Guidelines on ethics for Semantics and Pragmatics

These guidelines are based on Guidelines on Ethics for Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Publications and Conferences.

It is important for S&P to maintain a high level of quality and integrity in its reviewing and editorial procedures. The responsibility for this rests with all those involved, including authors, reviewers, and editorial staff. Adherence to the guidelines in this document should promote fair treatment throughout the processes of peer review and editorial decision, for all items under consideration for inclusion in S&P.

Definition of Conflict of interest

Conflict of interest refers to two types of case:

1. Situations in which an evaluator of an item submitted for review could stand to gain materially from its acceptance or rejection,
2. Situations in which the evaluator of an item and its author
   • are collaborating or have collaborated within the past 5 years;
   • are close friends or relatives or are in an employer/employee or academic advisor/advisee relationship;
   • are in the same department or program in an institutional unit; or
   • have been involved in a scientific controversy that is or was acrimonious beyond the bounds of normal and civil scholarly disagreement.

Editors

The Editorial Team members (ETMs) will give items submitted for review unbiased consideration and should process them expeditiously.

ETMs should not disclose information about items submitted for review that has not otherwise been publicly disclosed by authors, except as necessary in the ordinary review procedure or when permission has been obtained from authors.

ETMs must not handle items submitted for review for which there is a real or perceived conflict of interest. Editorial responsibility should be delegated to another ETM.

ETMs cannot themselves be authors or co-authors of items submitted for review to S&P.

Information, data, theories, or interpretations that are novel in an item submitted for review must not by used by ETMs in their own work until it has been published.

Authors

Manuscripts submitted to S&P should not be published or be simultaneously under consideration for publication elsewhere in substantially the same form. Should this occur, the manuscript will not be considered for publication in the absence of verification that the situation has been adequately remedied by suspension of simultaneous consideration elsewhere.

Authors must inform the editors if they have other publications or manuscripts under consideration elsewhere whose content overlaps significantly with that in a manuscript they have submitted, and are to provide the editors with access to this material if requested.

Manuscripts that constitute substantially refined or revised versions of research reports that have been or are to be published in a briefer form, such as in a conference proceedings or working papers volume, are ordinarily, but always at the editors’ discretion, eligible to be considered for publication (see more detailed information at http://info.semprag.org/author).

Authorship should be limited to those who have made significant contributions to the writing of an item submitted for review or to the concept, design, execution, or interpretation of the work reported in it. Authors should provide an acknowledgment footnote or section indicating what specific contributions the listed authors have made. The use of the CRedit taxonomy (https://credit.niso.org) is strongly encouraged. In any instance in which someone has made significant contributions but is not listed as an author, that should also be disclosed in the acknowledgments section or footnote. In such a case, it is the authors’ responsibility to make sure that those who have contributed significantly but are not listed as authors are aware of the submission, and agree to not being listed as authors.

Author order must be agreed on by all authors, as must any changes in author lists or author order that occur while an item is under review or revision. Changes in matters concerning the authorship of journal manuscripts must be approved by the editors, with verification that all authors approve.

Fabrication of data or results, selective reporting of data, theft of intellectual property of others, and plagiarism are unacceptable practices.

Submitted manuscripts must contain appropriate citation of work by others, especially publications that present the hypotheses, ideas, or data upon which the work is based or which it addresses.

If a source is cited for information it contains that originated elsewhere, the original source should be cited as well.

Authors must reveal to the editors any situation in which they could stand to gain materially from publication of a submission or of material therein.

Authors should disclose all funding sources relevant to the completion of the research and publication of the research reported in a submission (e.g., government agencies, private foundations, private industry, universities).

When the submission involves experimental research or fieldwork with human participants, authors should ensure that the work has been approved by an appropriate ethics review board and indicate as much in their submission.

Adding citations not contributing to the content of a manuscript in order to increase an author’s citations is considered to be unethical.

Reviewing

By default, all submissions undergo peer review. However, peer review is not required for submissions that the editors have good reason for rejecting or accepting based on their own evaluation, provided that they provide proper justification for such decisions in their decision letters to the authors.

Semantics and Pragmatics has a double-anonymous review policy for all contributed submissions; for details, see info.semprag.org/reviewers.

A reviewer should disclose real or perceived conflicts of interest to the editor with whom they are corresponding before agreeing to supply a referee report. (See definition of conflicts of interest above.) Once in possession of the facts concerning a potential conflict of interest, the editor will decide if a referee report from the reviewer would still be appropriate and of value in the editorial process, and will then contact the reviewer, advising whether or not to proceed with the review.

Reviewers must treat items under their consideration as confidential. They must ask the editor in charge of the submission for permission to discuss that work with others and may not allow someone else to carry out the review on their behalf without permission from the editor.

Reviewers may not use in their own work information, data, theories, or ideas from an item submitted for review until it is in press or has been published or presented, unless the author has given permission to do so.

Reviewers are encouraged to notify the editor with whom they are corresponding if they are aware of publications or manuscripts under consideration for publication elsewhere that appear to be essentially identical to what they have been asked to review.

Policy on generative AI

These guidelines are based on those of the journal Ethics published by the University of Chicago Press.

Guidelines for authors

AI tools cannot author or co-author a submission. Authors and co-authors must take full moral and legal responsibility for their submissions; they must take responsibility for the assertions that they make, the arguments that they proffer, and the sources that they cite or fail to cite. Since AI tools cannot take responsibility, S&P will not consider submissions that have been authored or co-authored by AI.

Authors must never take credit for work that is not their own. Consequently, authors who use text, images, or other content generated by an AI tool in their submission must be transparent about this, disclosing which tools were used and how. Authors may use an AI tool to assist with grammar checking and sentence construction by inputting their own writing to the tool, but may not allow the AI tool to introduce new content in this process. The requirement to disclose the use of an AI tool applies also to this use. Authors who wish to use material they have been made aware of through use of an AI tool must identify the original human source of this material and cite it appropriately. If an original human source cannot be identified, the material should be omitted.

The editors of S&P value human creativity; we, therefore, value work that presents the author’s own original ideas and insights more than work that presents ideas and insights that do not originate with the author. For this reason, content that does not originate with the author may be deemed less desirable and publishable – at least, other things being equal.

Guidelines for editors and reviewers

Submissions to S&P are confidential. Thus, editors and reviewers must be careful to maintain confidentiality and protect the author’s intellectual property. Just as sharing a submission with a colleague would violate confidentiality, so too would uploading it (or any part of it) to external services that lack the access controls needed to preserve confidentiality. The editors have agreed not to upload submissions to such external servers nor to use AI tools to assess them.

Those who agree to review for S&P do so under the implicit understanding that they will provide the editors with their own independent assessment of the submission, an opinion that is based solely on their own reading of the manuscript. Thus, it would be inappropriate for a reviewer to base their assessment of a submission, even in part, on a generative AI tool’s summary of it; and it would certainly be inappropriate to use an AI tool to generate any part of their report or assessment.

Complaints and appeals procedures

Authors may appeal against decisions to reject if they have a demonstrably valid reason for doing so. The concerns of the authors about the editorial decision, or about the editorial process, must remain confidential, before and while the complaint is being considered. To do otherwise may threaten the integrity of the appeals process or its confidentiality, and lead to the right of appeal being withdrawn.

Step 1: Contact the Editors in Chief via email. Your email should provide appropriate evidence for complaint. Appeals of editorial decisions must be based on evidence that either: (1) an editor or reviewer made a significant factual error or had a major misunderstanding of a manuscript; or (2) the integrity of the editorial decision-making process was compromised.

Step 2: The Editors in Chief will handle your complaint and consider your appeal, together with the Associate Editors. Granting of appeal does not guarantee final acceptance of your article by the journal. The Editors in Chief may decide to seek external advice, including from members of the Advisory Board of the journal or the Executive Committee of the LSA. An editor with a deemed conflict of interest with the appellant(s) will be recused from the discussion.

Step 3: If, after the editorial verdict in Step 3, the authors are still dissatisfied, they may lodge a complaint with the Executive Committee of the LSA.

Sanctions

Suspected breaches of policy may be handled by the Editors in Chief or may be forwarded to the Executive Committee of the LSA for review and recommendation.

If an Editorial Team Member is determined to have violated policies from these guidelines, the matter will be referred to the Executive Committee.

If a reviewer is determined to have violated policies from these guidelines, the Editors in Chief reserve the right to remove the reviewer from the Editorial Board.

If an author is determined to have violated policies from these guidelines, the Editors in Chief and the Executive Committee reserve the right to impose sanctions, which may include barring work by said author from appearing in S&P and retraction of a manuscript that has been published or accepted for publication.