On Publishing Quality Journals

I am the editor of Linguamática for more a dozen years. It is a journal on Natural Language Processing, with emphasis on the languages from the Iberian Peninsula.

Every time a new issue is published, I use a good amount of hours editing the authors articles. Not just fixing \(\LaTeX\) glitches, that some authors are not capable of fixing by themselves, but also reviewing the bibliography.

This takes a long time. And why I do that? Because I like to do my job properly. Unlike a lot of authors, I look to each cited document, and confirm it is correct. There are a lot of problems that arise:

  • There are citations with the wrong year,
  • There are citations where the editor, or the venue, is the name of a website that provides access to scientific content (like Academia.eu),
  • Some citations have the wrong type (they are proposed as journal while they are proceedings),
  • They miss information, like the pages or the DOI,
  • And some authors like to cite the same document more than once.

For those wondering, no, Linguamática is not a paid journal. Authors do not play for publishing. Reviewers are not paid for their word. Editors are not paid. And no, readers do not pay to read.

This is all goodwill from everybody. But after 12 years, Linguamática is a Q1 Journal. Who benefits from this? The authors.

So, if you are a scientific researchers, and submit papers to venues where you are not paying for it, please be sure you do your work properly, and present your work with quality.

Leave a Reply