We have been asked by several people whether S&P will be “just an electronic journal”. The question has two answers: “No” and “No”.

1. While we have not made any final decision on this, we plan to offer printed versions of the journal — either just an annual volume, or also quarterly issues and even single article offprints. This will be done via a print-on-demand service such as Lulu — although we are not committed to a particular vendor yet. We might even offer subscriptions to these print versions. We anticipate that we will price these print versions at a (slight?) premium as an additional revenue source to support typesetting and copy-editing services.
2. The primary identity of S&P is not that of an electronic journal. Our fundamental aim is to publish a high-quality, peer-reviewed journal on a par with the established journals. The electronic platform is secondary but gives us two very significant advantages:
3. fast turn-around from submission to publication, facilitated by the all-electronic journal management software plus the fact that publication will be online-first and each article will be published as soon as it is ready (without waiting for an “issue” to be complete);
4. open, immediate, and free access to anyone with an internet connection.

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):

Strategy for the long-term preservation of eLanguage content

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.

1. All articles are (minimally) described via Qualified Dublin Core Metadata and are additionally assigned a persistent identifier (URN, DOI) to make the resources citeable and unique.
2. Open Journal Systems (OJS), which is used by eLanguage, can act as an OAI data provider, as it includes an OAI-PMH interface. DiPP will harvest the meta data together with the full article content and ingest them in a Fedora repository.
3. Following procedures for the persistent storage of scholarly content in Germany content from digital sources such as e-journals is further preserved with the German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek).

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.

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.

My first post to our editors’ blog, and Kai’s letting me start with a bang: I’m very happy to announce that Semantics and Pragmatics has now been officially accepted as an affiliated journal of the Linguistic Society of America as part of their eLanguage initiative.

Kai and I are really delighted about what we hope will be a mutually beneficial relationship with the LSA. They will be hosting the journal for us, and providing technical support, meaning that Kai and I can concentrate on getting top quality content into the journal. For the LSA this provides a way of actively supporting and disseminating leading-edge research specific to the fields of Semantics and Pragmatics, something that, because of its generalist nature, has not been possible in the journal Language. We hope that as a result the LSA will come to play a much more central role in our field than has been the case in recent years. (Why do I suggest that the LSA doesn’t currently play a central role in our field? More on that in a later blog.)

We were in discussion with the LSA for several weeks, and I’d like to publicly thank Dieter Stein (eLanguage editor in chief), Stephen Anderson (LSA president), and Gregory Ward (LSA Secretary-Treasurer, and our Pragmaticist mole in the LSA, but don’t let on that he’s on our side) for their enthusiasm and efforts on our behalf.

The LSA executive initially planned a restriction that eLanguage journal authors would have to be LSA members, as is the case for Language authors. But, and Kai and I think this is great, they’ve now decided to impose no such restriction. So Semantics and Pragmatics will truly be free: it will not only be free to read, but also free to write for. And, or course, we also plan to accept free advice from reviewers, advisory board members, and, well, anyone who wants to contact us.

How can you show your support for the LSA’s decision to accept our journal and make it truly free to anyone with an interest in our field? Suppose e.g. that you are a semanticist or pragmaticist who is not a member of the LSA but who wants to signal your support for an initiative which will impose no pressure at all on you to join the LSA. In that case, there’s no stronger way to communicate your opinion than by the ultra-Gricean move of joining the LSA. Please tell them we sent you!

Cheers,

David

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:

• Eric Bakovic at phonoloblog declares “We Need to Do This, Too”:

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.

• Brian Weatherson links to our announcement and says:

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.

• Peter Suber at Open Access News — a very useful service, by the way — had a brief report on our announcement.

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:

• More on why open access is good for the field
• Role Models (successful open access journals in other disciplines)
• Innovation vs. Conservatism (how experimental should the journal be?)
• Funding
• How to ensure that the journal will be taken seriously (for tenure & promotion, especially)
• Editorial board expectations
• Graduate students as peer reviewers
• Style guidelines
• The author agreement (no copyright transfer, what kind of license does S&P get?)
• Depositing submissions to semanticsarchive: recommended, required?
• What if S&P is so successful that it monopolizes the field?

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.