Alan Prince, which we will respond to on this blog soon.
The journal will be open access and online, and it is well and truly worth supporting. I was thinking of developing a policy of submitting all non-solicited papers (if I ever write such a thing again) to Philosophers’ Imprint, out of general support for open access principles. But perhaps the right policy is a more general support for open access.
Here are some of the topics (in no particular order) we will be discussing on this blog in the near future, as our project progresses:
Here’s a request: please use the comments to this entry to add other topics you would like us to discuss.
In the comments to our SALT Announcement post, Paul Portner asks:
Do you have any ideas about how to make sure that published articles remain permanently available? (By “permanently”, I guess I mean however long today’s print journals are expected to last.) One advantage of the print model is that we can usually track down articles written long ago. Suppose the journal closes after — what, 5, 10, 25 years. Do you have any thoughts on how to make sure that the students in those times (especially those who may not be connected by personal relationships to somebody who downloaded it) can find the material?
We have been talking to the librarians at MIT and UT about many issues raised by a primarily electronic distribution format, and long-term preservation is one of the most important. As one might have expected, librarians have been thinking long and hard about issues of long-term preservation of electronic content for quite a while. So, following their recommendations, our plan is to not just have our content available on the server that hosts the journal (which may or may not be hosted by one of our libraries) but also deposit all articles to a repository which is specifically dedicated to long-term preservation. This may be DSpace or Portico, both of which librarians consider as “safe” for the long-term.
In the business meeting at this weekend’s SALT conference, we announced the launch of our journal with a short slideshow. There were many encouraging comments and interesting questions. We’ll continue the conversation on this blog as the launch progresses.
Semantics & Pragmatics
A New, Peer-Reviewed Open Access Journal in Linguistics
In this editors’ blog, we will track our progress while we are working on the launch of our new journal. We hope to get advice and comments from our colleagues and other interested people.
S&P: Editors' Blog 