About the Journal

Focus and Scope

The journal aims to host research within the field of linguistic typology. It is meant to give space above all, but not exclusively, to studies exploring the crossroads at which linguistic typology meets its closest neighbors. The journal will therefore welcome works dealing especially with the intersections between typology and other areas of linguistics, such as diachrony, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus-based analysis of speech and discourse.

Contributions should be of interest to the community of linguists as a whole, independently of particular specializations or theoretical frameworks.

Papers accepted for publication are selected solely on the basis of scientific quality and scholarly standing.

Section Policy

Submissions are possible for the following types of articles.

Research Articles

Presenting new evidence from empirical and/or theoretical studies at the crossroads between typology and neighbouring fields.

Manifesto articles

Showcasing ongoing research projects at the crossroads between typology and neighboring fields. These can be shorter than research articles and not necessarily based on new data. Their main purpose is to inform about and discuss the state-of-the art of new interdisciplinary endeavors in typology.

Reports from the field

Presenting ongoing work in language documentation and description. These can be shorter than research articles. Their main purpose is to strengthen the dialogue between on-the-ground and comparative studies on linguistic diversity.

Review articles

Presenting newly published work in neighboring fields within the language sciences and discussing their relevance for research on linguistic diversity.

Publication Frequency

The journal has two issues per year.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate and free open access. There is no embargo on the journal’s publications. Submission and acceptance dates, along with publication dates, are made available on the PDF format for each paper.

The authors of published articles remain the copyright holders and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce, and share the article according to the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license agreement.

Authors are encouraged to publish their data in recommended repositories or in AMSActa, the institutional open access repository of the University of Bologna.

Publication data

All publications include the publication data, together with submission and acceptance dates.

All papers within the journal are assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) at the time of publication.

Authorization for self-archiving

Authors are welcome to post pre-submission versions, the original submitted version of the manuscript (preprint) and the final draft post-refereeing (postprint) on a personal website, a collaborative wiki, departmental website, social media websites, institutional repository or non-commercial subject-based repositories.

Publication fees

The journal has neither submission charges nor article processing fees. Authors publishing in LTC face no financial obligation for the publication of their article.

Peer Review Process

Suitable submissions

When an article is submitted to Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads, the Editors in Chief decide whether the focus and scope of the submission are suitable for the journal. If the submission is deemed unsuitable, the author will be informed within a week. If the submission is in line with the journal's focus and scope, the Editors in Chief will assign themselves or one of the Associate Editors to act as Handling Editor for the submission. All submissions are automatically checked with plagiarism software.

Authors have to declare whether a paper has been previously submitted elsewhere, providing details of the outcome of that process and of possible subsequent revisions.

The journal accepts submissions of papers that have been loaded onto preprint servers or personal websites, presented at conferences, or disseminated through other informal communication channels. These formats are not considered prior publications, although the authors must have retained the copyright. Authors are encouraged to create a link from any previous posting of their paper to the final published version, if possible.

Reviewing process

Within a week after being assigned a paper, the Handling Editor will contact two reviewers to evaluate the paper and assess it for clarity in data and literature discussion, methodological soundness, and theoretical significance. Reviewers have two weeks to respond to the invitation. If they do not, new reviewers will be contacted by the Handling Editor. The time reviewers take to react may substantially lengthen the duration of the reviewing process.

Reviewers are asked to send in their reviews four weeks after accepting the invitation, but this is negotiable. They are invited to use a review form to evaluate the paper, but using this form is not compulsory. Reviewers are gently and regularly reminded of their invitations to review and the due dates for their reviews.

The reviewing process is double-blind: reviewers have no access to the identity of the authors, and the authors do not know who the reviewers are. However, if reviewers happen to know the identity of the author, this does not automatically disqualify them as reviewers, but they are asked to inform the Handling Editor. We allow reviewers to disclose their identity to authors if they think that this will help improve the paper by a personal discussion.

During submission, authors may suggest and exclude reviewers for their submission, and they may justify these proposals. The Editors are free (but not obliged) to contact suggested reviewers. They will not contact excluded reviewers to review a submission.

Members of the editorial and scientific boards are allowed to submit their own papers to the journal. In cases where an author is associated with the journal, they will be removed from all editorial tasks for that paper, and another member of the team will be assigned responsibility for overseeing peer review. A competing interest must also be declared within the submission and any resulting publication.

Editorial decisions and revisions

Once the Handling Editor receives all the reviews, an editorial decision is made. In case of conflicting reviews, a third review may be necessary to evaluate the submission correctly.

If the editorial decision is “publish with minor revisions”, “publish with major revisions”, or “revise and resubmit”, authors are asked to provide a detailed document explaining whether and how their revised submission has taken the reviewers’ comments into account. The revised version should ideally be resubmitted within 10 weeks after the editorial decision is made, but this is negotiable. In the case of “revise and resubmit”, the revised version and the document detailing the changes will be sent to the initial reviewers, unless the author can demonstrate that one of the reviewers is biased against the paper. Additional reviewers may also be invited at this point, at the discretion of the Editor.

Accepted and conditionally accepted submissions, i.e. where the editorial decisions is “publish as is”, “publish with major revisions”, or “publish with minor revisions”, are not sent out for review again once the author submits the revised version. The Editor makes an editorial decision based on the revised paper and the author’s reply to the reviewers. The Editor may still contact one or more reviewers regarding specific questions.

In case of conflicting reviews, or if an author formulates justified objections to the review(s), the Editors reserve the right to invite an additional reviewer who will have access to all versions of the paper and all reviews in order to advise the Editors.

Ethics

Data Policy

Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data, must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Where applicable, the studies must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee and the authors should include a statement within the article text detailing this approval, including the name of the ethics committee and reference number of the approval. The identity of the research subject should be anonymised whenever possible. For research involving human subjects, informed consent to participate in the study must be obtained from participants (or their legal guardian).

The journal strongly encourages authors to make all data associated with their submission openly available, according to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). This should be linked to from a Data Accessibility Statement within the submitted paper, which will be made public upon publication. If data is not being made available within the journal publication, a statement from the author should be provided to explain why. Data obtained from other sources must be appropriately credited. When depositing data for a submission, the below should be considered:

  • The repository the data is deposited in must be suitable for this subject and have a sustainability model.

  • The data must be deposited under an open license that permits unrestricted access (e.g. CC0, CC-BY). More restrictive licenses should only be used if a valid reason (e.g. legal) is present.

  • The deposited data must include a version that is in an open, non-proprietary format.

  • The deposited data must have been labelled in such a way that a 3rd party can make sense of it (e.g. sensible column headers, descriptions in a readme text file).

  • A ‘Data Accessibility Statement’ should be added to the submission, prior to the reference list, providing the details of the data accessibility, including the DOI linking to it. If the data is restricted in any way, the reasoning should be given.

A list of data repositories is available at http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Data_repositories.

Competing Interests and Funding

To ensure transparency, all authors, reviewers and editors are required to declare any interests that could compromise, conflict or influence the validity of the publication.

In addition, authors are required to specify funding sources and detail requirements for ethical research in the submitted manuscript.

Handling of errors and misconducts

Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads recognizes the importance of research ethics and integrity and has the strongest commitment to trustworthiness of its research articles. The decisions concerning publication are always discussed within the editorial board and are based on clear reviewing procedures. Very occasionally, an article may be published that must be later amended or retracted, based on exceptional circumstances. Editors have a duty to act promptly in case of errors and misconducts, both proven and alleged. This duty extends to both published and unpublished papers. In case such as errors in articles or in the publication process, fraudulent publication or plagiarism, appropriate steps will be taken, following the recommendations, guidelines and flowcharts from COPE. Corrections will happen with due prominence, including the publication of an erratum (errors from the publication process), corrigendum (errors from the Author(s)) or, in the most severe cases, the retraction of the affected work.

Article retraction

Articles are retracted in case of infringement of ethical codes, bogus claims of authorship, plagiarism, fraudulent use of data, or if they are clearly defamatory. In these cases, the editors notify authors of their decision, which is not negotiable. The online article is replaced by a retraction note signed by the editors and containing a link to the original article, which is retained unchanged and watermarked as “Retracted” for the sake of transparency.

Article temporary retraction

Articles are temporarily retracted in case of significant errors in the description and/or representation of data that are brought to the attention of the editors and/or the author after publication. In these cases, the editors ask the author(s) to deal with these issues and to submit a new version of their article. If the author(s) is/are willing to do so, the new version of the article is treated as a new submission and undergoes a new round of review. The published article is replaced by a temporary retraction note signed by the editors and/or the author(s) and containing a link to the original article. The original article is retained unchanged and watermarked as “Retracted” for the sake of transparency. The new submission, if eventually accepted, is published as early as possible in a subsequent issue of the journal.

How to signal a potential retraction issue

Potential retraction issues may be brought to the attention of the editors by sending a detailed retraction request to the principal contact of the Journal.

Indexing and abstracting

The Journal is indexed in the following databases and search engines:

  • ACNP – Italian Catalogue of Serials
  • BASE – Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
  • DOAJ – Directory of Open Access Journals
  • ROAD – Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources
  • Google Scholar – Academic search engine
  • Worldcat – The world’s largest library catalog

Archiving Policy

The University of Bologna has an archival arrangement with the National Central Libraries of Florence and Rome within the national project Magazzini Digitali.
http://www.depositolegale.it/editori-aderenti/

Publisher

Dipartimento di Filologia Classica e Italianistica – FICLIT
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna

Via Zamboni, 32
40126 - Bologna (Italy)


Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture moderne – LILEC
Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna

Via Cartoleria 5
40124 - Bologna (Italy)