Editorial Policies

Focus and Scope

The Journal of Experimental Linguistics is part of the Linguistic Society of America's eLanguage initiative. Like the rest of eLanguage, JEL will be an Open Access online journal. Regular publication is expected to start towards the end of 2009.

JEL is a linguistic "journal of reproducible research", that is, a journal of reproducible computational experiments on topics related to speech and language. These experiments may involve the analysis of previously­ published corpus data, or of experiment­-specific data that is published for the occasion. Other relevant categories include computational simulations, implementations of diagnostic techniques or task scoring methods, methodological tutorials, and reviews of relevant new publications (including new data and software).

In all cases, JEL articles will be accompanied by executable recipes for re­creating all figures, tables, numbers and other results. These recipes will be in the form of source code that runs in some generally-­available computational environment.

Although JEL is centered in linguistics, we aim to publish research from the widest possible range of disciplines that engage speech and language experimentally, from electrical engineering and computer science to education, psychology, biology, and speech pathology. In this interdisciplinary context, "reproducible research" is especially useful in helping experimental and analytical techniques to cross over from one sub­field to another.

Publication will be in online digital form only, with articles appearing as they complete the review process. A rigorous but rapid process of peer review, designed to take no more than 4-6 weeks from submission to publication, will be supplemented by a vigorously­-promoted system for adding moderated remarks and replies after publication.

The editorial board, in alphabetical order, is Alan Black, Steven Bird, Harald Baayen, Paul Boersma, Tim Bunnell, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, John Coleman, Eric Fosler­-Lussier, John Goldsmith, Jen Hay, Stephen Isard, Greg Kochanski, Lori Levin, Mark Liberman, Brian MacWhinney, Ani Nenkova, James Pennebaker, Stuart Shieber, Chilin Shih, David Talkin, Betty Tuller, Jiahong Yuan. Mark Liberman is the editor in chief.

 

Section Policies

Editorials

Unchecked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Articles

Checked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Unchecked Peer Reviewed

Remarks and Replies

Unchecked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Tutorials

Unchecked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Reviews

Unchecked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed

Squibs

Unchecked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed
 

Peer Review Process

Publication will be in online digital form only, with articles appearing as they complete the review process. A rigorous but rapid process of peer review, designed to take no more than 4-6 weeks from submission to publication, will be supplemented by a vigorously­-promoted system for adding refereed remarks and replies after publication.

The publication of "executable articles" obviously raises new conceptual, editorial and technical issues, which are also on the agenda for our colleagues in many other disciplines. One basic requirement is to verify that the recipe in fact works as it is claimed to. For the first three years of this journal's existence, the Linguistic Data Consortium will support a virtual test bench comprising a set of computers running today's common operating systems, with access to all needed corpora, and will support a research assistant to test submitted recipes under the direction of the journal's editors. If the journal is a success, then the cost of this function will made part of the calculation for its business plan going forward.

The editorial process for published software needs to go beyond this validation of basic function, and there are only limited precedents to guide us in setting standards for review and publication in this area. For examples of what software should be like, we can point to projects like NLTK and Praat, and to the software published in association with books like Johnson's Quantitative Methods in Linguistics or Baayen's Analyzing Linguistic Data. But rather than trying to write style guides or other requirements documents in advance, we propose to view the journal's first few years as a period of experimentation, during which the editors will gradually turn common­ sense and ad hoc standards into a more formal set of guidelines.

 

Publication Frequency

JEL articles will appear as they complete the review process.

We expect that regular publication will begin towards the end of 2009.

 

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

 

Archiving

This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration. More...