S&P: Editors’ Blog

We just rolled out a major upgrade to the PDFs published in our journal Semantics and Pragmatics. We already had extensive hyper-linking in the articles and in the bibliographies. Now, our PDFs sport rich meta-data that will make it easier for all kinds of services to recognize crucial information about our articles. The meta-data are embedded in the PDF but not visible to the naked eye. You can inspect them by probing into the document properties with Adobe Reader or some other tool. But the main purpose is for automated access by search engines and bibliographic software. If you drag one of our PDFs into a database maintained by Papers, for example, the information about the article will automatically populate the fields in the database, with no need for manual filling in of fields. Similarly, if you use JabRef to maintain a BibTeX database, you can import our PDFs via “Import > XMP-annotated PDF” and have all the BibTeX fields filled in automatically.

Behind the scenes, we are using a customized version of the hyperxmp package to embed XMP meta-data in a number of standardized formats (Dublin Core, PRISM, BibTeXmp).

We are in the forefront of scientific journals in implementing these meta-data standards. To our knowledge only the Nature Publishing Group and Elsevier are also consistently providing rich meta-data in their PDFs. Certainly, none of the other journals in our field have moved to these standards. The upshot for S&P authors is that their work is made even more accessible and useful for readers, in a way that is far ahead of competing journals.

[We thank Uli Sauerland for asking us whether our PDFs could embed bibliographic information in addition to us making BibTeX entry information conveniently available from the online abstracts at the S&P site.]

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.

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.