S&P: Editors’ Blog

Our journal now has an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), assigned by the Library of Congress (by their National Serials Data Program):

ISSN: 1937-8912

At the same time, we are now members of CrossRef and have been assigned a DOI (digital object identifier) prefix:

doi: 10.3765

The articles in our inaugural issue will now permanently be available via doi:10.3765/sp.0.1 and doi:10.3765/sp.0.2. If on the back-end the articles are moved around, these permanent identifiers will be unchanged and simply point to the new location of the articles. So, everyone should link to these articles (and all others that have a DOI, which is increasingly every scientific article published nowadays) via their DOI.

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.