Editorial Policies

Peer Review Process

Suitable submissions

When an article is submitted to Glossa, the Editor in Chief first decides whether the focus and scope of the submission is suitable for the journal. If the submission is deemed unsuitable, the author will be informed within a week. If the submission is in line with Glossa’s focus and scope, the Editor in Chief will assign one of the Editors to act as Handling Editor for the submission. All submissions are automatically checked with plagiarism software.

If a manuscript has previously been submitted elsewhere, the editors of Glossa would like to request that authors provide information about the previous reviewing process and its outcome. This provides an opportunity for authors to detail how subsequent revisions have taken into account previous reviews, and why certain reviewer comments were not taken into account. Information about the author's previous reviewing experience is to the author's advantage: it often helps the editors select more appropriate reviewers.

The reason Glossa has this policy is to discourage authors from simply resubmitting papers to different journals without taking into account reasonable requests from previous rounds of reviewing elsewhere. Such a situation often comes to light when reviewers inform the editors that they have reviewed the paper for a different journal and no changes were made in the new submission to Glossa. The editors believe this is a waste of precious reviewing resources. 

The journal is happy to accept submissions of papers that have been uploaded onto preprint servers or personal websites, presented at conferences, or disseminated through other informal communication channels. As long as they have not been peer-reviewed, and the authors have retained copyright, these formats are not considered prior publications. Authors are encouraged to create a link from any prior posting of their paper to the final published version in Glossa, if possible.

The reviewing process

Within a week after being assigned a paper, the Handling Editor will contact three reviewers to evaluate the paper and assess it for clarity, validity, and sound methodology. Reviewers have two weeks to respond to the invitation. If they do not, new reviewers will be contacted by the Handling Editor until a quorum of three is reached. The time reviewers take to react may substantially lengthen the duration of the reviewing process.

Reviewers are asked to send in their reviews four weeks after accepting the invitation, but this is negotiable. They are invited to use a review form to evaluate the paper, but using this form is not compulsory. Reviewers are gently and regularly reminded of their invitations to review and the due dates for their reviews.

The reviewing process is double-blind: reviewers have no access to the identity of the authors, and the authors do not know who the reviewers are. However, if reviewers happen to know the identity of the author, this does not automatically disqualify them as reviewers.

During submission, authors can suggest and exclude reviewers for their submission, and they may justify these proposals. The Editors are free (but not obliged) to invite suggested reviewers. They will however never invite reviewers  for the purposes of reviewing a submission who have been explicitly excluded by the author.

Members of the editorial team/board/guest editors are permitted to submit their own papers to the journal. In cases where an author is associated with the journal, they will be removed from all editorial tasks for that paper and another member of the team will be assigned responsibility for overseeing peer review. A competing interest must also be declared within the submission and any resulting publication.

Editorial decisions and revisions

When all reviews are in, the Editor makes an editorial decision, usually based on three reviews. In exceptional cases, or in the case of squibs, a decision may be made with two reviews. This is, for example, necessary when a third review fails to materialize after repeated reminders, and time is too short to invite a new reviewer. At Glossa, timely initial editorial decisions are generally prioritized over a complete set of three reviews.

If the editorial decision is “resubmit for review”, ”revisions required”, or “accept submission”, authors are asked to provide a detailed document explaining how their revised submission has taken reviewers’ comments into account. This document will be read both by the reviewers (in the case of “resubmit for review”) and the Editor. The revised version should ideally be resubmitted within 10 weeks after the editorial decision is made, but this is negotiable. In the case of “resubmit for review”, the revised version and the document detailing the changes will be sent to the initial reviewers, unless the author can demonstrate that one of the reviewers is biased against the paper. Additional reviewers may also be invited at this point if the initial reviewer is unavailable, or at the discretion of the Editor. In principle (conditionally) accepted submissions are not sent out for review again once the author submits the revised version. The Editor makes an editorial decision based on the revised paper and the author’s reply to the reviewers. The Editor may still contact one or more reviewers regarding specific questions. In principle, the Editors will allow for a maximum of three rounds of submission for a paper.

In case of conflicting reviews, or if an author formulates justified objections to the review(s), the Editors reserve the right to invite a fourth, ‘Solomonic’ reviewer who will have access to all versions of the paper and all reviews in order to advise the Editors. Authors have the right to suggest names for that Solomonic reviewer. At all times, the Editors try to facilitate the conversation between authors and reviewers as best they can.

Reviewer Guidelines

Reviewers are asked to provide comment on the below topics and guidelines:

• Does the paper present an empirical discovery potentially of interest to most of this journal's readers?
• Is the empirical content of the paper sound (e.g. fieldwork includes proper controls and comparisons, experiments well designed, etc.)?
• Does the paper make a broader proposal about an aspect of linguistic theory potentially of interest to most of this journal's readers?
• Is the argumentation linking the paper’s broader conclusions to its empirical or theoretical premises sound?
• Comment on the paper’s premises or the conceptual framework that it assumes.
• Any other comments relevant to the evaluation of the paper as a whole.
• Suggestions for improving the paper.
• Specific line-by-line comments on details of the paper.

Reviewing matters

Reviewers have a crucial responsibility in the decision process leading from submission to publication. Here are some things that you as reviewers can do to help us editors improve and accelerate that process.

1. Please answer the invitation to review as promptly as possible, especially if you cannot do the review. That will allow the editor to invite a new reviewer and considerably shorten the submission-to-decision (StD) time. If you don't answer quickly, the editors will wait for your answer for 10-15 days before inviting a new reviewer. When a succession of invited reviewers fail to answer timely, StD time is significantly increased.

2. If you cannot do the review, it would be extremely helpful for us if you could suggest alternative reviewers. The editors invited you because they think you are best qualified to review that paper. That also means that you are probably better qualified than the editors to think of alternative reviewers. Help the editors by suggesting alternative reviewers: reviewing and publishing is a shared responsibility of the scholarly community. Also keep in mind that a reviewer who quickly declines but provides the editor with the names of alternative reviewers is much more helpful than a reviewer who promises a review that never materializes or requires several reminders to deliver it.

3. Like most journals, Glossa has a policy of double-blind peer review. In principle, the reviewers do not know the author, and the paper is anonymously presented to the reviewers. Admittedly, double-blind peer review is not easily achieved in practice. In small or intersecting subfields, most scholars know each other and can easily identify who wrote the paper. We are aware of the debate around Open Peer Review. However, this is still very controversial. Nevertheless, we allow reviewers to disclose their identity to authors if they think that this will help improve the paper by a personal discussion. We ask reviewers who wish to sign their reviews to carefully take into account before doing so the power differential that may exist between themselves and the author of the paper.

4. If you know the author, that does not necessarily exclude you from being a reviewer. You just need to ask yourself if you can write a fair review of the paper in view of your relationship with the author. That is also why we ask reviewers to state that they have no competing interests. A competing interest refers to a secondary interest that an author might have besides the scientific quality of the paper, such as personal rivalry or an interest in the success of the author. If you have collaborated with the author on related research, or are in a supervisor-supervisee relationship with the author, then it is best to recuse yourself. When in doubt, ask the editor for advice.

5. If you have reviewed the paper before for a different journal, that does not automatically disqualify you from reviewing it again. More in particular, if you notice that the paper has not changed from the last time you saw it, please inform the editor of this. The editors will want to know whether the comments from the previous reviews for a different journal were taken into account in the new version. Authors should not be allowed to simply 'shop around' at different journals, hoping they will get lucky and find more compliant or less critical reviewers. That is a waste of scarce reviewing resources. Glossa has a policy of rejecting a paper out of hand if the reviewer informs the editors that the authors have blatantly ignored all previous reviews at a different journal.

6. Please answer review reminders. There may be a host of reasons why you cannot make the original deadline. Inform the editors and keep in touch. Always handle the review assigned to you in the same way you would like reviews of your own article to be treated.

7. Consider using our new and improved review format, developed by David Pesetsky and available to download in PDF here. It is not compulsory, but it will help you organize your thoughts and is of great value to authors and editors.

8. Co-reviewing. We encourage senior reviewers to consider involving PhD students in their reviewing tasks if the paper is something the students have expertise on. We do not, however, endorse a situation in which the PhD student does the bulk of the work: co-reviewing means a joint review by a senior and a junior researcher. One way of doing this is for the co-reviewers to review separately, and then discuss their notes merging them into a single review. Reviewers willing to do so should inform the handling editor, and provide the name of the PhD student involved in the acceptance message. Co-reviewing trains students in a valuable skill, as it helps them to formulate constructive criticism and to better understand the reviewing process.

Glossa Special Collections

Special Collections (SCs) are collections of papers devoted to a particular topic, and edited by a team of guest editors. This usually means that authors are invited by the guest editors to submit to an SC. Nevertheless, contributions to special issues are subject to the usual editorial processes of blind peer review.

The main concern for SCs is to achieve a strong thematic unity, avoiding the impression of conference proceedings. The Glossa policy on SCs is to prefer small SCs with papers that constitute a tight fit, over very general ones with contributions that are only loosely connected thematically. The papers in an SC should be strongly complementary, and ‘talk’ to each other. In short, an SC should avoid the impression that it is a mere collection of standalone papers on the same topic from different insular perspectives.

There is a size limit of 10 articles or 100,000 words at most per SC.

All proposals are evaluated by the Glossa Editors. Once a proposal has been reviewed, the submitter(s) of the proposal will be informed of the Editors’ decision. The proposal should be sent to glossa.editors@gmail.com in a single file that does not exceed 15 pages, and contain the following information:

1. Introduction
2. Title of the proposed SC and names of the guest editors
3. Goal of the proposal
4. Background of the proposal
5. Relevance to current research
6. List of contributors, titles, and 400-word abstracts of each contribution.
7. Five recent key publications on the topic
8. Projected length of the SC (a maximum of 10 articles or 100,000 words)
9. Proposed timeline

The total time from acceptance to finalization of a Special Collection should not exceed 12 months.

Provide (approximate) dates for the following:

1. deadline first submission
2. completion first review round (max. 6 months after the acceptance date)
3. deadline revised manuscripts
4. completion of the review and revision process.

Data Policy

The journal requests authors to make all data associated with their submission openly available, according to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). This should be linked to from a Data Accessibility Statement within the submitted paper, which will be made public upon publication. If data is not being made available within the journal publication, a statement from the author should be provided to explain why. Data obtained from other sources must be appropriately credited. When depositing data for a submission, the below should be considered:

• The repository the data is deposited in must be suitable for this subject and have a sustainability model.
• The data must be deposited under an open license that permits unrestricted access (e.g. CC0, CC-BY). More restrictive licenses should only be used if a valid reason (e.g. legal) is present.
• The deposited data must include a version that is in an open, non-proprietary format.
• The deposited data must have been labelled in such a way that a 3rd party can make sense of it (e.g. sensible column headers, descriptions in a readme text file). 
• Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Where applicable, the studies must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. The identity of the research subject should be anonymised whenever possible. For research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study must be obtained from participants (or their legal guardian). 
• A ‘Data Accessibility Statement’ should be added to the submission, prior to the reference list, providing the details of the data accessibility, including the DOI linking to it. If the data is restricted in any way, the reasoning should be given. 

A list of data repositories is available at http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Data_repositories.

Upload the files to your chosen open repository and make note of the DOI that they will provide (most suitable for datasets or information that act as foundations to the research being published. This option makes the files more findable and more citable). We recommend an open repository such as osf.io, which allows you to create a "project" under which you can upload relevant files (datasets, analysis scripts, experimental materials, etc.). The project will be associated with a unique DOI. You can then include in your manuscript a citation of the OSF entry and/or a link to the project page on OSF, to direct interested readers to the supplementary materials. During review, please be sure that the link to the repository is anonymized to maintain a fully double masked review process. Instructions for doing this on the OSF may be found here. If you'd like to learn more about best practices for ensuring reproducibility, see Laurinavichyute and Vasishth (2021). Please contact us if you would like more information or advice about hosting your data on an open repository.

If you have data, appendices, or any other supplementary material (tests, protocols etc) that you would like to see published alongside your paper, you can upload these files to Janeway and inform the handling editor. During the typesetting process, the editors can assign these materials their own DOI so that they are accessible to readers. Note that these materials will not be copy-edited or typeset: their appearance and format is entirely the author's responsibility.

Preprint Policy

The journal allows authors to deposit draft versions of their paper into a suitable preprint server, on condition that the author agrees to the below:

• The author retains copyright to the preprint and developed works from it, and is permitted to submit it to the journal.
• The author declares that a preprint is available within the cover letter presented during submission. This must include a link to the location of the preprint.
• The author acknowledges that having a preprint publicly available means that the journal cannot guarantee the anonymity of the author during the review process, even if they anonymise the submitted files.
• Should the submission be published, the authors are expected to update the information associated with the preprint version to show that a final version has been published in the journal, including the DOI linking directly to the publication.

ORCID

The journal strongly recommends that all authors submitting a paper register an account with Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID). Registration provides a unique and persistent digital identifier for the account that enables accurate attribution and improves the discoverability of published papers, ensuring that the correct author receives the correct credit for their work. As the ORCID remains the same throughout the lifetime of the account, changes of name, affiliation, or research area do not effect the discoverability of an author's past work and aid correspondence with colleagues.

The journal encourages all corresponding authors to include an ORCID within their submitting author data whilst co-authors are recommended to include one. ORCID numbers should be added to the author data upon submission and will be published alongside the submitted paper, should it be accepted.

Authorship

All listed authors must qualify as such, as defined in our authorship guidelines, which have been developed from the ICMJE definitions. All authors must have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper.

Funding and Ethics

Authors are required to specify funding sources and detail requirements for ethical research in the submitted manuscript (see Author Guidelines). All authors must confirm that they fit the definition of an author (see Authorship Guidelines), during submission.

Expected behaviour

The journal does not tolerate abusive behaviour or correspondence towards its staff, academic editors, authors, or reviewers. Any person engaged with the journal who resorts to abusive behaviour or correspondence will have their contribution immediately withdrawn and future engagement with the journal will be at the discretion of the editor and/or publisher.