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Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing LLC Editor's Report 1. Adoption as ACH journal During 2004, ACH ended their formal association with Kluwer, and adopted LLC as their journal, with membership of ACH being by subscription to the Journal. This has brought in train a number of changes to the journal: we have appointed an Associate Editor from ACH (Stéfan Sinclair); we have added ACH’s name to the cover of the journal; we have extended the Editorial Board to include all ACH Council members. If ACH wishes to propose one or two extra EB members from outside the Council, there is still room for that. 2. Associate Editors Simon Horobin and Edward Vanhoutte have been jointly Reviews Editors for several years. With the other changes happening to the journal, the ALLC Committee felt that it was appropriate to extend their remit, and so they are now both Associate Editors. The roles of the three Associate Editors have not yet been fully worked out, but OUP have suggested that we have an editorial team meeting in Oxford sometime over the next few months with OUP present for part of the meeting so that we can all meet the production and editing teams at the Press. We will work out the roles of the editorial team at that meeting, and also our relationship with the new ADHO e-journal. 3. Contract with OUP This has been a critical issue that we have been dealing with this year. At the beginning of 2004, we issued a call for proposals (CfP) for the publication of LLC, and two excellent proposals were received from OUP and from Blackwells. We engaged a consultant and a solicitor to help us with the preparation of the CfP and evaluation of the proposals. The OUP proposal offered several advantages over our existing deal with OUP, and also offered an enhanced financial package that should boost our income over the next few years. The proposal and the new contract have been carefully evaluated by the consultant and the solicitor, by myself, and by a number of members of the ALLC committee. The ACH President and other from ACH have also seen it. We are now happy with this contract, which will be signed very soon. The journal has been operating on the new financial model since the beginning of 2005. 4. Production issues This year, OUP have introduced a Publish-ahead-of-Print service, which means that papers are edited and made available online as soon as they are ready, rather than appearing online and in the print issue at the same time. This seems to be very popular with authors. The production time for print issues has been cut to twelve weeks from receipt of copy to publication. We are now on time with the production schedule, with copy delivered to OUP regularly on time The journal cover has been redesigned, which is timely with a) the adoption by ACH and b) the fact that this year we are publishing our 20 th anniversary issue. OUP have proposed also a redesign of the inside pages, as there is considerable wasted space in the current format. As we are publishing more copy that previously, this will allow us to increase word length without increasing page length, thereby cutting costs. As part of our new contract, OUP has offered to pay for the set-up costs of an online manuscript tracking system. There will be a small on-going charge for this, but the advantages are enormous, as it means that editors and authors can check the progress of the manuscripts with different levels of permission. 5. Copy This year we have produced a whole extra issue: the papers from ACH/ALLC 2003. This will be appearing very soon. We may also have another extra issue during this year. We have a good flow of papers coming in, and a number of special issues coming up soon. We need to overhaul our reviewers list as we are constantly expanding the range of content. We will be looking at the lists of reviewers for the conferences, as well as the book reviewers, in order to expand the list. It would be very useful if members of ALLC and ACH who are interested in reviewing papers could contact me and let me know what their areas of expertise are. Dr. Marilyn Deegan |
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