Marilyn Deegan, Editor-in-Chief, 6 July 2006
Centre for Computing in the Humanities
King's College London
The Strand
London WC2R 2LS
Phone 07940 570228
Fax 020 7848 2980
Email marilyn.deegan@kcl.ac.uk
Marilyn Deegan Editor-in-Chief, Centre for
Computing in the Humanities, KingŐs College London
Simon Horobin, Associate Editor, Glasgow
University
Stefan Sinclair, Associate Editor, McMaster
Edward Vanhoutte, Associate Editor, Royal
Academy, Belgium
The new 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, continues to be very popular with authors.
The journal cover has been redesigned, and we have also done a redesign of the inside pages, as there is considerable wasted space in the current format. As we are publishing more copy than previously, this will allow us to increase word length without increasing page length, thereby cutting costs. This new design has been implemented for papers which are on the Publish-ahead-of-Print web site, and will be implemented for the print from issue 21.1.
We went live with the online MSS submission
system at the beginning of 2006.
It is called Manuscript Central and is produced by a company called
Scholar One. It is proving relatively straightforward for authors and reviewers
to use.. I have uploaded a whole
list of reviewers and authors into the system, and will be sending out messages
to lists to invite further reviewers.
It is making the whole process of submission and tracking easier and
more transparent for everyone. The
project manager that I have been working with at OUP has been wonderful, and
the whole process so far has been relatively painless, but very
time-consuming. I am still running
the old system as there are papers going through the system. In future years I will be able to
provider very detailed stats about submissions, acceptances, and rejections.
Edward Vanhoutte has tried using the system
for book reviews, but at the moment it doesnŐt work too well for that However, Scholar One are
implementing a book reviews module, which we will be the first journal to try
out.
Clare Morton, who has been the Managing Editor for LLC for the past few years, is no longer responsible for the journal. Instead, we are looked after by Trish Thomas who works out of the New York office, but who makes regular trips to Oxford. The handover between the two editors has been smooth, and we are working well with Trish.
This year we are producing another extra issue: The Young Scholars issue edited by Melissa Terras and Edward Vanhoute. The selected papers from the 2005 conference are due out at any moment now, and we also have a special issue on dialectometry appearing this year. We are still receiving a great deal of copy, and with publishing the conference papers every year instead of every two years, the amount of copy coming in is growing. I have already had 64 papers submitted this year. We donŐt yet know what effect DHQ will have on copy flow, but it is certain that there is room in the field for more than one journal. However, we still welcome submissions from authors, and we would like to recruit more people to review papers and books for the journal.
Julia Flanders and I have been having very constructive discussions about how the journals can work together, and we met over dinner in London in March to take this forward. Julia has drafted a letter of understanding between the two journals, which will be presented to the committees in Paris. The editorial teams of both journals met in Paris for a working dinner to further cement our working relationships, which was highly successful and has resulted in a number of new ideas for collaboration.
In April, Lorna Hughes and I attended the
OUP Journals day, aimed at editors od OUP journals. There were presentations on a number of key issues in
journals publishing, including publishing trends, online access, overseas
marketing. There were also a number
of case studies given by journal editors.
In the evening, we attended the launch of the Oxfords Journals Online
Archives. The Press say:
The archive provides access to all content from
volume one, issue one, for nearly 140 journals.
Over three million article pages are included
in the archive, which includes content dating back to 1849. With powerful
search tools, cross-linking to similar articles, and a host of additional
online material, the archive offers convenient, permanent access to a wealth of
historical content.
See http://www.oxfordjournals.org/access_purchase/archives.html
LLC is included in this back list, and is
available free to members of the associations: there is a link to this on the
journal web site.