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. Of course, contributions to Special Collections are subject to the usual editorial processes of blind peer review.

When evaluating Special Collection proposals, the editorial team looks for strong thematic unity: SCs should avoid the impression of conference proceedings. In principle, Glossa does not publish conference proceedings, although thematically coherent subsets of papers from conferences may be submitted as Special Collection proposals. Our only exception to publishing conference proceedings is GLOW: this is due to its unique history in the development and advancement of generative grammar, its large intellectual community, and its consistent, very high quality of work. 

The Glossa policy is to prefer small Special Collections 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 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 for revised manuscripts
  4. completion of the review and revision process.