S&P: Editors' Blog

Cooling failure

2010-03-25T23:11:51Z

From our technical staff in Düsseldorf:

elanguage.net [and thus S&P] is currently suffering an outage which appears to be the result of a cooling failure in the HBZ’s server facility in Cologne. We’ll keep you posted.

We’ll keep you posted as well.

[Update: S&P is back online, after 4 hours of down time.]

On citing well

2010-01-27T12:43:59Z

The journal Nature Chemical Biology has an editorial that is well worth reading and pondering for other fields as well:

2010. On citing well. Nature Chemical Biology 6:2. p.79. doi:10.1038/nchembio.310.

Unfortunately, the editorial is behind a paywall. Here are the main points in excerpts.

The appearance of new ideas and discoveries in the scientific literature is a reflection of ongoing scientific progress. Individual articles are nodes of scientific knowledge, but citations of published work link together the concepts, technologies and advances that define scientific disciplines. Though information technology and databases have helped us to better manage the expanding scientific literature, the quality of our citation maps still hinges on the quality of the bibliographic information contained in each published paper. Because article citations are increasingly used as metrics of researcher productivity, the citation record also affects individual scientists and their institutions. As a result, all participants in the scientific publication process need to ensure that the citation network of the scientific literature is as complete and accurate as possible.

Many factors may stand in the way of good citation practices. [...] Each research group has its own referencing habits, and some may feature their own work too prominently or rely on familiar references without a critical examination of whether a particular citation is the most appropriate in the given context. Some researchers may not cite ‘old’ papers either because these are incorrectly viewed as being out of date or because inertia inevitably may encourage authors to cite the articles that show up more frequently in searches or that have appeared recently.

Researchers understandably are motivated, in both professional and personal ways, to have their scientific contributions recognized through citation by their peers. The community also values the accurate assignment of credit and precedence for scientific discoveries. As a result, even an accidental omission of a necessary citation may create an uncomfortable situation for a paper’s authors. More problematic, however, are cases where authors deliberately omit relevant citations. Because perceived novelty can be an important factor in determining where a manuscript is published, some authors may be tempted to avoid citing earlier or concurrent work from their own laboratories to enhance the apparent advance of a submitted study. In other cases, some authors may consider ongoing scientific disagreements, personal conflicts or competition a sufficient justification for omitting citations of work by others. Clearly authors need to do everything they can to avoid accidental omission of key references, and should never exclude relevant citations for nonscientific reasons. In turn, all scientists, independent of their roles as authors, referees or editors, need to renew their commitment to guaranteeing that literature citations correctly assign credit for ideas and discoveries and are placed thoughtfully in manuscripts and published papers.

Though editors and referees can help, authors are ultimately responsible for the information contained in their published papers. We recommend that authors take several important steps to increase the quality of their citation lists. First, principal investigators need to teach young scientists the appropriate ways to select manuscript references and mentor them in the ethical dimensions of citation. Second, authors need to put as much care into selecting and accurately citing references as they devote to the rest of their manuscripts. As part of this process, authors should perform comprehensive literature searches as they write and revise manuscripts, so as to identify relevant work that may need to be cited. Before including references in their citation lists, all authors should have read and discussed the candidate references to ensure that they are the most relevant choices and are called out at the appropriate point in the paper.

The responsibility for maintaining and enhancing the citation network of a discipline resides with all participants: authors, referees, editors and database managers. Thoughtful attention during the writing and review processes remains the first and best approach for ensuring citation quality and the appropriate assignment of credit in published papers. Yet new publishing and database tools that lead us to an interactive multidimensional scientific literature will become essential. As publishers move toward integrating functionality such as real-time commenting on published papers and creating ‘living manuscripts’ that preserve the snapshot of a research area through the lens of a published paper, while permitting forward and backward linking, the scientific literature is poised to become a richer environment that will support future scientific progress.

At S&P, we are fully committed to these goals, but could surely work harder to improve the citation practices. One of our criteria for evaluating submissions is “contextualization of research”, as spelled out in our inaugural editorial:

Are the main research questions contextualized in terms of earlier related work? Does the paper adequately cite related work? Could the impact of the paper be improved through modifications that would show the relevance of the results to future work in the same or other fields?

Advice to authors: by contextualizing results appropriately, the author not only increases the worth of the paper to the audience, but also makes the job of the editors and reviewers easier. It will be much easier for us to be sure that a paper should be published if we can clearly see what previous work it betters. Authors would do well to flag, both in the abstract and early on in the paper, the relationship of the paper to earlier proposals, and to indicate in broad terms what the relative advantages of the new approach are. Of course, it is then incumbent on the author to make sure that all such claims are fully justified in the main text of the article.

Another aspect of this is that once the relevant citations have been chosen, the bibliographic detail given in the article needs to be as complete and clear as possible:

full first names of authors and editors
both volume and issue numbers for journal articles
page numbers for everything that appeared on numbered pages
DOIs for every work that has a DOI (important both for easy access by readers to the cited literature and for all kinds of automated processes, present and future)
URLs for unpublished manuscripts and other obscure sources
conference proceedings formatted as specified in the Unified Style Sheet for Linguistics

S&P strives towards citing well, which requires continuous attention from authors, reviewers, and editors.

Another article out

2010-01-26T14:46:19Z

To add to yesterday’s announcement, we just published the third article of this year:

Rick Nouwen: Two kinds of modified numerals, doi:10.3765/sp.3.3.

Keep on rolling.

The Start of a Banner Year

2010-01-25T13:50:11Z

Today marks the start of what we hope will be a banner year for our journal. We just published two articles:

a main article by Sigrid Beck on “Quantifiers in than-clauses”
a commentary by Uli Sauerland on “Embedded Implicatures and Experimental Constraints: A Reply to Geurts & Pouscoulous and Chemla”.

We have three more main articles in production, which should all appear quite soon:

Donka Farkas & Henriëtte deSwart: “The semantics and pragmatics of plurals”
Thony Gillies: “Iffiness”
Rick Nouwen: “Two kinds of modified numerals”

We also have two or three more commentaries in various stages of submission/production, and are always soliciting commentaries on any of our main articles.

Finally, there are four papers under current review, we’re expecting revised versions of a number of manuscripts, and we’re awaiting several manuscripts that have been promised to us.

All in all, the journal is ramping up phenomenally and this will be the year that the quantity of our output will reach the levels of the other three main journals in our field.

Please help us make the journal more widely known and please submit your work to us. You’ll get excellent reviewing and editorial service and your work will look great thanks to our superior typography and it will be published free of charge and openly accessible to everyone.

Color

2009-10-30T12:23:10Z

Here’s a reproduction of a figure from a recent article in Mind and Language by Pietroski et.al.:

And here is a reproduction a figure from a recent article in Semantics and Pragmatics by Chemla:

No comment.

Rich Meta-Data in S&P’s PDFs

2009-07-14T12:46:57Z

We just rolled out a major upgrade to the PDFs published in our journal Semantics and Pragmatics. We already had extensive hyper-linking in the articles and in the bibliographies. Now, our PDFs sport rich meta-data that will make it easier for all kinds of services to recognize crucial information about our articles. The meta-data are embedded in the PDF but not visible to the naked eye. You can inspect them by probing into the document properties with Adobe Reader or some other tool. But the main purpose is for automated access by search engines and bibliographic software. If you drag one of our PDFs into a database maintained by Papers, for example, the information about the article will automatically populate the fields in the database, with no need for manual filling in of fields. Similarly, if you use JabRef to maintain a BibTeX database, you can import our PDFs via “Import > XMP-annotated PDF” and have all the BibTeX fields filled in automatically.

Behind the scenes, we are using a customized version of the hyperxmp package to embed XMP meta-data in a number of standardized formats (Dublin Core, PRISM, BibTeXmp).

We are in the forefront of scientific journals in implementing these meta-data standards. To our knowledge only the Nature Publishing Group and Elsevier are also consistently providing rich meta-data in their PDFs. Certainly, none of the other journals in our field have moved to these standards. The upshot for S&P authors is that their work is made even more accessible and useful for readers, in a way that is far ahead of competing journals.

[We thank Uli Sauerland for asking us whether our PDFs could embed bibliographic information in addition to us making BibTeX entry information conveniently available from the online abstracts at the S&P site.]

Time to Decision

2009-07-11T15:42:48Z

We now have three major articles published in S&P and one commentary. We have two articles forthcoming after very minor revisions. We have six articles where we are waiting for major revisions. We have four articles under current review.

We thought we would share our current statistics about time to decision. The chart below displays the data for first submissions, resubmissions, and for the few submissions that we rejected out of hand without sending them out for review. Our average (and median) time to a first decision is 53 days. The quality of our reviews tends to be very high, if we may say so. We think that we offer our authors first class service and we hope for many more submissions after the summer writing season.

Two Articles Published

2009-01-27T19:10:22Z

We haven’t posted to the editors blog in quite a while. We’ll have a fuller report about the journal’s first year soon. But since today we published a new article, let us take this opportunity to note the first two articles published in S&P:

Barker, Chris & Chung-chieh Shan. 2008. Donkey anaphora is in-scope binding. Semantics and Pragmatics 1. 1:1–46. doi:10.3765/sp.1.1.

Elbourne, Paul. 2009. Bishop sentences and donkey cataphora: A response to Barker and Shan. Semantics and Pragmatics 2. 1:1–7. doi:10.3765/sp.2.1.

Read and enjoy! And please submit your work to S&P. You’ll be amazed at the level of service we provide to our authors.

Harvard adopts OA mandate

2008-02-13T18:15:37Z

Harvard’s faculty last night voted to adopt the open access mandate that was promoted by S&P friend Stuart Shieber:

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.

To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost’s Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office. The Provost’s Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the Faculty.

There was a NY Times article on this, and here, here, and here is some of Peter Suber’s coverage.

Congratulations Harvard (and Stu)!

Biolinguistics: A New Open-Access (?) Journal in Linguistics

2008-01-21T20:43:47Z

[via Peter Suber]

Biolinguistics is an open access (?) journal, edited by Cedric Boeckx (Harvard University) and Kleanthes K. Grohmann (University of Cyprus). The inaugural issue includes articles by Noam Chomsky and others.

(Peter Suber correctly reports that the journal’s about pages state that there is delayed open access, but I wonder whether that is a simple error, since it is also stated that all content is free after a simple free registration. Note also that the journal requires authors to sign over their copyright. In any case, more free peer-reviewed content in linguistics is a good thing, even if there are some extra hoops involved.)