The Editor's Department

THE EDITOR'S DEPARTMENT This report is excerpted from my presentation to the LSA Executive Committee at its annual meeting in Chicago in January 2000. Nineteen ninety-nine was the fifth year of my seven-year term as editor of Language and fairly quiet, free of editorial, redactional , or technological change for the first time since I took up the position in 1995. For the most part, the overall shape of thejournal and the mix of articles, book reviews, and book notices have stabilized at realistic proportions, as evidenced by Table 1, which provides the relevant figures for the six years since 1994, the year before I became editor. • The number of pages per volume has remained constant at about 900, a number that has been mandated historically by the society and that is dictated largely by the costs of paper and mailing. • In the past year, approximately 65% of this annual allotment of pages was devoted to articles and 35% to book reviews and book notices, which I believe to be the proper ratio. • We published 50 full reviews and 205 notices in 1999, again about the right number. • In the December issue, we published the book reviews and book notices that were submitted between February and April of the same year. As explained in some detail in last year's report (published in the June 1999 issue), this lag of six to nine months between submission and publication of book reviews and book notices is about what we should expect, given our editorial and production schedule. • The number of articles published in the last year is still somewhat short of the goal of 25 that I originally set, which I nonetheless believe to be reasonable. I will attempt to hold to approximately these numbers for the remainder of my term and I suggest that the executive committee endorse them as guidelines for future editors, not as a straitjacket, but rather as a way of making the editor's job simpler and clearer. Technologically, after a flurry of changes in the preceding two years, there were no innovations at all in 1999. We have continued to enjoy the benefits of our long-term relationship with both our typesetters (Maryland Composition) and our printers (Cadmus ) and we expect to maintain them. For the near future, the Postscript typesetting environment seems to be reasonably stable as does printing from disk. The one area of technology that we have not succeeded in addressing directly is the Internet, though not for want of trying. The Association of Research Libraries, which has been working for some time to fight the high cost of scientific journals, especially those published by the larger for-profit publishers, has set up an initiative called SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition), designed to combat the increasing cost of scholarly journal publication (especially the runaway cost of for-profit scientific journals). Early in 1999, SPARC put out a request for proposals for a program to encourage web-based science publishing ventures, the Scientific Communities Initiative Grants. The LSA (together with Stony Brook) responded with a preliminary proposal for linking on the web the activities and publications of the LSA, the more specialized societies that meet annually with the LSA, and the regional organizations that sponsor annual meetings and publications. The LSA/Stony Brook proposal did not make it to the final round, apparently because linguistics was not viewed as a core 500 THE EDITOR'S DEPARTMENT501 YEAR ARTICLES PP. # OF ARTICLES REVIEW/NOTICES PP# OF REVIEWS # OF NOTICES 1994540 16 29946124 1995517 17 32253136 1996572 19 30148130 1997487 23 40365185 1998535 21 33753244 1999565 23 31450205 Table 1. scientific discipline, especially with regard to the journals crisis. We will pursue other such opportunities as they arise. Members of the society are especially encouraged to let both the editor and the executive director know of any developments in this area that they become aware of. A related topic is that ofindexing. For some time, our planned solution to the indexing problem has been to make the back issues of Language available in a digital format that would be searchable with Adobe Acrobat or some equivalent program. I made contact some time...