S&P: Editors’ Blog

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 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

• Editors: David Beaver (UT Austin) and Kai von Fintel (MIT)
• Open for submissions: September 2007
• First issue: early 2008

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.