S&P: Editors’ Blog

In an 11 minute interview, Kai explains the S&P project. Take a listen!

In the first two weeks after our grand opening we have already received three submissions, which are now under review (in fact, two reviewers have already reported back — with what is quite astonishing speed). We have also fielded some inquiries about possible submissions that we judged to be somewhat outside the scope of our journal.

As the year’s end is coming and many academics are free of teaching for a few weeks and thus get some time to work on putting the finishing touches on their newest research articles, we hope that you are all seriously considering S&P as your venue for publication. You will get prompt attention from first-class peer reviewers, and if your paper is accepted, it will quickly be copy-edited and typeset to our exacting standards, and then it will immediately be available to everyone in the field anywhere in the world without any cost (to anyone other than our institutional supporters, the LSA, MIT, and the University of Texas).

Semantics and Pragmatics is now open for business and accepting submissions. Please go check out the site: semprag.org. As you’ll see, Kai and I have put together a small pilot issue, with an editorial summarizing some of our policies and goals, and a paper with instructions on our house style.  

We had to deal with quite a few technical and practical details over the last few months, including some unexpected glitches. But we’ve made it, at last. And we couldn’t have done so without extensive help from Chris Potts and Ken Shan (our Technical Editors), Leslie Hastings of Kodiak Web Design (who put together the website style sheets), Cornelius Puschmann (the eLanguage technical support guru) and Dieter Stein (head of the eLanguage initiative), plus further administrative assistance from UT graduate student Emilie Destruel. Thanks to all of them!  

So, now Kai and I sit back and wait to see what comes in through the door. To paraphrase Tim Curry, we are shivering with antici………..pation.

Cornelius Puschmann, the technical staff behind the LSA’s eLanguage project, has written an overview article about the technical side of the project, and of course it is freely available as an open access publication. Check it out!

In our last post, on the author agreement, the Creative Commons License referred to was the “Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works License”. But maybe that is not the right license to use. Maybe, we should use the “Attribution-Noncommercial License”. The issue is whether the license should prohibit “derivatives”. Does “true open access” mean that readers can freely use an article to create derivative works (with proper attribution to the original author)? Isn’t “fair use”, which is allowable anyway, enough?

The Budapest definition of open access reads as follows:

By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

The Bethesda definition says:

An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:

1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship [Community standards, rather than copyright law, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now], as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).

The Berlin definition says:

Open access contributions must satisfy two conditions:

1. The author(s) and right holder(s) of such contributions grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship (community standards, will continue to provide the mechanism for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published work, as they do now), as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in an appropriate standard electronic format is deposited (and thus published) in at least one online repository using suitable technical standards (such as the Open Archive definitions) that is supported and maintained by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, inter operability, and long-term archiving.

So, the Bethesda and Berlin definitions make allowing derivative works part of the definition, while the Budapest definition does not. An article in PLoS Biology forcefully argues that open access should allow derivatives.

What is meant by “derivatives”? Perhaps, the most important kind of derivative at this time are translations. Wouldn’t an author who wants her work read by as many colleagues as possible welcome a translation into French (for example)? And wouldn’t it be better if that could happen without an additional permission process? Beyond translation, the PLoS Biology article just referenced argues that going forward, we don’t know what kind innovative uses could arise and that we don’t want to limit innovation.

We strongly invite discussion of this issue. We were hoping for guidance from an LSA working group on scholarly copyright but we don’t know when that might actually happen. So, we would appreciate it if potential S&P contributors and readers helped us figure this out.

When authors submit a manuscript to Semantics & Pragmatics, which they will very soon be able to do, they will have to agree to our Publication Agreement. In essence:

• they’ll declare that the article is their original work,
• they’ll allow us to publish the article under a Creative Commons license, which will allow users to freely share the article but won’t allow them to change the article, derive commercial benefit from it, or distribute it without attribution,
• they’ll retain full copyright on the article,
• they’ll agree to credit S&P for first publication if they republish the article elsewhere (in a collection of their work, for example).

Below the cut is a draft of what the submission process will say about this. In the preparation of this agreement, we found two documents especially helpful: a model Science Commons publication agreement and the agreement used by The Australasian Journal of Logic. We re-used quite a bit of the language from those documents. We might get some further directions from an LSA working group on scholarly copyright, but we don’t know whether that will come in time for our first publication agreements. We’re pretty happy with what we have, but certainly would welcome any feedback prospective authors might have.

Read the rest of this entry »

With a lot of help, we are slowly putting together the smoothly functioning journal machine that will (we hope) be Semantics and Pragmatics.

-Advisory Board: we may add one or two people, but as Kai blogged here, it’s in great shape. Several advisory board members have already been offering us some things to think about.

-Editorial Board: these are the second most important people to the success of the journal (after the authors). And we already have a spectacular Editorial Board line up. So far 82 fabulous semanticists, pragmaticists, philosophers, psychologists and computer scientists have completed the sign up process, running the gamut from Abbot to Zimmerman. The breadth and strength of our Editorial Board will mean that we send each reviewer an article only infrequently, and that we can target articles to our own expert board members for review without seeking outside help.

-Journal website: we have a professional designer, Leslie Hastings, doing some great work for us. She’s developing style sheets which turn the very functional Open Journal Systems web pages into something more distinctive and visually appealing. In the color scheme of Leslie’s current (top secret) incarnation of the web site, subtle hints of MIT and UT coloring buzz through a sharp white foam of content on a creamy beige background. I call this style “latte”. But who knows – it may be Mocha, Halloween or Juicy Fruit by the time you see it. The site should go live in a matter of weeks.

-Journal style and latex class files: Chris Potts and Ken Shan of our Technical Board are close to a release of the new class files. We aim to beta release them within a couple of weeks to allow some user testing. While we’re still finalizing various font and spacing issues, we’re confident that S&P articles will look very professional, and be comfortably readable both on-screen and in print. More news on this to follow soon.

-Journal policy: while Kai and I have discussed, and taken advice, on just about every aspect of the journal, many crucial details are still hanging over us, for example the exact wording of journal policy documents and copyright policy (which will resemble the Creative Commons license).

So the big question is: when will we be open for submissions? Everything’s going smoothly, but we’re not there yet. Could it be that we’ll accept our first paper before Thanksgiving? Watch this space!

We are proud to announce the formation of the Advisory Board for Semantics & Pragmatics. It is important to us that we get the best advice possible as we get S&P underway. So, we asked some of the most foremost scientists in our field, among them the editors (or past editors) of the premier journals, to join our Advisory Board. We asked them to commit to providing us with solicited and unsolicited advice on all kinds of issues connected to running a high-quality journal, especially a pioneering one like ours. The response was overwhelming. Here is the line-up of the Advisory Board:

• Greg Carlson (former editor of Linguistics & Philosophy)
• Gennaro Chierchia
• Bart Geurts (editor of Journal of Semantics)
• Irene Heim (editor of Natural Language Semantics)
• Larry Horn
• Polly Jacobson (editor of Linguistics & Philosophy)
• Hans Kamp
• Angelika Kratzer (editor of Natural Language Semantics)
• Manfred Krifka (editor of Theoretical Linguistics, former editor
  of Linguistics & Philosophy)
• Barbara Partee
• Robert Stalnaker

We look forward to much advice and support from these eminent colleagues. Thank you all!

PS. We may add a few more members to the Advisory Board in the near future. The intended size of the Advisory Board is between 12 and 15 scientists.

Along the same lines as the last post on stalking the perfect journal — and still awaiting your suggestions of features that the perfect journal should have –, I’ll consider the points made by Chris Leonard who wrote a blog post called “14 Steps to the Perfect CS Journal”, when he was publishing editor within Elsevier with responsibility for theoretical computer science journals. The original post is not on the net anymore, but there is a mirrored copy here. Here are the 14 points:

1. FREE ACCESS — at least at the point of use. Subscribers access the journal for 1 year, then all articles are available to everyone who wants them?

We’ll have free, open access to everyone as soon as an article is published.

2. DIGITAL PRESERVATION — the profileration of electronic journals is all well and good, but they need to be available in 100 years time. This could be done by independent 3rd parties.

Agreed. We have that covered, as documented earlier.

3. UPDATEABLE ARTICLES — following the example of versions on arXiv, authors should be able to update their articles whenever new date or results are available. Old versions remain available as well.

Interesting. We will consider how to implement that. At a minimum, we would like to be able to have a comment system associated with each article where the author(s) can make post-publication comments.

4. BETTER PEER REVIEW — open, on-going peer review. Anyone can comment on an article and suggest improvements or point out inaccuracies. Maybe also worth adopting something like F1000 or this reviewer rating system.

As we said, we won’t experiment just yet with peer review, but this will go on our to-consider list.

5. SOME PROFIT — a commercial company needs to make a profit to survive. What would be an acceptable level of profit to make (after tax)? Any excess could go to reducing the costs of the journal subscriptions.

We won’t be looking to make a profit. So, this does not apply.

6. INTERACTIVE ARTICLES — apart from readers being able to leave comments on an article, it would be nice to see some real functionality in CS articles. Maybe raw data for manipulation within Mathematica or Maple?

Unclear how this may apply to articles in semantics and pragmatics.

7. RAW DATA — all articles to have raw data available on the web in an open, interchangeable format.

Where applicable, this would be good to implement. Psycholinguistic articles for example might be accompanied not just by a sample of the data used but by the full data set.

8. INSTANT PUBLISHING — if we adopt a model whereby people can comment on articles when they are published, peer-review becomes an constant, ongoing process. Authors may choose to make sure the paper is refereed before submission. When the editor evaluates a submission, he or she is simply making sure it makes sense and is in the right journal — a 10 minute process, eliminating the need for lengthy review processes.

We will certainly do instant publishing, but not before an article has been peer-reviewed privately and before it has been copy-edited and type-set. As we will discuss in a later post, we certainly want to co-exist with the repositories in our discipline (Semantics Archive, LingBuzz), so we will at least encourage authors to put their submitted manuscript into the repositories. (Note that this is somewhat incompatible with allowing authors the option of submitting anonymous manuscripts. Clearly something to think about.)

9. OPTIONAL PRINT — electronic journals with an optional print version available for a small fee.

Yes, that’s part of our plan.

10. RSS FEEDS — all journals to have RSS feeds for Table of Contents.

Absolutely. This is part of the functionality provided by the Open Journal Systems software we’re using.

11. SOCIAL SOFTWARE — allow users to tag articles to create a folksonomy (good for discovering articles from other journals you wouldn’t normal consult). Adopt things like ‘interestingness’ but for journal articles.

This goes on the to-consider list. We haven’t figured out what kind of interactivity there will be for readers.

12. SEARCH ENGINES — abstract or full-text indexed in all search engines.

Yes, the full text of our articles will be indexed.

13. ADVISORY BOARD — alongside an editorial board, an advisory board of scientists and librarians to suggest and comment on new directions for publishing the journal.

That is indeed part of our structure. Stay tuned for the announcement of the line-up of our Advisory Board later this week.

14. CUSTOMER SERVICE — available via email, but also Skype, instant messaging etc. A regular weblog from this source would also help keep interested parties updated on what is happening behind the scences.

This editors blog is obviously the beginning of such a service to our community. And we are available via email (editors AT semprag DOT org). What else should we consider?