S&P: Editors’ Blog

Welcome

David Beaver and Kai von Fintel are editing a new open access journal called Semantics & Pragmatics. The journal is affiliated with, and electronically published by, the Linguistic Society of America (under the umbrella of their eLanguage initiative). The new journal was launched in the Fall of 2007, with the first accepted articles due to appear in early 2008. We would like the development of Semantics & Pragmatics to be as transparent as possible, and to that end have begun this editors’ blog.

“Beaver and von Fintel will be blogging the entire start-up process, offering a unique inside view of the business of starting up an open access journal. To follow their progress, visit the editors’ blog.” (MIT Library News).

We welcome comments and suggestions from everyone — if you have found your way to this blog, we will be happy to have your reactions and suggestions. You can email us (editors AT semprag DOT org) or leave a comment on any entry on this blog.

My first post to our editors’ blog, and Kai’s letting me start with a bang: I’m very happy to announce that Semantics and Pragmatics has now been officially accepted as an affiliated journal of the Linguistic Society of America as part of their eLanguage initiative.

Kai and I are really delighted about what we hope will be a mutually beneficial relationship with the LSA. They will be hosting the journal for us, and providing technical support, meaning that Kai and I can concentrate on getting top quality content into the journal. For the LSA this provides a way of actively supporting and disseminating leading-edge research specific to the fields of Semantics and Pragmatics, something that, because of its generalist nature, has not been possible in the journal Language. We hope that as a result the LSA will come to play a much more central role in our field than has been the case in recent years. (Why do I suggest that the LSA doesn’t currently play a central role in our field? More on that in a later blog.)

We were in discussion with the LSA for several weeks, and I’d like to publicly thank Dieter Stein (eLanguage editor in chief), Stephen Anderson (LSA president), and Gregory Ward (LSA Secretary-Treasurer, and our Pragmaticist mole in the LSA, but don’t let on that he’s on our side) for their enthusiasm and efforts on our behalf.

The LSA executive initially planned a restriction that eLanguage journal authors would have to be LSA members, as is the case for Language authors. But, and Kai and I think this is great, they’ve now decided to impose no such restriction. So Semantics and Pragmatics will truly be free: it will not only be free to read, but also free to write for. And, or course, we also plan to accept free advice from reviewers, advisory board members, and, well, anyone who wants to contact us.

How can you show your support for the LSA’s decision to accept our journal and make it truly free to anyone with an interest in our field? Suppose e.g. that you are a semanticist or pragmaticist who is not a member of the LSA but who wants to signal your support for an initiative which will impose no pressure at all on you to join the LSA. In that case, there’s no stronger way to communicate your opinion than by the ultra-Gricean move of joining the LSA. Please tell them we sent you!

Cheers,

David

The MIT Libraries News blog has an item about our journal, mentioning among other things that we will receive a modest amount of start-up funding from the MIT Libraries, who told us that they “look forward to this innovative addition to the peer reviewed literature in the field of semantics”.

Our announcement has had a bit of resonance:

• Eric Bakovic at phonoloblog declares “We Need to Do This, Too”:

It’s a great idea, and I think we can and should do something similar for phonology and phonetics for all the same reasons that David and Kai are doing this for semantics and pragmatics.

In the comments to his entry, there are interesting skeptical remarks by John McCarthy and Alan Prince, which we will respond to on this blog soon.

• Brian Weatherson links to our announcement and says:

The journal will be open access and online, and it is well and truly worth supporting. I was thinking of developing a policy of submitting all non-solicited papers (if I ever write such a thing again) to Philosophers’ Imprint, out of general support for open access principles. But perhaps the right policy is a more general support for open access.

• Peter Suber at Open Access News — a very useful service, by the way — had a brief report on our announcement.

Here are some of the topics (in no particular order) we will be discussing on this blog in the near future, as our project progresses:

• More on why open access is good for the field
• Role Models (successful open access journals in other disciplines)
• Innovation vs. Conservatism (how experimental should the journal be?)
• Funding
• How to ensure that the journal will be taken seriously (for tenure & promotion, especially)
• Editorial board expectations
• Graduate students as peer reviewers
• Style guidelines
• The author agreement (no copyright transfer, what kind of license does S&P get?)
• Depositing submissions to semanticsarchive: recommended, required?
• What if S&P is so successful that it monopolizes the field?

Here’s a request: please use the comments to this entry to add other topics you would like us to discuss.

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.

In the business meeting at this weekend’s SALT conference, we announced the launch of our journal with a short slideshow. There were many encouraging comments and interesting questions. We’ll continue the conversation on this blog as the launch progresses.

Semantics & Pragmatics A New, Peer-Reviewed Open Access Journal in Linguistics

• Editors: David Beaver (UT Austin) and Kai von Fintel (MIT)
• Open for submissions: September 2007
• First issue: early 2008

In this editors’ blog, we will track our progress while we are working on the launch of our new journal. We hope to get advice and comments from our colleagues and other interested people.