S&P: Editors’ Blog

In a letter to Science, William F. Perrin, a past editor of Marine Mammal Science and a present associate editor of the Journal of Mammalogy writes:

I have had great difficulty in lining up reviewers. Sometimes it takes 8 or 10 tries to find someone who will agree to review a paper. The typical excuse is “I’m too busy.”

First I try the people who have published the most relevant and recent papers on the topic in question. Then I move down the range of choices. The temptation, and sometimes the need, is to turn to potential reviewers in less-related fields or those who are not so “busy” (i.e., are not producing much themselves). This inevitably leads to less-knowledgeable reviewers and often reviews of lesser quality, which of course complicates the editor’s job and sometimes enrages the authors.

If an average acceptance rate of 50% is assumed, and if each paper needs at least two reviews, then each paper published represents at least four reviews. Following this logic, if you publish three or four papers a year, you should be doing at least 12 to 16 reviews. Anything less means that you are sloughing off the work to others who are perhaps less knowledgeable and capable than you in your specialty, and you should not be upset when someone reviewing a paper of yours “doesn’t have a clue.”

Doing a fair share of peer reviews should be a recognized and expected part of the job for scientific professionals; it should be written into the job descriptions of salaried scientists and be considered in evaluating junior faculty for tenure. The caution should be “Publish and review, or perish.”

The average of published papers in semantics and pragmatics may be closer to 2 or 3 a year. So, this calculation would mean 8 to 12 reviews per year. Are you doing that many?

We here at S&P have promised our editorial board members not to expect more than 2 reviews each year (although we maybe should be getting nervous about the load of manuscripts that we’re receiving). Assuming that they review for other journals as well, that probably does add up to the “ideal” workload for reviewing.

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.

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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.