Literary and Linguistic Computing, Report for ALLC committee meeting

Marilyn Deegan, Editor-in-Chief, 2 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

1. Production issues

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 my 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 has tried using the system for book reviews, but at the moment it doesn’t 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.

2. Copy

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. We are still overwhelmed with copy, and I think that we are going to have to increase our rejection rates. 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 don’t 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.

3. Working with DHQ

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 are also meeting in Paris for a working dinner to further cement our working relationships.

4. OUP Journals Day

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. It has occurred to me that we should perhaps discuss with OUP a deal to make this available free to members of the associations