Comments for S&P: Editors' Blog

Comment on Harvard adopts OA mandate by Bonnie Lucas

Bonnie Lucas — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 04:03:24 +0000

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Comment on Biolinguistics: A New Open-Access (?) Journal in Linguistics by Kleanthes Grohmann

Kleanthes Grohmann — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 16:00:25 +0000

It is correct that BIOLINGUISTICS is “delayed open access”, just as it is correct that all access is completely FREE. Since BIOLINGUISTICS is the first serious online journal (= full peer-review) in theoretically orientated linguistics (generative grammar, biological underpinnings, and so on), we wanted to have an idea how many readers we could attract.

Since neither of us are experienced or tech-savvy enough in online publishing, the easiest way we chose was a registration process. We will use the next few months to concentrate on the contents and organization of the journal, but we will turn to both the access issue (ideally we’d go fully open access) and the copyright issue (we’d like to implement a Creative Commons license) shortly.

Thanks for your interest.

Comment on Stalking the Perfect Journal by kvf

kvf — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 12:56:55 +0000

That’s a very good point, Martin. Of course, we were going to track that kind of statistics internally, but you’re right: we should publish all relevant dates: submitted, first decision, revision received, accepted, published.

Comment on Stalking the Perfect Journal by Martin Haspelmath

Martin Haspelmath — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 12:13:22 +0000

Pullum’s first desideratum is “Dates of receipt and revision printed along with each article published”, but journals should actually be more ambitious: They should publish the date when the first decision was taken. If the time lag between the receipt date and the revision date is 18 months, one can conclude nothing from this: The journal reviewers/editors could have been very quick, but it took the author very long to do the revisions; or the journal editors/reviewers needed over a year (as has happened to me with a renowned journal), and the author was very quick. To assess a journal’s performance, one crucially needs the “first decision” date.

Comment on Derivatives or No Derivatives? by robert

robert — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 20:00:21 +0000

good points. we (www.livingreviews.org) also went for a no-derivatives cc license. but basically because that was already better than what we had before. we may have to reevaluate as well.

Comment on Publication Agreement by robert

robert — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 19:56:26 +0000

fwiw, that’s what we came up with for one of our journals (www.livingreviews.org): https://dev.livingreviews.org/projects/epubtk/browser/trunk/ePubTk/config/lrsp/config.xml we have the authors “sign” by logging into our system and clicking a button, but it was never really clear, whether that has all the legal binding we would like.

Comment on General update by dib

dib — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 15:41:27 +0000

Thanks Tamina. Good suggestion. Certainly that numbering system would be far more perspicuous than the traditional journal numbering system. We haven’t really decided what the utility of the standard volume system would be, beyond adding a patina of academic authenticity.

David

Comment on General update by Tamina Stephenson

Tamina Stephenson — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 22:13:51 +0000

Just a quick thought about identifying articles in both the online and print versions: you might modify the volume/issue system by simply giving each article a number, presumably in the order published, so that essentially each article is its own issue. Then you could send out print versions that are titled something like “Semantics and Pragmatics 2007, #1-5.” Article numbers could then also be treated as issue numbers in bibliographic styles. You could either start the article numbers over every year or simply let them continue up.

Tamina

Comment on 14 More Steps to a Perfect Journal by kvf

kvf — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 14:03:17 +0000

Yeah, citing articles with multiple “official” versions would be a difficult issue. Doesn’t it seem ante-diluvian, though, to publish separate errata but to leave the erroneous article in place? Postscripts, addenda, and such seem fine as additional bits that could be separate downloads, although it might make sense to consolidate them somehow into the official file (what to do with pagination in such a case though? perhaps some kind of x-1 etc. numbering?). I understand that there are people working on citation issues with multiple versions of journal articles. Anyway, our first step will be to investigate the Open Journal Systems capabilities for addenda etc.

Comment on 14 More Steps to a Perfect Journal by Chris Potts

Chris Potts — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:14:39 +0000

A brief comments about 3. UPDATEABLE ARTICLES: I like the comment idea, and it would be useful to have functionality for uploading addenda, errata, and the like. But I would suggest that there be just one published version of the article itself, warts and all, else citing S&P articles will be complicated. (They would require version numbers, which people would often forget.)