Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, May 14, 2007

Forthcoming OA journal of semantics and pragmatics

David Beaver and Kai von Fintel have announced plans to launch a new peer-reviewed OA journal, Semantics and Pragmatics (no web site yet).  Beaver is in the Linguistics Department at the U of Texas, and von Fintel is in the Linguistics and Philosophy Department at MIT.  From von Fintel's blog post:

This weekend at the annual SALT meeting, David Beaver and I announced the coming launch of the new journal Semantics & Pragmatics. Our journal will be a high-quality, rigorously peer-reviewed journal on topics in semantics and pragmatics. Why a new journal (given that the field already has three excellent dedicated journals: Linguistics & Philosophy, Natural Language Semantics, Journal of Semantics)? Our journal will be an open access journal, with no subscription barriers, and it will make optimal use of modern electronic distribution and management methods. One can get some idea of our plans from the slides we used at SALT. We received many encouraging comments and many interesting questions. We will continue the conversation begun at SALT on our editors’ blog. Please join us there. We are very optimistic about this project and we need the community’s help and support as we move ahead.

Update. Also see the MIT press release on Semantics and Pragmatics (May 17, 2007). Excerpt:

Some of the significant aspects of the business plan:

  • Start-up Funding: The editors are seeking institutional support for the start-up phase. The MIT Libraries will be providing partial funding for the first year through a modest grant.
  • Publishing Software: The editors plan to use open source software from Open Journal Systems from the Public Knowledge Project at Simon Fraser University.
  • Archiving: The journal plans to make arrangements for archiving through discussions with the Libraries’ Dspace team and is examining services for e-journal archiving such as Portico. They plan to offer an annual volume through a print-on-demand service for those who would like the print as an archival format.

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.