- The LSA's 2009 Annual Meeting has been moved to San Francisco due to an ongoing labor dispute affecting the Portland Hilton. The host hotel will be the San Francisco Hilton. The LSA will enjoy the same excellent room rate--$99/night single or double, $129/night triple or quad--that we were to have had in Portland. More information
- Nominations for the Leonard Bloomfield Book Award are due 1 June, 2008.
- Nominations for the LSA's "Linguistics, Language and the Public" Award will be accepted until 1 June, 2008.
Call for Co-Journal Proposals
Request for Co-journal Proposals
With the establishment of eLanguage the Linguistic Society of America has now opened an innovative channel of publication, publicity and communication that meets the need of the society to represent the full range of perspectives and lines of inquiry into language and at the same time offers innovative and modern ways of reaching a global audience with unparalleled speed and efficiency, and with new opportunities to present content and data.
As can be seen from the more detailed description of eLanguage, the central locus of intellectual content of eLanguage will be the co-journals.
The Linguistic Society of America now invites proposals for co-journals.
The LSA encourages novel ways of handling the publication process from solicitation to processing that exploit the new possibilities offered by the Internet. Minimally, the proposal must contain the following information:
1. Who can propose a co-journal?
Any LSA member or group headed by at least one member wishing to establish a co-journal within eLanguage.2. Field of enquiry and eligibility
The proposal should outline the field of enquiry covered by the proposal and how the co-journal will serve a significant community in the field. In considering a proposal the editorial committee will be concerned to ensure broad coverage of the discipline, and also to exclude significant overlaps. It may be useful to cite articles that could have appeared in the co-journal proposed. The editors of a co-journal will be expected to enforce a policy that normally, at least one author of any item submitted for publication in any part of eLanguage will be required to be a member of the LSA.3. Editorial board
The proposed editorial board should send a clear message that it represents the best competence available in the respective subfield of linguistics. All members of the editorial boards should be committed to the eLanguage idea and be ready to themselves bear a substantial burden of the reviewing work.4. Reviewing The proposal should be explicit about what kind of reviewing process is envisaged. This is essential not only to keep the highest standards of quality as an aim in itself, but also for eLanguage to count as a "reviewed publication" on a par with the best print journals. At the same time, the proposal should make explicit (in terms of technical procedure and in terms of instructions and conditions for reviewers) how a timely and expeditious procedure (without compromising quality!) from solicitation to processing will ensure that the possibilities of an e-journal are taken advantage of, in order to avoid the long time lags often involved between submission and actual publication in the case of print journals.
5. Technical aspects The eLanguage platform is intended to relieve co-journal organizers and editors of as much as possible of the detailed work involved in producing an electronic journal. It is expected that in the usual case, the editorial process for manuscript submission, review, editing and approval will be carried out within the Open Journal System software provided, and the co-journal completely housed on the eLanguage servers. For those who wish to handle more of the process on their own, or to host part or all of the co-journal content on servers of their own, this is certainly possible, but a proposal should indicate where this is envisioned, and why that makes sense in the particular case of this co-journal.
Material which is eventually published in any part of eLanguage or its co-journals will be expected to appear as PDF documents conforming to the PDF/A standard, so as to ensure that it can be properly processed by the indexing programs in use. Obviously, some supplementary material will not be appropriately presented in this form, and a co-journal proposal should note the extent to which this is likely to be the case in the area addressed.
More generally, co-journal proposers are encouraged to address specific ways in which their potential component of eLanguage takes advantage of the potential of online electronic publication. The fields covered by the individual co-journals will differ in their affinities to different kinds of content and types of data and ways to handle them in an Internet publication. Editors will be encouraged to adopt standards that utilize the electronic medium efficiently, rather than simply reproducing the style of presentation of a traditional paper-based journal.
The description of procedures should also address issues like frequency of publication (e.g., periodic issues vs. articles published as they become available, with post hoc aggregation into an "issue" or "volume" periodically or when a certain quantity of papers is available), special features of content that might have implications for style sheet matters, etc. Beyond such broad considerations, prospective editors are free to set their own standards and procedures.
Co-journals will be expected to conform to a uniform overall style sheet for eLanguage based on the current style sheet for Language, incorporating citation practices recommended in a proposed "Uniform Style Sheet for Linguistics" developed by a group of journal editors. Co-journal web pages will also be expected to be based on a common design, to assure some uniformity of visual appearance across the entire journal. If individual co-journal proposers have specific ideas or requirements for their main pages, these should be described in the proposal.
At a later stage, more specific technical specifications and style instructions will be provided.
6. Submission of proposals
Proposals for co-journals to be included in eLanguage should be presented in the form of a PDF document and submitted to the Editor-in-Chief, Dieter Stein. They should be sent as attachments to e-mail directed to stein@phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de. The Editor-in-chief will then circulate them to the eLanguage editorial board for review and comment, and when a decision is reached (possibly after further discussion with the proposer(s)), arrangements will then be made for the establishment of a co-journal page linked to the eLanguage main page. The principal editor of an approved co-journal will also serve on the Advisory Board for eLanguage. Editors are encouraged to meet at the LSA meetings for consultation and exchange of experience to help make the eLanguage enterprise a success.
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Stephen Anderson Yale Vice-President/President-elect Linguistic Society of America |
Dieter Stein Duesseldorf Editor-in-chief eLanguage |
