Submissions

This page is designed to help you ensure your submission is ready for and fits the scope of the journal.

Before submitting you should read over the guidelines below, then register an account (or login if you have an existing account)

  Aims and scope

The journal is dedicated to general linguistics. It publishes contributions from all areas of linguistics, provided they contain theoretical implications that shed light on the nature of language and the language faculty. Contributions should be of interest to all linguists, independently of their own specialisation. No specific linguistic theories or trends are given preference. Papers accepted for publication are strictly selected on the basis of scientific quality and scholarly standing.

Glossa: a journal of general linguistics is a Diamond Open Access journal owned and controlled by the linguistics scholarly community (see Governance), with no financial barriers to publishing for authors. Authors are only asked to make a Voluntary Author Contribution (VAC) if they have access to institutional funding or grants for this purpose.

Between 2016 and 2020, financial support for the journal was provided by LingOA with grants of NWO and the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU). From 2021 onwards, long-term funding is provided by the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). 
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Journal Statistics 2021 to 2023

Submissions received: 1033
Reviews requested: 4126
Reviews received: 3542
Total rejections: 666, of which 407 'desk reject' decisions
Acceptances: 295
Acceptance rate: 30.7%
Time from submission to publication: 369 days

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See here for further information.

Glossa is a member of the Free Journal Network.

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The journal is dedicated to general linguistics. It publishes contributions from all areas of linguistics, provided they contain theoretical implications that shed light on the nature of language and the language faculty. Contributions should be of interest to all linguists, independently of their own specialisation.

No specific linguistic theories or trends are given preference. Papers accepted for publication are strictly selected on the basis of scientific quality and scholarly standing.

As part of the submission process, authors are required to check the compliance of their submission with *each and every item* of the following 16 item checklist:

Submissions that do not adhere to these requirements will be summarily desk-rejected.

1. First of all, please do not assume that your article is appropriate for Glossa simply because it is an article about linguistics. Like many other journals, Glossa has well-defined aims and scope, which narrowly circumscribe the type of linguistics articles that our readership and community are interested in. We will only publish articles that fall within our aims and scope, which are as follows: 
   
   "The journal is dedicated to general linguistics. It publishes contributions from all areas of linguistics, provided they contain theoretical implications that shed light on the nature of language and the language faculty. Contributions should be of interest to all linguists, independently of their own specialisation."
   
   Please take some time to carefully check whether your submission is in line with the aims and scope of Glossa. Submissions that do not address the implications of their findings for linguistic theory and the language faculty – e.g. that are strictly descriptive or only report on (experimental) findings without discussing theoretical implications – will be desk-rejected. 
   
   When in doubt, please check the articles on our website to see whether articles similar to yours have previously been published in Glossa. If this is useful, you can use the search function for this purpose. 
   
   
2. Your submission has not been previously published, nor is it being considered for publication by another journal (or an explanation has been provided in Comments to the Editor). Please provide information about previous submissions elsewhere and, in case you have received reviews, how you have addressed them. This will help us facilitate our reviewing process.
   
   
3. Any third-party-owned materials used have been identified with appropriate credit lines, and permission obtained from the copyright holder for all formats of the journal.
   
   
4. All authors have given permission to be listed on the submitted paper and satisfy the Authorship Guidelines.
   
   
5. The submission is provided as a single PDF file, containing all tables and figures.
    
6. All DOIs for the references have been provided, when available.
   
   
7. Tables and figures are all provided in the submitted PDF and correctly cited in the text.
   
   
8. Figures/images have a resolution of at least 300dpi and are included in the main manuscript file being submitted.
   
   
9. If your research involves human participants, please make sure you include an "Ethics and consent" section in your manuscript indicating that your work was approved by your university's ethics board, mentioning the name of the committee and the approval number/ID for the project. If your research was not subject to ethical review at your institution, please include a brief explanation of why the research was exempt from ethical approval.
   
   
10. If your research makes reference to datasets and analysis scripts, please consult our data policy here. We strongly encourage authors to make their datasets openly accessible upon publication. These can be made available in an online repository or we can host the files as appendices to your article on the Glossa website.
    
    
11. The author(s) agree to edit their text to adhere to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines, should the paper be editorially accepted. Please ensure that your article includes a competing interest statement in accordance with our Competing Interest Guidelines.
    
    
12. All references to the author(s) have been removed from the paper. Aside from omitting the author’s name in the title block, this entails only referring to your own work in the third person (do not use ‘Author 1’ or a similar replacement for your own name). Also check the acknowledgments and the funding information sections for identifying information.
    
    
13. Author names have been removed from the document properties of the manuscript file (check the File menu of your PDF software for document properties). See Ensuring a Blind Review for more information.
    
    
14. Your paper adheres to the maximum word count (or includes an Appendix that is not counted towards the maximum word count). See Author Guidelines for more information.
    
    
15. For review purposes, make sure that your contribution has page numbers.
    
    
16. Please note that the journal does not charge Article Processing Charges to its authors. We only ask you to make a Voluntary Author Contribution (VAC) to financially support the journal *if* you have access to institutional or grant funding for this purpose on the basis of an honour system. Authors who are affiliated with an OLH supporting institution do not need to consider making a VAC. 

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

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.

The editors of Glossa ask that authors declare whether a paper has been previously submitted elsewhere, as well as provide details of what the outcome of that process was, and how subsequent revisions have taken into account those reviews. Glossa has a policy of rejecting papers that do not sufficiently respond to reviews from previous submission processes, unless authors are able to explain and justify why they did not adapt their work.

The journal is happy to accept submissions of papers that have been loaded onto preprint servers or personal websites, presented at conferences, or disseminated through other informal communication channels. These formats are not considered prior publications, although the authors must have retained the copyright. Papers previously published in conference proceedings can be submitted, provided they have been suitably revised or expanded, and not been subject to peer review by the proceedings' editors. 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 contact suggested reviewers. They will not contact excluded reviewers for the purposes of reviewing a submission.

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 necessary when, for example, 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 of the editorial decision having been 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 a 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. At all times, the Editors try to facilitate the conversation between authors and reviewers as best they can.

More information can be found on the Journal Policies page.

The following licences are allowed:

• CC BY 4.0 - More Information  
  Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

Authors publishing in Glossa have no obligation to pay for the publication of their article.

We do however ask authors to check with their institution or grant agency whether they can contribute financially to the operations of the journal.

Authors from institutions that have an OLH membership will have the costs for the article's publication covered by the consortium of libraries participating in the Open Library of Humanities (OLH). We recommend authors from institutions that are not yet members of OLH to ask their libraries to support OLH with an annual contribution that will cover any current/future publication in the journal. Should a submitting/corresponding author be from an institution that already has an OLH membership, they should indicate this when submitting their paper. 

Authors who have access to institutional funds or grant funding earmarked for Open Access publication (via a research grant or through their institution's department or library) are kindly asked to use those funds to cover the £450 Voluntary Author Contribution (VAC) of their publication in Glossa. If you do not know about your institution’s policy on open access funding, please contact your departmental/faculty administrators, grant officer, and institution library, as publication funds may be available to you.

We intentionally use the term Voluntary Author Contribution (VAC) to sharply distinguish this from an Article Processing Charge (APC), a fee that is required for publication at most Gold Open Access journals. Glossa is emphatically a Diamond Open Access journal: it does not charge obligatory fees to either readers or authors, in the interest of scholarly equity. The VAC, if the author is able to make one, would cover publication costs (editorial processes; web hosting; indexing; marketing; archiving; DOI registration etc.) which in turn helps OLH's model to fund even more articles for publication. This approach maximises the potential readership of publications and helps the journal to be run in a sustainable way.

The VAC is genuinely voluntary. Whether or not the author is able to contribute makes absolutely no difference to editorial decision-making on the submission. For further information on VACs, please see the publisher's VAC policy.

The journal is published online as a continuous volume and issue throughout the year. Articles are made available as soon as they are ready to ensure that there are no unnecessary delays in getting content publicly available.

Special Collections of articles are welcomed and will be published as part of the normal issue, but also within a separate collection page.